I left Squarespace and rebuilt my own site. Here's what I learned.

For years, I was a Squarespace person. I built sites on it, I recommended it, I taught my clients how to use it. It paid my bills and I’d do it all again.

So it’s a little funny that I just spent two months dragging my own website off it.

This isn’t a takedown. Squarespace is a good tool, and for plenty of people it’s the right call. But I noticed something about my own clients that quietly rewired how I think about this whole job. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. So I rebuilt my site from scratch to prove I could do the thing I now actually believe in. Here’s why, and what it taught me about the difference between owning your website and renting it.

The thing I kept noticing

Here’s what I saw, over and over, with real business owners.

They didn’t want to log into Squarespace. They didn’t want to learn the editor. They didn’t want to figure out why the mobile version looked busted, or where the button settings wandered off to after the latest update. They wanted their website to exist, to work, and to never need their attention again.

And honestly, good for them. They’ve got a business to run. The website is supposed to bring in customers, not become one more needy thing demanding attention on a Tuesday night. Every hour spent wrestling a drag-and-drop editor is an hour not spent doing the work they’re actually good at.

I’d built my whole service on a platform that, by design, hands the ongoing work right back to the owner. That’s the part that stopped sitting right with me.

Owning your website vs renting it

Let me explain what I mean, because this is the real lesson and it’s simpler than it sounds.

When your site lives on a website builder, you’re renting. You pay every month, and in exchange you get a spot to set up shop inside someone else’s box. When they change the rules, bump the price, or move the furniture around in the editor, you live with it. Your site is exactly as fast and as flexible as the platform decides to let it be. Stop paying, and poof, it’s gone.

A custom-coded site is something you own. Built from the ground up to do what your business needs and skip what it doesn’t. It’s lighter, it’s faster, and it isn’t hostage to somebody else’s roadmap. You’re not renting a corner of someone’s tool anymore. You’ve got your own place, keys and all.

Now, owning a thing usually means more upkeep. That’s the catch everyone braces for. So here’s the part that matters: I don’t hand that work back to you. I build the site, then I keep it running and updated and looked after on a monthly plan. You get the ownership without the homework. That’s the whole point of me.

So I went first

I wasn’t about to sell a new way of doing things while my own site sat there on the old way. That’s a personal trainer wheezing at the top of the stairs.

So I rebuilt kickstartcreatives.com from scratch. New code, new host, the works. It was a real project, with real late nights and a couple of “why did I do this to myself” moments at 11pm. But I came out the other side with a site I actually own, and proof the whole idea holds up.

And the proof is kind of fun to look at.

What actually changed

Same content, old site versus new. Here’s the difference, in plain English.

My old site weighed about 6 MB, which is heavy. A big chunk of that was images, piles of them, the way these sites tend to accumulate over the years. The new one is under 1 MB. Some of that is the custom build being leaner, and some of it is me finally being ruthless about what earns its place on the page. The thing is, on a custom site I get to make that call deliberately. Nothing’s heavy by accident.

There’s a measurement for how long a page sits there frozen and useless while it loads. My old site: about 0.63 seconds. The new one: 0.01 seconds. Blink and you missed it.

And Google scores every site’s speed out of 100. Old site scored a 55. New one scores a 95. Google clocks that. So does the person deciding whether to wait for your page or just hit back and go to your competitor.

None of those numbers are really the point. They’re the receipts. The point is what they add up to for a visitor: a site that feels quick and effortless and just works. The kind of first impression you actually want your business making.

What I learned

I went into this thinking it was a tech project. Move the site, swap the host, done by Friday.

What I came out understanding is that it was never about Squarespace versus code. It was about who’s supposed to do the work. The old model quietly assumes the business owner will babysit their own website forever. The model I believe in now assumes the opposite: that you’ve got better things to do, and the digital side should just be handled.

I built my own site to prove I could deliver that. Turns out I can. And now I get to go do it for everyone else.

If you’ve ever sat glaring at your website thinking “I do not have time for this,” that feeling is the entire reason I changed how I work. You shouldn’t have to become a website person to have a website that works. That’s my job. You go run yours.