Wix vs WordPress vs Squarespace: Which Should You Build Your Website On

Almost every new website today gets built on one of three things, Wix, WordPress or Squarespace, and the choice is harder to undo than it looks, because two of the three do not let you take the site with you when you leave. So, if you are weighing Wix vs WordPress, or Squarespace against either of them, before you commit a business or a blog to one, this guide can surely help. The short version is that WordPress is the default for anyone who wants to own the site and let it grow, Wix is the pick when the site has to be live this weekend and never needs a technical owner, and Squarespace is the pick when how the site looks is most of what it has to do.

I have run this site on WordPress since 2008 and have helped many small businesses and bloggers choose between these three over the years, often after they had already chosen once and wanted out.

Every site has its own mix of needs, so one comparison cannot hand every reader a verdict. But the differences that decide this are the same for everyone, mainly who owns the site, what you can export, how much design freedom and how much maintenance you are taking on, and how each one charges you as you grow, and in this one I will try my best to cover those properly, with a plain recommendation for each kind of owner.

In addition to that, I have put together a chooser you can print: 12 questions that score the three against your own site, a cost worksheet you fill with the prices on the day you read this, and the exit route from each platform. You can download it right below. Or, if you would rather talk the decision through with someone, I am always available for a chat. Without further ado, let’s get started.

Wix vs WordPress vs Squarespace at a Glance

The table holds the differences that change the decision. Prices are left out on purpose, because all three change them often and the shape of the cost matters more than the number, which the cost section below explains.

What decides it	Wix	WordPress	Squarespace
What it is	Hosted website builder	Free open-source software you host anywhere	Hosted, design-led website builder
Who runs hosting, updates and security	Wix	You, or your managed host	Squarespace
Free plan	Yes, with Wix ads on a Wix subdomain	The software is free; hosting is not	No, a 14-day trial
What you can take with you	Blog and CMS content as CSV; no pages or design	Everything: files, database, media	Pages, posts and galleries as XML; no products or index pages
Design approach	Freeform drag-anywhere editor, plus Wix Studio	Block editor and themes, or a page builder	Structured templates on a grid
Extending it	Wix App Market, a few hundred apps	Tens of thousands of plugins, and custom code	A small extensions catalog and code injection
Blogging	Basic, fixed URL structure	The deepest of the three	Good, with a fixed blog prefix
Selling	Store on mid-tier plans, no platform cut of sales	WooCommerce, free, no platform cut	Built in; the entry plan takes a cut of sales
SEO control	Essentials covered	Complete	Essentials covered
Share of all websites	Around 4%	A little over 40%	Around 2.5%

Two rows do most of the deciding: what you can take with you, and who runs the maintenance. The first is the cost of being wrong, and the second is the cost of being right.

Quick Verdict

WordPress should be the choice for a blog, a content business, an online course, a shop that intends to grow, or any site where you cannot yet name every feature it will need. You own the whole thing, you can move hosts in an afternoon, and there is a plugin for the feature nobody planned for. The price is that somebody has to keep it updated and backed up, and that somebody is you or a managed host you pay.

Wix should be the choice when the owner is not technical, wants the site live this weekend, needs bookings, events or a small store, and does not want to think about hosting ever again. It is the widest feature set of the two hosted builders. The price is that leaving means rebuilding, since Wix exports content but never pages or design.

Squarespace should be the choice for a portfolio, a studio, a restaurant, a photographer or a small shop where the site’s job is to look considered and its structure will stay simple. It produces the best-looking result with the least design skill. The price is a narrower feature set than either rival and no free plan.

Being extreme about any of the three is not a good idea. WordPress is not the answer for a florist who will never log in again after launch, and Wix is not the answer for a publisher who will have 800 articles in 3 years. It is wise to pick for the site as it will be in 2 years, not as it is on launch day.

What Each One Is

Before the head-to-heads, I want to ensure the basic difference in kind is clear, because most of the confusion in this comparison comes from treating three different things as three brands of the same thing.

