Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress: Where a Growing Business Should Be

Your Business Has Outgrown Your Website

If you are reading this, you probably already suspect that your website is not as good as your business. Maybe a competitor launched a site that made yours look dated overnight. Maybe you hesitate before sending someone the link. Or maybe you simply know the business has grown past what was set up years ago. That instinct is usually right, and it is worth acting on.

When a business comes to me about its website, it almost always has one of two things. Either someone on the team attempted to build it in Wix or Squarespace in their free time, or it is a WordPress site that was built ten or fifteen years ago and has not been touched much since.

The questions come in the same few shapes. Which website builder is best? Is Wix or Squarespace better? Is WordPress outdated? Should we switch, and if we do, will we lose what we have? This article answers all of them.

Those questions rarely start with the platform. They start because the site has stopped keeping up with the business:

• It does not look the part. You expect more from your website than it shows, especially next to the polished sites competitors are launching now.
• Google sends fewer people than it used to. Newer, faster sites outrank yours for searches you used to win, and an outdated site is slow to fight back.
• It costs you time. Every new page, project or update is done by hand, so the site eats hours that should go to work that actually moves the business.

So the real question is not which tool is best in the abstract. It is where a business that plans to grow should end up. (If your team already works in Webflow or Framer, you have likely settled this, and Framer vs Webflow covers that side. This article is for everyone else.)

The Short Answer

If you are building your first website

Most of this article is for businesses that already have a site. If you are starting from nothing, the same logic applies, just earlier.

• If the site only needs to exist (a few pages, run by you, unlikely to change much), Wix or Squarespace will get you there fastest. Pick the one whose templates you like better.
• If you expect the business to grow, start on WordPress. A builder site that the business outgrows has to be rebuilt from scratch, so starting on a builder often means paying for a website twice.

Wix and Squarespace Are the Same Kind of Tool

Wix and Squarespace compete hard with each other, but they are built the same way. Both are hosted website builders. You pay a monthly subscription, pick a template, and drag blocks around a page. The company runs the software, the hosting and the security for you.

That is the appeal, and for a new business it is a fair trade. Something presentable can be live in a weekend.

Wix vs Squarespace: where they differ

Prices are as of October 2026. Both are from each company's pricing page. Market share is from W3Techs.

If you are choosing between the two today, pick the one whose templates are closer to what you want. The bigger decision is the one they share.

You are renting, not owning

On either platform, the site only exists inside the company's system.

• Wix says so directly. Its help center explains that a Wix site relies on Wix's own technology and cannot be hosted anywhere else. Leaving means rebuilding from scratch and copying your content across.
• Squarespace offers a partial export to WordPress. Per its own support documentation, that covers layout pages, one blog, text and image blocks, and galleries. It leaves out store, portfolio and index pages, video and audio, drafts, any second blog, and every style setting.

So the longer a business builds on a website builder, the more it has to rebuild when it leaves. That cost is easy to miss when the subscription is the only bill.

The Real Difference: What Caps the Result

Renting is one cost. The bigger one is the ceiling.

Wix and Squarespace cap what a site can be. Every site on them is assembled from the same blocks, templates and settings the platform offers. A good designer gets more out of them than a beginner does, but only up to what the builder allows. That is why so many builder sites look alike.

The best Squarespace and Wix sites you have seen usually get past that with custom code. Squarespace's higher plans accept your own CSS and JavaScript, and Wix has its own developer tools. That works, up to a point. Every customization works around the builder instead of with it, imitating an effect the platform was never built to produce, and a template or platform update can break it. Once a site needs that much code to look the way it should, building the whole thing in code gives you the effect properly, with every design decision open.

WordPress works differently, so it helps to separate the platform from the build. The platform is the engine underneath: the content, the editor, the users. The build sits on top of it, and the options there are close to open-ended:

• about 8,600 free themes in WordPress's official directory, and tens of thousands of free plugins, before counting premium ones;
• a range of page builders and editors, for teams that want to drag and drop;
• a fully custom design, coded from scratch, with the editing set up exactly as the business needs. AI has made this route faster than it has ever been.

So a WordPress site is not capped by the platform. It is capped by the creativity of the person designing it and the skill of the person building it. That is the real answer to Wix vs WordPress, and to Squarespace vs WordPress: not which has more features, but whether your site has a ceiling. It is also why an old WordPress site can look so dated. The freedom that allows a great site allows a poor one too.

What Is Really Wrong With an Old WordPress Site

An old WordPress site usually feels slow, dated and fragile. It is easy to blame WordPress. Usually, the platform is not the problem. The build is.

The same problems show up again and again:

• A theme bought in 2014 that its author stopped updating years ago.
• A page builder loading its code on every page, even where nothing uses it.
• Plugins for features nobody remembers adding, some of them abandoned.
• An old version of PHP, the language WordPress runs on. WordPress recommends version 8.3 or newer, and warns that older versions are past their end of life and may expose a site to security vulnerabilities.
• A layout designed for desktop screens, adjusted for phones as an afterthought.

WordPress itself has kept moving. Since 2022 it has supported block themes, where the whole design is built from blocks and patterns. That makes it possible to lock a layout and still let staff edit everything inside it.

