WordPress vs Wix vs Squarespace for a Business Site

Search for wordpress vs wix and almost every result on the first page pays somebody a commission. Wix, Squarespace and the large managed WordPress hosts all run affiliate programmes, comparison sites exist to farm them, and the recommendation is settled by the payout table before any research starts. That is why the conclusions all rhyme, and why they answer a question no business actually has.

The question a business has is not which platform is best. All three are good enough to run a fifteen page brochure site, and two of them will do it faster and more reliably than a badly run WordPress install. The real question is what this site has to do in three years, and what it will cost to leave whichever platform you pick.

This is written by an agency that gets paid to migrate sites off all three, which is a different bias from an affiliate one and worth stating up front. Everything below uses vendor documentation and prices read on 3 September 2026, plus GOV.UK, the ICO and Google’s own developer documentation.

Which is better for a business website, WordPress, Wix or Squarespace? For a brochure site under twenty pages, in one language, run by people who will never patch software, Wix or Squarespace is usually the right answer and WordPress is a liability. WordPress wins when the site must do something the platform does not sell, when it needs more than one language, or when the content has to be portable. The deciding factor is rarely the feature list. It is what leaving costs.

The Question That Actually Decides This

Most comparisons rank features. That is the least useful cut of the data, because for a small business site every feature that matters is present on all three platforms and has been for years. All three give you responsive templates, a blog, forms, SSL, a sitemap and per page meta tags. Nobody loses a customer because their platform lacks a contact form.

What differs is the shape of the commitment. A website is a five to eight year asset that gets redesigned once or twice in that time and accumulates content continuously. The decision you are actually taking is which organisation owns the machine your content sits inside, and what it costs to take the content back out again.

So ask two questions before comparing anything else. What will this site have to do in year three that it does not do today, and if the answer is something the platform does not offer, what does moving cost at that point rather than now. Every other criterion is downstream of those two.

The reason this section is rare is that it does not produce a clean winner. It produces a rule, and the rule sends a large share of readers to a platform that pays the writer nothing.

What These Three Products Structurally Are

WordPress is software. It is licensed under the GPL, you download it, and you run it on hosting you choose. The current release is 7.1, published on 19 August 2026, and the release archive is blunt that only the newest version in a series is safe to run. The files sit on a disk you can reach and the content sits in a database you can dump.

Wix and Squarespace are not software you run. They are hosted products, and what you buy is an account. The editor, the templates, the rendering and the storage are all theirs, the data model is theirs, and there is no filesystem or database you can log into. This is not a criticism. It is precisely why they need no maintenance.

That difference is why the price tags are not comparable. A Squarespace subscription buys hosting, software, updates, security patching, a content delivery network and a support team in one line item. A WordPress site’s hosting bill buys the disk and the processor. Everything the subscription bundled is now either your job or somebody’s invoice, and nearly every apparent contradiction between these three platforms resolves back to that one fact.

The Honest Case for Wix

Wix is a better product than its reputation among developers suggests, and that reputation is roughly a decade out of date. The editor is genuinely capable, the template library is large, and a competent non technical owner can have a credible business site live in a weekend without asking anybody for anything.

Wix publishes reference prices in US dollars and states plainly that prices and currency vary by location, so the figure a UK buyer pays is set at checkout by billing address. On yearly billing paid up front, the published reference prices are $17 a month for Light with 2 GB of storage, $29 for Core with 50 GB, $39 for Business with 100 GB and $159 for Business Elite with unlimited storage. There is a free tier, and paid plans include a domain for the first year.

What that buys is the absence of an entire category of work: no patching, no backups, no hosting decisions, no compatibility testing, no compromised site at three in the morning. For a business with no technical staff that is worth more than the subscription costs.

The business Wix is correct for is a five to twenty page site for a trade, clinic, restaurant or consultancy, in one language, updated by the owner a few times a year, whose job is to produce a phone call.

The Honest Case for Squarespace

Squarespace sells design, and it is the only one of the three where the default output looks deliberate. A Squarespace site built by someone with no design training generally looks better than a WordPress site built by someone with no design training, and for a business selling on taste that is the whole argument.

Squarespace publishes UK prices in pounds. On annual billing the plans are £12 a month for Basic, £17 for Core, £29 for Plus and £79 for Advanced. On monthly billing the same four plans are £16, £24, £36 and £89. The gap between the two billing modes is the widest of any platform here, so paying monthly on Squarespace is an expensive habit.

