Your Provo startup's Wix site looks great until a customer needs to log in and see their own data
Wix, Squarespace, and templates are right for a Provo startup's marketing site, and wrong the moment that site needs to authenticate users, show account-specific data, or talk to your SaaS backend. A custom website with real application behavior runs $30,000 to $120,000 over 2 to 5 months, and the dividing line is whether the page only describes your product or actually does something when a logged-in customer arrives.
Your Provo company's marketing site lives on Squarespace and converts fine. Then product wants a customer portal where users log in, see their subscription, and manage their plan, and Squarespace simply cannot do that. You bolt on an embedded tool, and now your site is half template and half iframe, with two designs, two logins, and a seam customers notice.
Templates assume a brochure: pages that describe, not pages that act. A Silicon Slopes SaaS needs the site to authenticate against your backend, render real data, and feel like one product from landing page to logged-in dashboard. Wix and Squarespace were never built for that, and every workaround widens the gap between your polished marketing and your duct-taped portal.
What website costs in Provo
| Project scope | Typical cost | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Custom marketing site with CMS | $30k to $55k | 2 to 3 months |
| Marketing site plus authenticated portal | $60k to $90k | 3 to 4 months |
| Full site with backend-driven customer dashboard | $90k to $120k | 4 to 5 months |
The fix: website built for Provo, not rented
A custom website is one product from landing page to logged-in dashboard: it authenticates against your backend, renders real customer data, and shares your design system end to end. For a Provo SaaS company, that closes the seam between a polished marketing site and a portal customers actually use, and it gives you a foundation you can extend instead of a template you keep working around.
- Customers need to log in and see their own data
- Your site must talk to your SaaS backend
- A bolted-on portal has created a visible seam in the experience
- Marketing and product feel like two different products
- Your site is purely a marketing brochure with no login
- Squarespace or Wix covers everything you need today
- You have no backend the site needs to talk to
- You want marketing to edit pages without engineering
The capability list that earns its budget
Provo website: the full scope
Everything a website build here can cover: Jamstack, SEO-optimized websites, website redesign, custom website development, web design, Next.js development and React development.
How long it takes, phase by phase
Exactly what you get
One coherent web product for a Provo SaaS company: a fast marketing site with a CMS your team can edit, plus an authenticated portal that renders real customer data from your backend, all on a single design system. No iframe seams, no second login. It connects to your custom CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for account context, your accounting software for billing views, and a business intelligence dashboard for conversion analytics.
How to choose a developer in Provo
Ask how they would unify a marketing site and a logged-in portal into one experience that shares a design system and authenticates against your backend. A strong team talks about a shared component library and a real auth flow. A weak one suggests embedding a tool in a Squarespace page. Provo's Silicon Slopes scene has full-stack shops that build marketing and product as one; favor them over a pure design studio that stops at the brochure.
- One seamless experience from marketing page to logged-in customer portal
- Real authentication and account-specific data pulled from your backend
- A shared design system so marketing and product feel like one product
- Performance and SEO control a template builder cannot match
- A foundation you extend, instead of a platform you fight
- A custom site costs and takes far more than a Squarespace template
- You own hosting, security, and maintenance the builder used to handle
- Marketing loses the drag-and-drop editing speed of Wix
- For a pure brochure site, a template is genuinely the smarter spend
- !They treat the portal as a separate embedded tool; ask how they make it one product
- !No backend-integration plan; ask how the site renders real account data
- !They ignore SEO; ask how they keep your search rankings through the rebuild
- !No CMS for marketing; ask how non-engineers edit pages after launch
- !They quote without seeing your backend; ask what they need to scope accurately
If website is on the roadmap, hr, accounting, business intelligence dashboards usually follow within the year. Budget them as one conversation.
Rohan advises mid-market and enterprise teams on ERP, CRM and custom software, and has led delivery on dozens of business-software builds.
Writes for Digital Heroes, shipping business software for 2,000+ brands across 55+ countries since 2017.
Frequently asked questions
When do we outgrow Squarespace or Wix?
The moment customers need to log in and see their own data. Template builders handle brochure sites well but cannot authenticate users or render account-specific data from your backend, which is exactly what a Provo SaaS portal requires.
Can we keep marketing on a builder and build only the portal?
You can, but it usually creates a visible seam with two designs and two logins. Unifying both under one design system and codebase is what makes the experience feel like a single product, which is the main reason to go custom.
Will a custom site hurt our SEO?
Not if it is built right. A custom site gives you more SEO and performance control than a template, but you must preserve URLs and redirects during the rebuild. Ask your developer how they protect rankings through the transition.
What does a custom website cost in Provo?
A custom marketing site with a CMS runs roughly $30k to $55k. A full site with a backend-driven customer dashboard reaches $90k to $120k over four to five months.