I’ve been involved in web dev in different forms for 20 years, but I’ve never done anything with these types of websites.

My questions are:

* When you register a domain with them, is the domain legally yours?

* Are there any SEO penalties for using these apps to build websites? Does anyone own a website or client site hosted on Squarespace or similar that’s ranking high on Google?

I can see the benefit for developers but I’m wondering about the benefits for clients.

The domains do seem to be yours, since both services let you transfer the domain away:

https://support.wix.com/en/article/transferring-your-wix-dom...

https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205812338-...

As far as I know, their SEO is fine, though they'll usually do worse in things like page speed than a site built from the ground up. I don't recall any sites my previous employers built with said services struggling to rank in Google.

As for whether they'd be recommended? Well to be honest, I'd say only for small companies and individuals who need the most basic of websites and don't fancy paying very much for it. For a client in that situation, you may as well just throw together a quick site on one of these services, change a few images and colours and call it a day. At least then they won't keep coming to you for web hosting help or updates.

I frequently recommend Wix to freelance clients who just need a basic site. Once they set it up, it basically keeps going for years and years, which is not true of most other stacks, including Wordpress. It's an easy service from a single vendor, so no need to deal with different hosting/CDN/SSL/etc providers. I think it's a wonderful thing for clients with simpler needs.

The benefit for clients is that they can pay you once, for a few hours, to help them set it up (if they even need that)... and then they basically don't need you anymore. I've "lost" several happy clients this way, but I'd rather they just use that service than waste their money on a developer they don't really need. It's very easy to use, reliable, and cheap. And they have a single vendor to go for any sort of support they might need for their website.

In contrast to many of the over-engineered Next.js or Gatsby sites I've seen, Wix is far, FAR easier to maintain and I get pretty much zero complaints about it after initial setup. All the other stacks I've ever made for clients, whether they were in Next, React, Angular, vanilla HTML, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, other CMSes... all became a maintenance headache after 2-3 years, and usually obsolete, unusable, and completely rewritten within 4-5. Not so with the Wix sites; they just keep going year after year and the client never worries about it again, logging in to post an occasional update every week or so but otherwise letting it do its thing.

I wouldn't choose to use it for a personal project anything more advanced than a personal blog or a very simple marketing site. But it's fine for what it is, and the web is better off for having services like this for regular people to choose from. Not everything needs a super-heavy JS frontend.

As an agency owner, we don't use these tools regularly but we have clients who do, and we support them. As far as the domains, they are a registrar like any other. You can transfer the domains away or to them like any other registrar. This means that the customer "owns" it for the period of time it is registered for with an accredited registrar. The web builder companies do not own it on your behalf.

There are no real SEO penalties, but as with any web property, you have to do the work to get all the SEO working as you want.

As far as benefits for developers, give me an open source tool any day that I can improve on, extend, or mess up with sketchy coding. These tools are meant for consumers to build their own sites for the most part. They represent the initial commodification of "get a website". They are more difficult and/or expensive to extend than a tool like WordPress, Laravel, Hugo, etc. And they are walled gardens, which means they are difficult to migrate away from.

Squarespace is fine. We've been talking about replacing it for almost a decade now at my org, but it's easy to edit and relatively cheap so we keep it. Domain is registered separately.

One data point I have discovered: many organizations block wix.com by default, because it's popular with phishing actors who mock up Google/Apple/Microsoft logins on free accounts and Wix has been relatively slow to take those down.

Squarespace is a great balance between having no website at all and WordPress.

Wix is overly complicated bloat, and you are better off just using WordPress if you need the bells and whistles or Squarespace if you don't.

I use Typedream. Pretty happy with the results. Squarespace was just too inflexible (in my opinion). Didn't try Wix. Any of the point-click tools, you give up a bit of creative freedom for the time-to-value & ease of maintenance.