Commerce pricing is tiered rather than flat. Basic carries a 2 percent online store transaction fee and a 7 percent fee on digital content and memberships. Core drops the store fee to zero and memberships to 5 percent, Plus takes memberships to 1 percent, and Advanced takes both to zero. Card processing starts at 2 percent plus 25p and falls to 1.5 percent plus 25p on Advanced.

Squarespace suits a studio, photographer, restaurant, small hotel or membership business where the site is a portfolio with commerce attached and the editorial rhythm is a few posts a month.

What WordPress Gives You, and What It Charges

WordPress gives you the files, the database and the templates. Anything you can describe, somebody can build, and when you decide to move the site elsewhere the content comes with you. That is the entire case, and it is a strong one.

The charge is that you have taken on an operational responsibility the subscription platforms were absorbing invisibly. Core handles part of it. Minor releases and translation files update automatically by default, and installations created since WordPress 5.6 default to automatic major updates as well. Plugins and themes do not. They update automatically only in the narrow case where the WordPress security team pushes a fix for a critical vulnerability.

So the real liability is not WordPress itself. It is the stack of eight to twenty plugins a typical business site accumulates, each from an independent vendor with its own release cadence, its own commercial pressures and its own probability of being abandoned. A plugin that stops being maintained is not an inconvenience. It is a component of your live site with no security response behind it.

That work is real and somebody has to do it. If your answer is that you will keep on top of it yourselves, be honest about whether that has ever been true of anything else in the business.

WordPress vs Wix on the SEO Controls That Matter

Here is the folklore, stated fairly so it can be tested: builders cannot do proper SEO because you cannot reach the code. On the controls a search engine actually reads, that has not been true for years.

The Wix SEO panel exposes the title tag, meta description, URL slug, canonical tag, an index toggle, social share tags and structured data, per page. Wix generates a default canonical URL for every page and lets you override it. Structured data is JSON-LD only, supplied as editable presets per page type, capped at 7,000 characters per markup. Wix also ships a robots.txt editor, with a warning that support will not help you if you break it.

That is the same control surface a WordPress site gets from an SEO plugin. WordPress goes further because you can write anything into a template, but further only matters when you are doing something unusual. On a brochure site, comparing wordpress vs wix on search controls is close to a tie. Squarespace sits lower on the same axis: its canonical handling and structured data are automatic rather than editable, and robots.txt is a setting rather than a file.

Where Squarespace Genuinely Constrains You

Squarespace does more for you automatically than either of the others, and gives you less to hold. It generates the sitemap, the page metadata and a set of structured data types on its own, covering blog posts, events, local business, organisation, product and website. For most sites that is exactly right and the output is clean.

The constraint appears the moment you need a type that is not on that list. Adding your own JSON-LD requires code injection, and code injection is a Core plan feature. On the £12 Basic plan you cannot add custom structured data at all, which means the cheapest Squarespace plan cannot mark up a service, a set of FAQs, a recipe or a review.

Redirects carry a harder limit. The URL mappings field holds 400 KB, which Squarespace puts at roughly 2,500 redirect lines. Rules fire from top to bottom so ordering matters, and a redirect only works if the page it points away from has been deleted or disabled. A live page always beats a mapping aimed at it.

None of this is a defect. It is a hosted product declining to hand you a rope. But if your plan involves marking up services, or maintaining a redirect table of any size, you want to know the ceiling before you sign up rather than in month eleven.

Redirects Are Where a Migration Lives or Dies

Redirects are the least glamorous item on this page and the one that decides whether a replatform keeps its rankings. Every URL that changes needs a permanent redirect to its replacement, and on a site with any history that means hundreds of rules, not a handful.

Wix creates a 301 automatically when you change a page’s URL slug, which is a genuinely good default, and it offers a redirect manager with bulk import for larger jobs. Two caveats matter. Redirects only work on a custom domain, so a free Wix URL cannot redirect anywhere, and blog pages are excluded from the automatic behaviour. Rename a blog post on Wix and you are writing that rule yourself.

The Squarespace mappings described above are capable but capped, and the deleted or disabled rule catches people mid migration. You cannot stage a redirect for a page that is still live, so the cutover order is prescriptive rather than a matter of preference.

WordPress has no ceiling here. Redirects live either in the web server configuration or in a plugin, they accept patterns, and a four thousand rule map is unremarkable. That is the practical reason large content sites end up on self hosted software regardless of what the marketing pages claim.

