You've heard the headlines. Adobe killed Muse. Google deprecated their legacy version of Sites. Wix removed a feature that customers relied on, forcing them to find workarounds or jump ship. Squarespace hiked their pricing again. A WordPress plugin you rely on gets abandoned, becomes incompatible with the latest update, and suddenly your site looks broken. This isn't hypothetical. It happens all the time, and it happens to real business owners who thought their website was secure.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: if you build your website on someone else's platform, your business ultimately depends on their decisions. Not your decisions. Theirs. And they don't always make the right ones.
The real cost of vendor lock-in
Squarespace charges between $16 and $33 per month, depending on your plan. That's not unreasonable on the surface. But try exporting your site. Try taking all your content, your design, your customer data, and moving it somewhere else. You basically can't. You're locked in. The design only works within Squarespace. Your site only exists inside their platform. If they change their pricing, change their terms of service, or shut down entirely, you have no good options.
Wix is similar. They build tools specifically so you can't easily leave. Your site is a Wix site first, a functioning website second. If Wix makes a decision that doesn't work for you, you either accept it or start from scratch somewhere else.
WordPress is more flexible, but it brings its own problems. Plugins can be abandoned by their developers. A security vulnerability emerges in a plugin you're using, nobody patches it, and suddenly your site is at risk. You update WordPress to the latest version and a plugin breaks. Now you're troubleshooting code you didn't write, trying to find a replacement plugin that does the same thing, and hoping it integrates properly. For someone who isn't a developer, this is incredibly stressful.
When platforms change their minds
Adobe Muse looked fantastic. Clean interface, good design tools, it made it easy to create beautiful websites without writing code. Thousands of people built their businesses on it. Then Adobe decided to focus on other products and discontinued Muse. Bye. If you built a site on Muse, you had to rebuild it somewhere else. Whatever investment you made in learning the platform, in building your site, in customizing it just right, it evaporated.
Google Sites had a legacy version that worked well for millions of small sites. Simple, reliable, free. Google moved everyone to the new version, which is more limited and less powerful. Some sites broke in the process. Features disappeared. But you didn't really have a choice. Google decided, and you adapted.
These aren't edge cases. Platform risk is structural. Every platform eventually faces pressure to change. Reduce costs. Increase revenue. Compete with a rival. Pivot to a new market. Shut down a product that isn't profitable. When that happens, you're not a valued customer. You're collateral damage.
There is another way
I build static HTML sites. Pure, simple, standard web technology. No platform. No plugin dependencies. No vendor lock-in. Your site is a collection of text files and images. That's it. Open one in any text editor and you can read the code. Modify it if you want. Upload it to any web server in the world and it works. Host it on a cheap shared server, an expensive cloud platform, or something in between. It doesn't matter. The files don't care.
HTML has been the foundation of the web since the 1990s. It's not going anywhere. Every device that connects to the internet knows how to read HTML. Every browser, every device, every platform understands it. It's the only truly universal language for web content. If you built a website in static HTML in 1995, it would still work today. And a site you build in 2026 will work in 2056.
No monthly subscription. No platform fees. No dependency on a company's decisions. When you own the files, you own your website.
What about updates and keeping things current?
A valid question. Static HTML sites don't update themselves automatically. There's no dashboard where new features magically appear. If you want to add a testimonial, change your pricing, update your contact information, you need to either edit the HTML yourself or work with someone who can.
But here's the thing: most small business websites don't need constant updates. Your services page doesn't change weekly. Your pricing doesn't shift daily. Your about section stays relatively stable. You probably update your site a handful of times a year. And in 2026, you don't even need to understand code to make those changes. AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can edit your HTML file for you. You tell it what you want changed in plain English, it makes the edit, and you upload the updated file. It takes minutes. No developer needed, no platform subscription, no waiting for support tickets. You're in complete control.
And unlike platform-based sites, an update to your static HTML site doesn't break everything. You're not waiting for the platform to release a new version. You're not hoping a plugin developer patches a security vulnerability. You control every line of code. Changes are predictable and safe.
Build for the long term
Your website is part of your business. It deserves to be built on something stable, something you truly own, something that will outlast trends and corporate decisions. Static HTML does that. The files are yours. They work anywhere. They load fast. They're secure. And they'll still work exactly the same way in twenty years.
That's what I build.
Disclaimer: All platform pricing, features, and comparisons mentioned in this article are accurate to the best of my knowledge as of March 2026. Pricing and features may have changed since publication. This article reflects my professional opinion and experience as a web designer.