A website builder won't stop you ranking. Skipping the local work will.

Having a website does not grow a business. That sounds obvious written down, and almost nobody acts like it is true. People launch something that looks good, feel finished, and then wait. The phone does roughly what it was doing before.

So when someone asks me whether they should use Squarespace or have something built, I think they're asking the wrong question. Let me deal with the platform part first, because there's a lot of nonsense written about it.

The honest answer first: yes, Squarespace can rank

Builders are not the reason local businesses stay invisible. Squarespace and Wix produce clean, crawlable pages, and plenty of businesses rank perfectly well on them. You'll find agencies claiming otherwise, usually the ones selling the alternative. It isn't true, and repeating it would tell you more about me than about the platform.

The platform was never the deciding factor. Whether anybody did the local work is.

And here's the uncomfortable part: a builder hands you a finished-looking website on day one, which makes it feel like somebody already did that work. Nobody did. The template doesn't know which towns you cover.

What actually decides whether locals find you

Six things. None of them are design, and none of them happen automatically on any platform.

A page for every town you serve. People search with a place in the query. A page that says Kenner, Metairie or Marrero out loud can answer that search. One page saying "the greater New Orleans area" cannot answer any of them.

Business details that match your Google profile exactly. Google checks your profile against your website. Name, phone and service area have to agree character for character. A mismatch is a ranking problem you can't see and nothing warns you about — I found one on my own profile recently, and I do this for a living.

Markup that says what kind of business you are. LocalBusiness structured data tells Google you're an electrician in New Orleans rather than a page containing the word electrician. Builders don't add it for you. Someone has to write it and put it there deliberately.

A phone number that is a link. On a phone, tapping the number should start the call. An enormous number of local sites render it as an image or plain text, so tapping does nothing and the customer goes back to the results page.

A form somebody has actually tested. Forms fail silently. The submission goes nowhere, the page still says thank you, and you never learn about the job. This is the single most common broken thing I find, on every platform.

Speed on a cheap phone, on mobile data. Not on your laptop on wifi. On a mid-range Android in a driveway with two bars, which is how your customers actually see it. Heavy templates and stock video are where this goes wrong.

Squarespace vs a custom website, side by side

Both columns are achievable on either. The difference is who does the work, and whether it gets done at all.

When a website builder is the right call

I'd rather say this than sell you something you're not ready for.

Use a builder if you need something online this week; if your budget is genuinely tight and the choice is a builder or nothing; if you're still testing whether the business works at all; or if you enjoy this stuff and will keep it current yourself. Those are all real situations, and a builder is a sensible answer to every one of them.

Stop using one when the phone has gone quiet and you can't tell why; when you're turning down work in one town while invisible in the next; when you've never once tested your own quote form; or when you want the six things above and don't want to spend your evenings building them.

Why I care about this one specifically

I'm from here. I've watched restaurants and service businesses in this city that were genuinely good at the work struggle to get found, while someone less good but easier to reach took the call. Not because their website was ugly — some of them looked great — but because nothing about the site told Google where they worked, or made it easy to reach them from a phone.

That's a solvable problem and an unglamorous one. It's mostly structure, consistency, and testing the boring things. It does not require a new logo.

How I'd do it for you

Four steps. You see the real thing before any money moves.

1. I research you and what you actually want. Your services, your towns, who you're competing with on the results page, and what a good month looks like to you. That last one changes the whole build.

2. I build a free mockup. Not a template preview — the real thing, with your services and your photos, so you can look at it on your own phone. No payment before this exists.

3. I change anything you want changed. You tell me what's wrong with it and I fix it. This is where it stops being my idea of your business and becomes yours.

4. I optimise it, and you keep direct access to me. Local structure, profile consistency, tested forms, real speed. You deal with the person who built it, not a ticket queue.

Two businesses are live on that process so far. TK Electric went from 4 Google reviews to 14 in his first month, and his profile views went from roughly 50 across the whole prior year to roughly 150 in that month. Magnolia Mist went live in September; it's too early for numbers and I'm not going to invent any.

If you're earlier than that — still working out whether referrals alone will carry you — this one has a calculator that puts your own numbers on a slow month.