Multiple Languages Is the Clearest Dividing Line

If the site needs a second language, this comparison ends early.

Squarespace has no native multilingual system. Its documented options are the Weglot integration on version 7.1 or a manual build, and the manual route carries three hard limits: built in interface text renders in one language only, the site can sell in one currency at a time, and you cannot give different languages different domains or subdomains. For a UK business trading into Europe, that last one is usually disqualifying on its own.

Wix Multilingual is a real implementation. It supports subdirectories, which is the default and the option that keeps every language version on one domain, plus subdomains and language parameters. Wix’s own documentation warns against the parameter option, on the grounds that search engines may treat the variants as duplicates of the main site.

The signal a search engine reads is the hreflang annotation, emitted either as link elements in the page head or as entries in an XML sitemap. A platform that produces neither, which is what a manual Squarespace build leaves you with, is invisible as a multilingual site.

On WordPress this is a plugin decision rather than a platform limit, which is the whole point.

Page Speed, and What Google Actually Says

Speed arguments in platform comparisons are usually theology. The primary source is not.

Google’s page experience documentation says there is no single page experience signal, that Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, and that good scores do not guarantee a top ranking because there is more to page experience than those numbers. It also says Search will show the most relevant content even where the page experience is poor. Speed is a tie breaker between comparable pages, not a lever that outranks relevance.

With that framing, the honest comparison is unflattering to everyone. Both builders ship a substantial JavaScript runtime you cannot remove, so there is a floor you will not get under. A typical WordPress site assembled in a page builder is not faster, and is often slower, for the same reason plus a plugin stack on top. Our breakdown of Elementor against a custom theme covers where that weight actually lands.

The genuine difference is the ceiling, not the floor. A hand built WordPress theme on decent hosting reaches numbers no hosted builder will ever produce. Whether that is worth anything to you depends entirely on whether your competitors are slow too.

Exit Cost, Leaving Squarespace

This is the section the affiliate posts do not have, because it is the one that costs the platform money.

Squarespace exports an .xml file intended for WordPress import. What comes out is layout pages, one blog page including its posts and up to 1,000 comments per post, text blocks, image blocks, the text from embed and Instagram blocks, and gallery pages.

What does not come out is a longer list than what does. Album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio and store pages are all excluded. So is content in page specific headers, footers and sidebars, any blog page after the first, dropdowns, audio blocks, product blocks, video blocks, drafts, style settings and custom CSS. Images cannot be exported in bulk at all, only downloaded one at a time from the asset library. You cannot export from a trial site, and you cannot export from one Squarespace site and import it into another.

Read that list against a real site. A shop loses its products. A portfolio loses its portfolio pages. Anything running more than one blog loses every blog but one. The design is a total loss by definition, because the styling belongs to Squarespace.

The export is not useless. It rescues written content, which is the expensive part to recreate. But it is a text rescue, not a site migration.

Exit Cost, Leaving Wix

Wix is more direct about it. Wix documentation states that a Wix site must run on Wix servers and that its software as a service architecture does not support external hosting, because the site depends on proprietary Wix services to function. There is no export of the site in any form.

Below the site level there are partial escapes. The contents of a CMS collection export to CSV, and a store’s product list can be exported and imported elsewhere. Blog posts are the notable gap: the Wix help centre records exporting blog posts to other platforms as a feature request rather than a feature, and suggests sharing posts on social media instead.

The practical consequence is that leaving Wix means recreating the site and re entering the content. On a fifteen page brochure site that is an afternoon of copy and paste and it barely registers. On a site with two hundred blog posts and five years of accumulated pages it is a project, and the alternatives are scraping your own site or paying somebody else to.

That asymmetry is what to weigh at the start. The cost of leaving Wix is not fixed. It grows with every post you publish, and it grows fastest for exactly the businesses whose content marketing is working.

Exit Cost, Leaving WordPress

WordPress portability is real, and it is narrower than people assume.

A WordPress site moves as a database dump plus the content directory. Any competent host accepts that, the process is routine, and nothing in the licence or the architecture stops you. Set against the two hosted platforms this is a different universe: the exit cost of a well built WordPress site is close to zero, and it is the single strongest argument for choosing it.

The narrowing happens at the presentation layer. Content is portable, layout is not. If the pages were assembled in a page builder, the layouts are stored as that builder’s own markup inside the post content, and they do not survive removing the builder. Deactivate it and you get pages full of unrendered shortcodes or a wall of empty containers. The site changes hosts happily and cannot change its own theme.

