A close-up photo of a computer screen showing the settings button with a cursor hovering over it.

5 October 2026

WordPress or Wix and Squarespace? A Fair Comparison for Business Owners

“Can’t we just do it on Wix?” It’s one of the first things business owners ask, and it’s a fair question. Wix and Squarespace look slick and you can have something live in an afternoon, hosting included. WordPress is free software that runs a huge chunk of the web, but it needs somewhere to live and someone to keep an eye on it. Neither is wrong for everyone. Just know what you’re signing up for before you’ve spent three years building on it.

In brief

WordPress is open-source software you can host wherever you like. Wix and Squarespace rent you a platform and run it for you.
Leaving a builder is much harder than joining one.
Builders now do well on speed. WordPress can match them, but only when it’s built and looked after properly.
A small brochure site can live happily on a builder. Once you need custom features, integrations or real room to grow, WordPress usually comes out ahead.

What you’re actually choosing between

When an agency says WordPress, it means software. You put it on hosting you’ve chosen and shape it with a theme and plugins. It’s open source, released under the GPLv2 (or later) licence, and the WordPress project is plain about what that gives you. You’re free to run it for any purpose and to change how it works. No software vendor can take that right away.

Wix and Squarespace are a different animal. They’re software as a service. You pay a subscription and get the editor, the hosting, the security patches and the support in one box. You never see a server. That’s the appeal for a café owner who wants the menu and a booking link live by Friday.

WordPress is still the giant, at roughly 64% of sites that use a content management system in the HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac. Wix sits at about 5% and Squarespace at roughly 3%. Popular doesn’t mean better. It does mean plenty of developers and answers when something breaks.

Who owns the site when you want to leave

Nobody thinks about this on day one. Then the plan price goes up, or the business outgrows the thing, or you fall out with whoever built it, and suddenly you want to pack up and move.

With WordPress you can. The files and database copy across to another host, and any competent developer can pick up where the last one stopped. That assumes you hold the logins, which is why it pays to ask who owns the website once it’s built before you sign anything.

Wix is open about where it stands. Because it’s a SaaS product, your site has to run on Wix’s own servers and can’t be hosted anywhere else. Wix says the content you build belongs to you. The site itself still can’t leave.

Squarespace lets you export some content as an .xml file meant for importing into WordPress. It’s patchy. Only one blog page comes across. Store pages, product blocks, video blocks, style settings and custom CSS are all left behind, and images can’t be downloaded in bulk. For a small online shop that’s a lot of rebuilding.

None of this makes builders a trap. The cost of leaving just creeps up the longer you stay.

Flexibility, and where builders run out of road

Builders are brilliant inside their walls. Drag a section in, swap a photo, hit publish. Plenty of small sites never need more than that.

The walls appear when the business wants something unusual. Picture an accountancy practice after a client portal that talks to its practice software, or a manufacturer with a catalogue of several thousand parts and trade prices behind a login. A training provider might need course bookings to land in its CRM without anyone retyping them. Builders have app marketplaces, and some of that’s doable. Some of it means bending the business to suit the platform.

WordPress has fewer walls because the code itself can be changed. That freedom cuts both ways. Every plugin is one more thing to update, one more thing that might clash with the rest, and more code for a visitor’s phone to load. Somebody sensible needs to hold the reins. Writing a proper website brief before you pick a platform helps, because it makes you list the features you’ll actually use.

Comparing costs over the long run

Online comparisons tend to pit a builder’s monthly plan against ‘free’ WordPress. That isn’t a fair fight.

A builder subscription covers the hosting, the security and the platform. Ecommerce usually sits on dearer plans, and prices change, so check the current plan pages rather than an old blog post.

WordPress itself costs nothing. A business site still needs hosting, a domain, often a premium theme or builder licence and a few paid plugins. Then there’s the time, yours or a developer’s, to keep it all patched. Spread over five years, the two totals often sit closer together than people expect.

The biggest bill is usually the one you didn’t plan for. A forced rebuild when a cheap setup can’t grow. Or a month lost moving off a platform that’s boxed you in.

SEO and speed on each platform

Can you rank on Wix? Yes. Google’s SEO Starter Guide points out that with a CMS you might not need to do anything technical to your page titles, since most systems turn the titles you write into the page’s title tag automatically. All three handle the basics. Wix even has a URL Redirect Manager so you can set up 301 redirects yourself, as long as you’re on a custom domain.

WordPress pulls ahead on control. Templates, structured data and what gets indexed can all be changed without waiting for the platform to add a setting. A charity with hundreds of news and event pages will notice that. So will a retailer with fiddly category filters.

Speed is the awkward bit for WordPress. In that same Web Almanac, 74% of Wix sites passed Core Web Vitals on mobile, up from 55% the year before. WordPress managed 45%, among the lowest of the platforms compared. A builder controls every site on its servers, so it can roll an improvement out to all of them at once. A WordPress site is only as quick as whoever built it and the hosting underneath. If you want to know what Core Web Vitals measure, we’ve covered that separately, and our guide to website speed and performance shows where slow WordPress sites usually go wrong.

Thinking of switching later? Your page addresses will often change. Google’s site move documentation recommends permanent redirects, such as 301s, from every old URL to its new home, kept in place for as long as possible and generally at least a year, and it warns rankings can wobble while Google recrawls. Plan for that and it’s manageable. Skip it and enquiries can dry up, sometimes for weeks before anyone twigs. We’ve set out how to move to a new website without losing your Google rankings step by step.

Upkeep and security

On a builder, security is mostly someone else’s problem. Platform patches are applied for you.

WordPress hands that job to you, or to whoever you pay. Older versions stop getting security fixes, which is why WordPress’s own hardening docs tell you to keep plugins updated and bin any you’re not using. Your host usually won’t do it either. They tend to look after the server, not the software sitting on it. An old, unpatched plugin is a classic way in. That’s a maintenance failure more than a WordPress one, but it still lands on your desk.

If nobody in the business has time for that, a website care plan takes it off your hands. There’s more on backups, updates and logins in our guide to keeping a website secure and maintained.

Which one suits which business

A builder makes sense more often than some developers admit. A sole trader, a small guest house or a village sports club needing a handful of pages, a contact form and perhaps a booking widget can do very well on one, especially with nobody around to manage updates.

WordPress earns its keep once the website is doing real work. If most of your enquiries or sales come through it, or it has to be wired into your booking system and accounts, the extra control is worth paying for. It also suits anyone who’d like to change agency or host one day without starting from scratch.

Already on a builder and it’s working? There’s no prize for moving. Move when it starts holding you back.

Getting the platform decision right

The platform matters less than people think on launch day and a great deal more three years later. If you’re weighing up website design and development and can’t decide which way to go, get in touch and tell us what the site needs to do. You’ll get a plain answer, even if it’s that a builder will do the job.

Keep reading

Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

Let’s have a chat