Wix and Squarespace are services. You rent a site inside their system, they host it, secure it and update it, and everything you build lives on their servers under their rules. Squarespace has been a design house first, with structured templates and opinionated defaults; Wix has been a feature house, with a freeform editor, a large app market, its own code platform called Velo and, since 2023, a more disciplined agency-grade editor called Wix Studio.

WordPress is software. It is free, open source, and runs on any web host, from shared hosting that costs less than a coffee a month to managed hosting that costs more than both builders combined. You install it, or the host does, and from then on the files and the database are yours. That is why it runs a little over 40% of all websites, and it is also why it needs looking after. There is a hosted version too, WordPress.com, which behaves more like the builders, and the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org are a decision of their own.

Everything that follows comes back to this picture. On WordPress every layer is yours, including the ones you would rather not hold; on the builders the bottom layers belong to the vendor, which is a relief until the day you want to leave.

Wix vs WordPress

This is the pair most people are deciding between, and it is the pair with the largest gap in kind. Wix wins on the first month; WordPress wins on the years after it.

Ownership and leaving. A WordPress site is a folder of files and a database, and you can copy both to another host any afternoon, so the worst outcome of a bad host or a price rise is an afternoon’s work. A Wix site cannot be exported as a site. Wix will give you the blog posts and other collections as CSV files, with a size limit on large collections, and the domain can be moved, but every page you designed stays behind, so leaving Wix means rebuilding. That single fact should weigh more than any feature in this section.

Design and editing. Wix lets a beginner drag anything anywhere, which is why people love the first hour and curse the third month when the mobile layout drifts and nothing lines up. Wix Studio fixes much of that for people who work like designers. WordPress edits in blocks inside a theme, which feels more constrained on day 1 and stays tidy on day 400, and page builders such as Elementor or block libraries such as Kadence add the drag-and-drop layer for people who want it.

Features. The Wix App Market has a few hundred apps, most of them good, all of them approved by Wix. WordPress has tens of thousands of plugins, some of them terrible, and the freedom to write your own. For a site whose feature list is known and ordinary, Wix’s catalog is enough. For a site that will need a membership area, a course, a custom post type or an integration nobody built an app for, WordPress is the only one of the two where the answer is never “not possible”.

SEO and speed. The line that Wix is bad for SEO is a decade out of date. Wix covers titles, descriptions, redirects, canonicals, structured data and sitemaps, and a small business site ranks on Wix as well as anywhere. The difference is depth and size: WordPress lets you shape URL structures, schema, performance and multilingual setups exactly, which starts to matter past a few hundred pages, while Wix’s blog URLs carry a fixed prefix you cannot remove. Speed is a draw at the small end and a WordPress advantage for anyone willing to choose hosting and a theme with care.

Maintenance. Wix has none. WordPress has updates, backups and security, and the plain way to say it is that a neglected WordPress site gets hacked and a neglected Wix site does not. Managed WordPress hosts take most of that on for a monthly fee, which is the fair comparison to make against a Wix plan.

Wix should be chosen over WordPress when the owner will not maintain anything and the site’s needs are ordinary. WordPress should be chosen over Wix when the site is the business, when content is the product, or when you cannot yet name every feature it will need. A blog belongs on WordPress. So does anything you would be upset to rebuild.

Wix vs Squarespace

These two are the same kind of thing, hosted builders that carry the maintenance for you, so the decision comes down to temperament. Wix gives you more to do; Squarespace makes it harder to do something ugly.

Design. Squarespace’s templates are the best-looking defaults in this comparison, and its grid editor keeps a non-designer’s work looking designed. Wix’s freeform editor gives more control and more rope, and the results depend on the person holding it. A photographer, a studio or a restaurant is usually happier on Squarespace; a business with 15 different things to show is usually happier on Wix.

Features. Wix has the larger app market, bookings and events built in, a code platform, and a free plan that lets you build before you pay. Squarespace has a smaller extensions catalog and no free plan, only a trial, but what it includes is finished and consistent. Squarespace has no native multilingual site; Wix does, through its own app.

