WordPress, Wix or Squarespace: which one is actually right for you

Every comparison of these three is written by somebody selling one of them. We build custom sites, so we are not selling any of the three, which at least makes this a different kind of bias: we are more likely to think custom is worth it than you are. Bear that in mind and judge the arguments.

Here is what each is genuinely good at, what each costs once you add the parts that are not in the headline price, and the one question that usually settles it.

The short answer

	Best for	Weakest at	Realistic cost, year one
Squarespace	Looking good with no technical work	Anything unusual	$200–$400
Wix	Building it yourself, quickly	Speed, and moving away later	$150–$500
WordPress	Growing, and being owned	Needing maintenance forever	$200–$2,000
Custom build	Speed, and doing one job well	Small changes without a developer	$1,000–$8,000

Squarespace

Squarespace is the one most small businesses should look at first, and the one most likely to be dismissed for the wrong reason.

What it does well is the thing that is hardest to buy cheaply: it is difficult to make a Squarespace site look bad. The templates are designed by people who know what they are doing, the type is set properly, and the result on a phone is usually fine without you thinking about it. For a restaurant, a salon, a clinic or a consultant, that covers most of what a website has to do.

Where it runs out is anything unusual. If your booking has real rules, if your pricing depends on options, if you need it to talk to a system you already use, you will hit a wall and the wall is hard. There is no gradual escalation. It works, then it does not.

It is also slower than a well-built custom site, though considerably faster than a badly built WordPress one, which is the more common comparison in practice.

Wix

Wix is the one to choose if you genuinely intend to build and maintain it yourself, and enjoy doing so.

The editor is the most direct of the three. You drag a thing, it goes there. For somebody who wants control without learning anything, that is a real advantage and the others do not match it.

The costs are two. Wix sites are usually the slowest of the three, because that drag-anywhere freedom has to be paid for in code somewhere, and it is paid for on your visitor’s phone. And you cannot leave. There is no meaningful export: if you outgrow Wix, you rebuild from scratch. Squarespace has the same problem; WordPress does not.

That lock-in is worth pricing. It is not a reason to avoid Wix, but it does mean choosing it is a longer commitment than the monthly fee suggests.

WordPress

WordPress runs a very large share of the web and is the only one of the three you genuinely own. That is the argument for it and it is a strong one.

The argument against is that WordPress is not a product, it is a starting point. A WordPress site is the theme plus the plugins plus whoever set it up, and those decisions matter far more than the choice of WordPress itself. Done well it is excellent. Done the common way — a heavy commercial theme, a page builder on top, thirty plugins accumulated over three years — it is slow, fragile, and expensive to fix.

It also needs maintaining permanently. Core updates, theme updates, plugin updates, security. If nobody is doing that, the site does not stay still, it degrades. A neglected WordPress site is the single most common thing we get called about.

Choose WordPress if somebody is going to look after it. That somebody can be you, an agency or a care plan, but it has to be somebody.

What each actually costs over three years

Headline prices hide the difference. Rough three-year totals for a real small business site.

	Platform	Template or design	Maintenance	Three-year total
Squarespace	$600–$1,200	$0–$400	included	$600–$1,600
Wix	$450–$1,500	$0–$200	included	$450–$1,700
WordPress, self-managed	$150–$600	$0–$300	your time	$150–$900
WordPress, maintained	$150–$600	$300–$3,000	$900–$3,600	$1,350–$7,200
Custom, maintained	$1,000–$8,000	included	$600–$1,800	$1,600–$9,800

The row that surprises people is maintained WordPress. It is frequently the most expensive option, not the cheapest, once somebody is genuinely looking after it. The cheap version is the self-managed one, and the cost there is real, it is just paid in your evenings and in risk rather than in invoices.

The question that actually decides it

Not “which is best”. Ask this instead: who is going to change this site in eighteen months, and what will they be changing?

If the answer is “me, and only the text and photos”, Squarespace or Wix. You will be happy and you should not spend more.

If it is “me, and I want to add things over time”, WordPress, and budget for somebody to keep it patched.

If it is “nobody, it just needs to work”, a built-once custom site or Squarespace.

If it is “we do not know yet, the business is changing”, that uncertainty is the argument for WordPress or custom, because both let you leave with your work.

Where we sit, since it would be strange not to say

We build custom, and our own site is custom. The reason is narrow rather than ideological: a site built for one job loads faster than a general-purpose platform doing the same job, and speed is one of the few things that reliably affects both rankings and enquiries. We wrote up what a heavy homepage actually costs using our own previous WordPress site as the example, which is the honest way to make that argument.

That said, custom is the wrong answer for plenty of businesses. If you want to rearrange your own pages on a Sunday afternoon, a builder is genuinely better for you than anything we would make, and we will say so on the call. The web design service page covers what we actually build and what we do not.

What moving between them actually involves

Worth knowing before you choose, because it is the part nobody mentions at the start and everybody discovers at the end.

Leaving WordPress is genuinely possible. The content lives in a database you can export, the images are files you can download, and a competent developer can move it. It is work, but it is work with a known shape.

Leaving Wix or Squarespace is a rebuild. There is no export that produces anything usable on another platform. You can copy your text out and download your photographs, and that is the extent of what comes with you. Everything else — layout, structure, forms, anything you configured — is recreated from nothing. For a five-page site that is annoying. For a forty-page one it is a project.

None of that makes them bad choices. It means the decision is stickier than the monthly price implies, so it is worth making on where the business is going rather than on which editor felt nicer during a free trial.

Whatever you choose, keep the domain registered in your own name and separate from the platform. That single habit is what turns a migration from a negotiation into a task.

The short version

Squarespace if you want it to look good and be left alone. Wix if you want to build it yourself and enjoy that. WordPress if it will grow and somebody will maintain it. Custom if speed and doing one job well are worth paying for. And before any of that, work out who is changing the site in eighteen months, because that answer decides it more reliably than any feature list.