So the claim that WordPress is portable is a claim about how a particular site was built, not about the platform. A site on a hand built theme with content in the editor is genuinely portable. A site assembled in a builder is locked to that builder in much the way a Squarespace site is locked to Squarespace, with the difference that you can at least pay somebody to unpick it.

What the Migration Actually Costs

Nobody publishes these numbers, so here they are as we quote them.

Moving a fifteen to twenty five page brochure site off a builder onto WordPress, with a new design, the content transferred by hand and a redirect map built from a crawl of the old site, runs £2,500 to £6,000. A content site of sixty to a hundred and fifty pages with a blog archive runs £6,000 to £15,000. A store with products, variants, customer accounts and order history runs £10,000 to £30,000 and needs a data migration plan rather than an export.

The distribution inside those numbers surprises people. The export is the cheap part and is often free. Roughly a third goes on rebuilding the design, because none of it transfers. Another third goes on content: reformatting, re uploading images one at a time where no bulk export exists, and repairing internal links. The remainder is the redirect map and the post launch monitoring, which is where search rankings are actually preserved or lost.

Our guide to migrating a CMS without losing traffic covers the sequencing, and what a website costs in the UK sets these figures against new build prices. If you want the work scoped rather than estimated, that is what our website development service is for.

Accessibility Obligations for a UK Business Site

Accessibility gets asserted vaguely in platform comparisons, so state it precisely.

The public sector accessibility regulations apply to public sector bodies, not to businesses generally. They require the WCAG 2.2 AA standard and a published accessibility statement that is kept up to date. Exemptions exist for some non government organisations and charities, for public sector broadcasters, and partially for schools and nurseries. If you run a private company selling to consumers, these regulations are not your obligation.

Your obligation comes from the Equality Act 2010 instead, through the duty on service providers to make reasonable adjustments. That duty is anticipatory, which means you are expected to think ahead rather than wait for a disabled customer to struggle. No statutory conformance level is attached to it, which is why WCAG is used as the working standard in practice.

The criteria that catch templates are predictable. 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) wants a ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 on body text, and pale grey on white fails it constantly. 1.4.11 Non-text Contrast wants 3 to 1 on interface components and focus indicators. 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum) catches cramped mobile menus. 1.1.1 Non-text Content is the alt text one, and that is a content problem rather than a platform one.

Here a builder is genuinely ahead. Wix ships an accessibility wizard built around WCAG 2.2, and stock WordPress ships nothing equivalent.

Data Protection, Cookies and Where the Data Sits

Cookie banners on small business sites are usually wrong, and the platform choice affects how wrong.

The ICO recognises five exceptions to the rule that you need consent to store or read anything on a visitor’s device: communication, strictly necessary, statistical purposes, appearance and emergency assistance. The statistical purposes exception is the analytics one, and it is narrower than the relief it appears to offer. It covers aggregate information about how your service is used rather than who uses it, it excludes advertising entirely, and relying on it requires clear information plus a simple means of objecting, free of charge.

That is a question about your analytics configuration rather than your platform, but the platform decides how well you can answer it. On a hosted builder, what the bundled analytics stores and for what purpose is whatever the vendor documents and is not otherwise inspectable. On WordPress you can read the code, which is only an advantage if somebody actually does.

Where the data sits differs too. On Wix or Squarespace it sits in their infrastructure under their processor terms, and you accept those terms as written. On self hosted WordPress you choose the host and therefore the region, which matters if you have told customers their data stays in the UK.

Three Year Cost for a Representative Small Business Site

The site modelled here is a twenty page brochure with a blog, contact forms and no shop, in one language. Three years, because that is roughly when the first redesign lands.

Currencies are not mixed and not converted. Wix publishes reference prices in US dollars and sets the local figure at checkout. Squarespace publishes pounds for UK buyers.

What Those Rows Mean in Prose

Wix Core at $29 a month on yearly billing is $348 a year, so $1,044 across the three years, before local tax and before the domain renews at the end of the first year. Squarespace Core at £17 a month on annual billing is £204 a year, so £612 across the three. WordPress hosting suitable for this site runs roughly £11 to £30 a month in the UK, so £400 to £1,100 over the period, with premium plugin renewals adding £100 to £400 a year on top.