Selling. Both have stores. Squarespace’s entry plan takes a percentage of every sale on top of the payment processor’s fee and the higher plans do not, while Wix takes nothing beyond the processor on any plan that includes a store. For a shop that expects real volume, that percentage decides the plan and sometimes the platform.

Leaving. Squarespace exports pages, blog posts and galleries as an XML file that WordPress imports directly, though products, index pages and audio and video blocks stay behind. Wix exports collections as CSV and nothing of the pages. If you think you might outgrow either one, Squarespace is the easier exit.

Squarespace should be chosen when the site’s job is to look right and stay simple. Wix should be chosen when the site has a long feature list, needs a store without a platform cut, or when you want to build for free before you decide.

WordPress vs Squarespace

This pair splits along the same line as Wix and WordPress, ownership against convenience, but the convenience on Squarespace comes with better taste and a cleaner way out.

Blogging. WordPress started as blogging software and it still shows: categories and tags with their own archives, revisions, scheduling, custom post types, and a plugin for every editorial habit. Squarespace’s blog is good for a studio that posts twice a month and thin for a publisher, with a fixed prefix on post URLs and less control over archives and taxonomy.

Design. Squarespace’s defaults beat most WordPress themes out of the box, and a non-designer gets a finished look faster there than anywhere. WordPress can reach the same place with a good theme and gets past it with a designer, but it does not start there.

Selling. WooCommerce on WordPress is free, takes no cut of sales and extends to almost anything, at the cost of being a system you run. Squarespace Commerce is built in and finished, and the entry plan’s percentage on sales is the number to check before choosing it for a shop.

Ownership and maintenance. The same trade as before: WordPress is yours to move and yours to maintain; Squarespace is theirs to run and yours to leave with an XML file. For a site that will stay small and pretty, the trade favors Squarespace. For a site that will grow, it favors WordPress every time.

WordPress should be chosen when content, growth or an unusual feature is the point. Squarespace should be chosen when the look is the point and the site will stay the size it launched at.

What It Costs Over 3 Years

Prices change too often to print, so the useful thing is the shape of the bill on each platform, which does not change. The chooser has a worksheet where you fill in the current numbers.

• Wix: a monthly plan, cheaper on annual billing, with a store only from the middle tiers. The free plan is a sandbox, not a business site, because it shows Wix ads on a Wix subdomain. A custom domain is usually free for the first year and then renews at the going rate.
• Squarespace: a monthly plan with no free option, cheaper on annual billing, plus the platform’s percentage of sales on the entry plan. The domain follows the same first-year-free pattern.
• WordPress: hosting, a domain, and optionally a premium theme or plugins. Shared hosting starts at a few dollars a month and is enough for a new site; managed hosting costs about what a mid-tier builder plan does and removes most of the maintenance. The software itself never costs anything.

Over 3 years, WordPress on shared hosting is nearly always the cheapest of the three, and the gap widens as the site grows, because you can shop for hosting while the builders can only raise the plan. The 2 numbers to compare are the renewal price, since every one of them discounts the first year, and the platform’s cut of sales if you sell anything.

For a first WordPress site, an entry plan from Hostinger with a free theme such as GeneratePress is the cheapest serious setup, and a managed host such as Cloudways is the fair comparison to a paid builder plan once the site earns its keep. The one setup to avoid is the cheapest host with 40 plugins and no backups, which is where WordPress gets its reputation for trouble.

Moving Between Them

The exit is part of the decision, so I want to lay out what each platform hands back when you go.

• Leaving WordPress: export everything. The built-in exporter gives an XML of all content, and a host migration copies files and database as they are. Nothing is lost and no rebuilding is needed.
• Leaving Squarespace: export an XML with pages, blog posts, text and image blocks and galleries, which WordPress imports in one step. Product pages, index pages, audio and video blocks and some layouts do not come along and are rebuilt by hand. The domain transfers once unlocked.
• Leaving Wix: export blog posts and other collections as CSV, within Wix’s limits on large collections, then download the media separately and rebuild every page on the new platform. The domain transfers and the design does not.