What an old site has that is worth keeping

This is the part most owners miss. A site that has been live for a decade has things a new one cannot buy:

• a domain with a long history;
• pages that already rank for what you do;
• links from other sites, pointing at specific URLs;
• years of content.

Rebuilding on WordPress keeps all of it. The content imports, and any URL that changes gets a permanent redirect to its new page. Moving to Wix or Squarespace means rebuilding by hand, and every redirect has to be set up separately.

A ten-minute check of your WordPress site

You can do most of this yourself, logged in as an administrator:

1. Tools → Site Health. It lists critical issues and shows which version of PHP the site runs on.
2. Appearance → Themes. Note the theme's name, then look up when its author last updated it.
3. Plugins. Count them, and see how many say an update is available or that they have not been tested with your version of WordPress.
4. Open a page and try to change one sentence. If that feels risky, the build is the problem.
5. Load the site on your phone and try to contact yourself through its form.

If most of these come back badly, the site needs a rebuild, but on WordPress. Not a new platform.

Why a Growing Business Should End Up on WordPress

Growth puts the same pressures on every website: a higher bar for how it looks, more pages, more people editing them, more systems to connect. WordPress handles each of them better than a builder can.

• It can look and feel exactly how you want. With a custom-coded theme, there is no template underneath the design, only code. Layout, typography, color, motion, how a page responds as someone scrolls: every decision belongs to the designer, not to a template's settings. So the site looks like your business, not like every other site on the same builder.
• It fits what you publish. A custom build can give every recurring thing its own entry and fields: projects, listings, team members, locations. Adding one becomes a form, not a new page to design.
• Staff can edit without breaking it. In a custom block theme, each section of a page is locked. Editors change the words and images, and the layout holds. At the Burt Foundation, the director edits copy on the live site herself.
• It connects to the rest of the business. Forms, CRMs, booking and payments are standard work. Techromatic's inquiry forms write straight into its CRM, field by field.
• You own it, and it moves when you do. The site is files and a database, so any WordPress host can run it and any WordPress developer can work on it. WordPress runs about 40% of all websites, per W3Techs, so that talent is never hard to find.

I have built on Squarespace, so this is not a guess. Boston Showcase Company designs and supplies restaurant kitchens. I rebuilt its site on Squarespace in 2025, and working in it, the team ran into the limits. Adding a project or a team member meant duplicating a page, dragging blocks into place and fixing the spacing by hand, every time. So in 2026 I rebuilt it as a custom WordPress theme. Projects and team members are now entries with fields. The team fills them in, and the layout takes care of the rest. And the design team's own 3D kitchen models now run live on the page, which no template offered.

That is why, for any business that plans to keep growing, I build on WordPress with a custom-coded theme, and not on Wix or Squarespace.

What Each One Really Costs

The monthly price is the smallest part of this decision. What matters is what you pay for over the years, and what you own at the end of them.

Prices as of October 2026. Wix and Squarespace are billed annually. The budget WordPress figure is Hostinger's $2.99 a month on a four-year plan, which renews at $10.99. The managed figure is WP Engine's Essential plan.

Three things stand out:

• The running cost favors WordPress. Five years of a builder subscription comes to about $1,000 to $9,500 on Wix, or $1,140 to $5,940 on Squarespace, at annual prices. Five years of budget WordPress hosting comes to a few hundred dollars.
• Design costs money on every platform. If you hire someone to make a Wix or Squarespace site look good, you pay for design either way. The difference is what the money buys: a design capped by a template, on a site you rent, or a design with no ceiling, on a site you own.
• A custom build costs less than it used to. A custom theme once took weeks of developer time, which pushed most small businesses toward templates. AI-assisted development has changed that. The time that used to go into routine code now goes into the design, so a custom WordPress build is more affordable than it has ever been.

Switching From Wix or Squarespace to WordPress

Switching sounds bigger than it is. Most of the work falls to whoever builds the new site, and most of what you have built stays with you. The same goes for rebuilding an old WordPress site.

• Your domain and your email stay yours. The domain is pointed at the new site. If your email runs through Google or Microsoft, it keeps working, as long as its settings carry over with the domain.
• Your current site stays live until the new one replaces it, so there is no gap when customers cannot reach you.
• Your content carries over. From an old WordPress site it imports. From Squarespace, part of it exports. From Wix, it is copied across.
• Your search rankings carry over, if every old address is redirected to its new page. This is the one step that protects them. When Boston Showcase moved, all 151 of its old URLs were redirected at launch, so every link and search result still landed on a page.
• Your part is mostly decisions: how the business works, what the site needs to do, and sign-off on the design and the copy.
• After launch, your team edits the words and images, and the layout holds.

Five questions to ask before you hire anyone

1. Will the site and the hosting account be in my name?
2. How will you redirect my old URLs, so I keep my search rankings?
3. Can my team edit the site without being able to break the design?
4. Will the design be made for my business, or a purchased theme with my logo on it?
5. If you are not around in two years, can another developer pick it up?

With a custom WordPress build, every answer should be the one you want.

Where to go from here

If your site has stopped keeping up with your business, whether it is a builder site or a WordPress site that has not been touched in years, a custom WordPress build is where I would take it. I would love to hear about what you are building and see if we are the right fit. Tell me about your project.