The line that actually decides the comparison is maintenance. On the builders it is zero, because it is bundled into the subscription and performed by people you never meet. On WordPress it is either a retainer of £50 to £250 a month or somebody’s unpaid attention, and the second option is how sites end up compromised.

The exit row is the one worth staring at. On both builders it is a rebuild. On WordPress it is a file transfer, unless the site was assembled in a page builder.

The Year Three Problem

In year one every option looks fine. The site is new, the content is small, whoever built it still remembers how, and nothing has broken yet. Comparisons are written from the perspective of year one, which is why they are useless.

Year three is where the platforms separate. By then the site has two hundred posts instead of ten, and the exit cost has quietly multiplied. The person who set it up has left or moved on. Somebody in the business has asked for a booking system, a members area, a second language or an integration with the CRM, and on a hosted platform the answer is either an app that does most of it or nothing at all.

On WordPress the year three problem is different and just as real. Three or four plugins are behind, one has changed hands, one has moved to a subscription and one has been abandoned. The theme has not been updated since it was bought. Nobody has checked the backups. Our note on hiring a WordPress developer exists because this is the point at which most people start looking, and when the need is broader than WordPress it is usually time to hire a web developer on a retainer rather than per incident.

Neither of those is avoidable. What you choose at the start is which one you would rather be dealing with, and how much it costs to change your mind.

A Decision Rule, and Who Should Stop Reading Here

The rule is short. Choose a hosted builder if the site is under about twenty five pages, in one language, with no integration beyond a form and a payment link, and nobody in the business will ever patch software. Choose Squarespace over Wix if design matters more than control, and Wix over Squarespace if you need a second language or editable structured data.

Choose WordPress if any of four things are true. The site needs more than one language. It needs to talk to something else you run, such as a CRM, a booking system or an inventory feed. The content is an asset you intend to keep for a decade. Or you already have somebody, internal or external, who will own the maintenance.

If you came here wanting permission to use a builder, you have it, and you can stop reading now. A well run Squarespace site beats a neglected WordPress site on every measure that produces revenue, search included. The failure we get called in to fix is almost never that a business chose Wix. It is that a business chose WordPress and then nobody owned it.

The one thing not to do is choose on price. The subscription is the smallest number in this article.

Where Mecanik Fits

Mecanik builds and migrates business sites on WordPress and on custom stacks, and we tell people to stay where they are when moving would not pay for itself. If you are weighing a move, the useful first step is a scoped look at your actual site rather than a generic comparison: how many URLs it has, how much of the content survives an export, what the redirect map looks like, and what the rebuild costs.

That work sits under our website development service, and when you need capacity rather than a fixed project you can hire a web developer directly. For the wider question of whether a bespoke build is warranted at all, our comparison of WordPress and custom development for UK businesses and the piece on headless and traditional CMS architectures go further than this one. If the trigger is a site that has aged rather than a platform you regret, start with when and how to redesign.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is WordPress better than Wix and Squarespace for SEO? Not on the per page controls, which are close to equivalent. Wix exposes the title tag, meta description, canonical tag, an index toggle, structured data and a robots.txt editor, and Squarespace generates most of that automatically. WordPress wins on redirect capacity, on multilingual work and on anything needing custom markup, not on the basics.

Can you move a website off Wix to WordPress? Not as a site. Wix documentation states that a Wix site must run on Wix servers and offers no site export, and its help centre lists exporting blog posts to other platforms as a feature request rather than a feature. CMS collections and store product lists export to CSV. In practice, leaving Wix means rebuilding the design and re entering the content.

What does Squarespace actually export when you leave? An .xml file aimed at WordPress import, containing layout pages, one blog page with its posts, text blocks, image blocks and gallery pages. Store, portfolio, index, album, cover, calendar and info pages do not export, nor do additional blogs, drafts, custom CSS or style settings, and images cannot be exported in bulk.

How much does Squarespace cost in the UK? On annual billing Squarespace publishes £12 a month for Basic, £17 for Core, £29 for Plus and £79 for Advanced, and £16, £24, £36 and £89 respectively on monthly billing. Basic carries a 2 percent online store transaction fee, while Core and above charge nothing on store sales. Code injection, which you need for custom structured data, starts at Core.

Which platform should a UK small business choose? A builder if the site is under about twenty five pages, in one language, with no integrations, and nobody will maintain software. WordPress if you need a second language, an integration with another system, or long term content portability. The three year cost is close enough that it should not decide the question, because what genuinely differs is the exit cost.