A move from either builder to WordPress is common and the tools for it are mature. A move in the other direction is rare, because people who leave WordPress usually do it for the maintenance, and a managed host solves that without giving up the files.

Which Should You Choose

The question that decides it is not which platform is best but what the site has to do in 2 years and who will be looking after it. Start there and the path is short.

• Pick WordPress if the site is a blog or a content business, if you will sell more than a handful of products, if you can name a feature the builders do not offer, or if being unable to leave would hurt. Accept the maintenance or pay a managed host to carry it.
• Pick Wix if the owner is not technical, the site needs to be live within days, it needs bookings, events or a small store, and its feature list is ordinary and known. Accept that leaving means rebuilding.
• Pick Squarespace if the look is most of the job, the structure will stay simple, and you want a finished result without a designer. Accept the smaller catalog and check the sales percentage before choosing it for a shop.

If you are torn between WordPress and a builder, the tie-break is content. A site that will publish regularly belongs on WordPress, and the guide to how to start a blog walks through the setup from the domain onward. If you are torn between the two builders, the tie-break is the exit, and Squarespace has the cleaner one.

The Limits

This comparison covers the three platforms most people are deciding between and leaves out the ones they compare against next: Webflow and Framer for designers, Shopify for stores, Ghost for pure publishing. The comparison of Webflow or Wix covers the first of those.

My standing is uneven across the three. This site has run on WordPress for a long time and the WordPress judgments come from running it and from client work; the Wix and Squarespace judgments come from their documentation, their published plans and export policies, and from helping people move off them, not from running a business on either.

Plan names, tier limits and the percentage each builder takes on sales change every year or two, which is why none of them is printed here and why the chooser leaves the price boxes blank for you to fill on the day.

And none of the three fixes a site nobody updates. The platform decides how hard growth will be; the owner decides whether there is any.

What Quietly Ruins the Decision

Choosing by the first-year price. All three discount the first year and none of them discount the fourth, so the site gets picked on a number that disappears before the site has an audience.

Choosing WordPress and the cheapest possible host. The savings are real for a month, and then the site is slow, the backups do not exist and the first plugin conflict has nobody to call, which is how WordPress gets blamed for a hosting decision.

Choosing Wix for a site that will publish weekly. The first 30 posts go in easily, and by the 200th the fixed URL structure, the thin archive controls and the CSV-only exit have turned a blog into a hostage.

Choosing Squarespace for a growing shop without reading the fee line. The entry plan’s percentage of sales is small on the first month and a monthly hosting bill by the time the shop is working.

Buying the domain from the platform. It is convenient, and it makes leaving one step harder and one renewal more expensive, when a registrar of your own would hold it for less and hand it to any host.

Deciding for the site you have today. Every one of these is chosen at launch, when the site is 5 pages and nobody has needs, and paid for in year 2, when it is 60 pages and everybody does.

FAQs on Wix vs WordPress vs Squarespace

Final Remarks

If you have read this far, you know that the three are not three versions of one thing, that ownership and the exit route are where the decision lives, and that the site to choose for is the one you will have in 2 years. That is the one idea I want to leave you with.

When someone I work with is about to pick a platform, I tell them the same 3 things. Register the domain yourself, at a registrar and not inside the builder, because it is the one part of the site that must survive every other decision. Write down the 5 things the site has to do in 2 years before you look at a single template, since a template is the last thing that should choose a platform for you. And if the answer is WordPress, spend the money on the host and not on the theme, because the host is what you will be living with.

The chooser turns those questions into a score and leaves the price boxes for you to fill on the day, so it is worth keeping until the site is live. And if you would like to talk the decision through with someone who has moved a few sites between these, I am always available for a chat.

That is all from my side. I hope it helps you.

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