WordPress vs Wix vs Squarespace for a small business

For most small businesses that want to be found on Google and plan to grow, we’d choose WordPress, mainly because you own it and can take it anywhere. The WordPress vs Wix question isn’t one-sided, though. Wix and Squarespace are good products, and for some businesses they’re the better pick.

We should be upfront: we build on WordPress, and have done since 2015. Read this knowing where we stand. We’ve also moved plenty of sites off Wix and Squarespace over the years, and there are people we’ve told to stay where they are.

The short version of each

WordPress is open source software, free to use and released under the GPL licence. You install it on hosting you choose, and you or your developer can change anything about it. Nobody can withdraw it or change the terms on you.

Wix and Squarespace are website builders. You pay a monthly or annual subscription, and hosting, security and updates come with it. You drag things around in their editor and it works. Squarespace leans towards polished, design-led templates. Wix gives you more freedom to move things around, plus a bigger app store.

Who owns your website

This is the difference that matters most, and the one people think about last.

With WordPress, the files and the database are yours. If you fall out with your developer or your host, you take a backup and move somewhere else. With Wix or Squarespace you’re renting. You can take some of your content with you, but the design and the build stay behind on their platform. If prices go up, or a feature you rely on changes, your choices are to accept it or start again elsewhere.

For a business that plans to be around in ten years, that counts for a lot.

WordPress vs Wix for SEO

Both Wix and Squarespace have improved a great deal at SEO. You can edit page titles and meta descriptions, set up redirects and connect Google Search Console. For a small local business that mostly wants to rank for its own name and a few local searches, that’s often enough.

WordPress pulls ahead on control. You can decide how every page is structured, add detailed schema markup, tune the speed properly, and build out lots of pages aimed at specific searches. We plan every site around what people type into Google before we design a single page, and our SEO-first approach to building websites explains how. You can do that planning for any platform, but WordPress lets you carry it right through the build.

What each one costs over time

Wix and Squarespace usually look cheaper at the start, and often are. You can put a basic site together yourself over a weekend for the price of a subscription. The plans cost more as you add a shop or extra features, and you pay every year for as long as the site exists.

WordPress itself is free. You pay for hosting and a domain, sometimes a premium theme or plugins, and for someone to build it unless you do that yourself. A properly built WordPress site costs more on day one. Over a few years the gap tends to narrow, and at the end of it you own what you paid for.

The cost people forget with WordPress is upkeep. WordPress, its theme and its plugins all need regular updates, and a neglected WordPress site is an easy target. If nobody is going to look after it, that alone is a fair reason to choose Wix.

Flexibility and growth

If you can describe it, it can almost certainly be built in WordPress. Booking systems, member areas, a large WooCommerce shop, a site in three languages, a private client portal. Wix and Squarespace manage some of this through their own apps, and you’re limited to whatever those apps allow.

That freedom has a downside. More moving parts means more that can go wrong, so you need a developer you trust. It’s one reason our website development projects come with training built in, so you aren’t stuck phoning us every time you want to swap a photo.

Who should pick which

Our honest take, for what it’s worth.

• Choose Wix if you sell fewer than 10 products, update the site twice a year and want to do everything yourself. Honestly, it’s fine.
• Choose Squarespace if your site is mostly about showing your work, say as a photographer or designer, and you’re happy with their templates more or less as they come.
• Choose WordPress if Google is how customers find you, if you expect the site to grow, if you need something specific built, or if owning your site outright matters to you.

Most of the businesses we work with land in that last group, which is why WordPress is what we build on. We’d still rather you picked the right tool than the one we happen to sell.

Running a WordPress site yourself

The usual worry is that WordPress is difficult. It isn’t, once someone has shown you around. Every client we build for is trained to update their own site, and we’re still here afterwards when something odd happens. If you’d like to learn properly, our WordPress courses run in small groups, and the Manage Your Own WordPress Website course is for owners who want to handle the day-to-day changes themselves, with us in the background for the technical side.

Frequently asked questions

Is WordPress better than Wix for SEO?

Both can rank well for a small business. WordPress gives you more control over page structure, speed and schema markup, which matters more as your site grows and you compete for more searches.

Can I move my Wix site to WordPress?

Yes, but it’s a rebuild rather than a transfer. Your text and images can come across, but the design and layout have to be recreated in WordPress. Set up redirects from your old page addresses so you keep your Google rankings.

Is WordPress hard to learn?

Not for everyday updates. Most people can edit pages, add blog posts and change images after a short training session. The technical side, like updates and security, is usually best left to someone who does it every day.