The real difference is ownership, not features
Comparison articles list features. The difference that decides whether you regret the choice is who owns the site. On Wix or Squarespace the site exists only on their platform; if you stop paying or want to move, you export some content and start again. On WordPress you own the files and the database and can move them to any host in an afternoon.
For a brochure site that is a price worth paying for simplicity. For a site that carries three years of pages Google has learned to rank, it is the whole business, and “start again” means starting the rankings again too.
Side by side
| Wix | Squarespace | WordPress (self-hosted) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who owns the site | The platform; you licence it | The platform; you licence it | You, outright |
| Can you move it elsewhere? | No; export content and rebuild | No; export content and rebuild | Yes, files and database, any host |
| Build it yourself? | Yes, easiest of the three | Yes, with the best-looking templates | Yes with a theme; a studio for anything bespoke |
| Monthly cost | Subscription, published by Wix; rises with features | Subscription, published by Squarespace | Hosting only; from £50 a month with us including care, or a few pounds on shared hosting |
| Speed | Improved; still carries platform code you cannot remove | Generally good for brochure pages | As fast as it is built; our sites paint in under a second, builder-heavy ones do not |
| SEO basics | Adequate for a local brochure | Adequate for a local brochure | Full control: structure, schema, redirects, feeds |
| E-commerce | Built in, with platform fees | Built in, with platform fees | WooCommerce: no platform fee, unlimited products, more to maintain |
| Maintenance | None; the platform does it | None | Updates, backups, security: yours or your host’s |
| When it goes wrong | Support ticket; you cannot fix it | Support ticket | Anyone can fix it, including a different developer |
Source: Cybrial, from building and migrating sites on all three. Subscription prices are published by the vendors and change; we have not restated them so as not to be wrong by the time you read this.
Is WordPress free?
It is one of the commonest WordPress questions, and the answer is yes with a footnote. The WordPress software is free and open source and always will be. What you pay for is hosting (where it runs), a domain, and either your time or a studio’s to build and look after it. WordPress.com, the hosted service, is a separate thing with its own subscription plans; the free tier there is a builder with adverts, not the WordPress most businesses mean.
On this site the arithmetic is published: a build from £500, then hosting and care from £50 a month, which covers the hosting, the updates, the backups, the monitoring and small changes. Over three years that is around £2,300 for a site you own outright and can take anywhere. A builder subscription with e-commerce over the same period is often comparable, for a site you do not own.
Choose Wix or Squarespace when
- The site is a brochure: who you are, what you do, how to contact you, and it will stay that size.
- You want to build and edit it yourself with no help and no maintenance.
- Design polish matters more than search traffic, and your customers arrive by referral rather than by Google. Squarespace especially.
- Budget is genuinely a few pounds a month and nothing more, for now.
- You are testing an idea and may not still be doing it in a year.
A studio that tells a two-page consultancy to commission a bespoke WordPress build is selling, not advising. Wix is the right answer for that business, and it should hear so.
Choose WordPress when
- Search traffic is how customers will find you. Structure, speed, schema, redirects and feeds are all under your control, and they are what moved a 17,000-product store from 672 to 7,781 organic clicks a month.
- You want to own the site outright and be able to leave any supplier, including us, with the whole thing.
- The site will grow: more services, more locations, a shop, a booking system, an integration with your CRM.
- You sell more than a handful of products. WooCommerce has no platform transaction fee and no product limit; a Rochdale sweet shop runs 1,000 lines on it with a pick-and-mix builder.
- You want any developer to be able to work on it. WordPress runs around two-fifths of the web; there is never a shortage of people who know it.
Moving from a builder to WordPress
It happens in year two or three, when the builder site has started ranking for something and hit a limit. It is a rebuild, not an export, and the pages must be redirected one to one so the rankings move with them. Done properly, we have seen no lasting loss; done carelessly, it is the most common way a growing business loses its search traffic overnight. The migration guide sets out the method.
