Last month, I finally sat down to build a website for my side project.
It should be easy, right? It's 2026. Website builders have had over a decade to figure this out. Surely by now someone's cracked the code on making this painless.
Reader, I was so wrong.
What followed was a week-long odyssey through five different platforms, each promising simplicity and delivering... homework. Here's what happened.
Attempt #1: Wix
Signed up. Immediately hit with: "Choose from 800+ templates."
Eight hundred. Plus.
I scrolled through maybe 50 before decision fatigue kicked in. Eventually picked one at random just to move forward. Then spent two hours dragging boxes around the page. The editor let me put things anywhere-which meant I kept putting things in the wrong places. My "simple portfolio" started looking like a ransom note.
Gave up. Closed the tab. Poured myself a drink.
Attempt #2: Squarespace
Okay, Squarespace. The fancy one. The one with the podcast ads. Surely this would be better.
It was more polished. Fewer templates (still 100+, but who's counting). I picked a nice minimal one. Felt good about myself for approximately four minutes.
Then the customization panel opened.
Fonts. Colors. Spacing. Animations. Header styles. Footer layouts. Button corner radius. Hover effects. Mobile breakpoints.
I changed the font. Didn't like it. Changed it again. Spent an hour on fonts alone. At some point I realized I'd been staring at the difference between "Helvetica Neue Light" and "Helvetica Neue Thin" for fifteen minutes.
Never got to the actual content. Closed the tab.
Attempt #3: Webflow
"Try Webflow," people said. "It's the professional choice."
They were right. It's professional like Photoshop is professional. Like After Effects is professional. Like hiring an actual web developer is professional.
The interface greeted me with terms like "flexbox," "breakpoints," and "interactions panel." There was a tutorial. The tutorial had chapters.
I'm building a simple portfolio page. I am not launching the NASA website.
Closed the tab.
Attempt #4: WordPress
The classic. Forty percent of the internet runs on WordPress. Surely there's wisdom in that.
Installed it. Picked a theme. The theme came with a 47-page documentation PDF. The "theme options" panel had over 200 settings. I needed plugins for SEO, plugins for speed, plugins for security, and-I wish I was joking-a plugin to manage my other plugins.
My simple website now had a MySQL database, a caching layer, and according to one scary notification, three security vulnerabilities.
Closed the tab. Considered a career change.
Attempt #5: Carrd
Now we're getting somewhere. Carrd is simple. Clean. One-page sites. No bloat.
But I wanted... two pages. Maybe three. And even for one page, I was still picking fonts. Still choosing colors. Still making decisions I didn't feel qualified to make.
Better, but still friction. Still homework.
The Pattern I Couldn't Unsee
Five tools. Five failures. And somewhere around attempt four, I realized they all shared the same fundamental assumption:
That I wanted control.
Every single platform competed on features. More templates! More customization! More power! The marketing promised "build anything," as if that's what I was asking for.
But I wasn't asking to build anything. I was asking to build one specific thing: a simple website. And I wanted it done. Today. Without becoming a designer first.
What I Actually Needed
After my fifth closed tab, I wrote down what I actually wanted:
- No template selection. Just start with something that already looks good.
- No design decisions. Fonts, colors, spacing-handle it for me.
- Content in, website out. That's the whole flow.
- Done in minutes, not hours. Or days. Or never.
The Takeaway
If you've bounced off website builders before-if you've started and stopped, signed up and given up, bookmarked "finish website" on your to-do list for months-I want you to know something:
You're not the problem. The tools are.
They're built for people who enjoy playing with design. For people who find font-pairing relaxing. For people with opinions about whitespace.
The rest of us just want a website.
Simplicity isn't a limitation. It's respect for your time.
Tessa Moreno writes about websites, small business, and the joy of keeping things simple. She's the head of content at Cantrip, a website builder that makes design decisions for you-so you can focus on what you actually want to say.
→ See how Cantrip works: cantrip.io