Longleaf Design is a Florida-Friendly landscape design practice — native, edible, and tropical gardens — serving Jupiter, Tequesta, Jupiter Farms, the Palm Beaches, and the Treasure Coast up through Stuart and Hobe Sound. Cam Maletto runs it. When we started, his site was on Wix, and it was fine in the way most template sites are fine: it existed, it had a phone number, and it produced nothing he could point to.
This isn't a "Wix is bad" article. Wix is the right answer for plenty of businesses. It's a walk-through of what the template couldn't do for a designer who sells a point of view, what the rebuild had to do instead, and how to tell which side of that line your business is on.
What the Wix site couldn't do
- Show the work over time — a garden is a before, a just-planted, and a two-years-later; the template had a photo grid
- Explain the philosophy — native and edible landscaping beats a turf lawn in South Florida for specific reasons (water, salt, HOA pushback, pollinators, maintenance cost), and a "Services" page with three bullets doesn't make that case
- Rank where the money is — Jupiter and Tequesta ahead of Port St. Lucie, which takes page structure the template didn't have
- Answer plant questions — "can I grow mango in Martin County," "is papaya native to Florida," "what's the difference between native and Florida-Friendly" — the questions people actually type into Google and ChatGPT
- Be read by AI search — the content was rendered in a way most non-Google crawlers couldn't see, and there was no structured data telling them what the business was
- Book a paid consult — the call to action was "contact us," which for a $250 on-site design consultation is a leak
What the rebuild had to do
Position, don't list
A landscape designer sells judgment. The new site reads like a horticulture magazine — editorial layout, Latin binomials in italics, real project photography — because the customer is deciding whether to trust this person's taste before they're deciding on price. Every service page ends in the same action: book the consult.
Case studies in three stages
Before → just planted → today. A Hobe Sound project on sugar sand, cleared of Brazilian pepper and replanted with 80-plus native species, is the kind of story a homeowner in Jupiter Farms can see themselves in. A template photo grid can't tell it.
A plant library that answers questions
Pages for the fruit trees and natives Cam actually installs, with the honest caveats he gives in person — this one needs irrigation, this one outgrows a small lot in five years, never citrus. This is the content Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT cite, and it's also the content that makes the consult call shorter because the customer arrives educated.
Local pages in the right order
Jupiter, Tequesta, and Jupiter Farms first; Stuart, Hobe Sound, and Palm Beach Gardens next; Port St. Lucie present but not prioritized. Service-area structure is a business decision, and the site should reflect it.
Structured data in the HTML
Business, service, article, and FAQ schema hardcoded where any crawler can see it. Verified with the browser's JavaScript turned off — if the content isn't there without JavaScript, it isn't there for most AI engines.
A migration that didn't lose the domain
The domain was registered through Wix, which doesn't allow nameserver changes. The path was to point the records inside Wix DNS at the new host so the site went live the same day, then transfer the registration afterward. Email stayed up the whole time. The order matters; done backward, the site is down for days.
What Wix is still right for
A single-location business whose customers already know it, whose work doesn't need explaining, and who needs a phone number, hours, and a map on a page — a barber, a food truck, a one-person cleaning service testing whether the business is real. If the site's job is to confirm you exist, a template does that for $20 a month. The line is crossed when the site's job becomes to persuade, to be found for questions, or to book a paid appointment. That's when the template starts costing you the jobs it doesn't produce.
How to decide for your own trade business
- Does a customer need to see your work over time to choose you? (Landscaping, remodeling, painting: yes. Drain cleaning: no.)
- Do customers type questions before they call, and could you be the answer? (If "how much does X cost in Stuart" is a real search, you want a page for it.)
- Is there a paid or high-value first step to book? (A design consult, an estimate, an inspection.)
- Do you want to rank in specific towns ahead of others?
- Do you need to own the site outright — domain, code, content — and leave the platform someday?
Three or more yeses and you've outgrown the template. Two or fewer, keep it and spend the money on reviews and your Google Business Profile instead.
FAQs
Can't I just upgrade my Wix plan and add the pages? — You can add pages. What you can't easily add is the structure — service-area ordering, hardcoded schema, case-study templates, a plant or FAQ library — that makes the pages findable. Most businesses that try end up with a bigger template.
Will I lose my Google rankings if I move? — Not if the old URLs redirect to the new ones and the domain stays the same. That's a checklist item, not a risk, as long as someone's actually doing the checklist.
How long did the Longleaf rebuild take? — The build itself was weeks. The content — Cam's voice, his plant caveats, the case-study photos — took longer because it came from him, in voice memos, and that's what makes it his site and not a template.
What does a rebuild like this cost? — Standard service-business sites start at $3,000; editorial, plant-library, and case-study builds run higher. Cost factors are on the Website Design page. Migration off Wix is one of them.
Do I keep everything if we part ways? — Yes. Domain, code, content, and accounts stay in your name. That's the point of leaving a rented platform.
Summary
Wix confirms you exist. A custom-built site persuades, answers, and books. Longleaf needed the second — case studies in three stages, a plant library that answers real questions, service-area pages in business order, structured data any crawler can read, and a migration that kept the domain and the email up. Run the five questions above on your own business before you decide.
Marketing systems and operations structure for service businesses on the Treasure Coast.
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