Wix, Squarespace or WordPress for a small business website.

The short answer

For most small businesses the choice comes down to how much you want to change the layout yourself, which extras you need and whether you might move the site one day.

• Squarespace suits a business that wants a good-looking site quickly and will keep it simple, such as a photographer, a florist or a consultant. Its templates are hard to make ugly, and there is little to look after.
• Wix suits an owner who wants to place things freely on the page and add features from its app market, such as bookings, a members area or a small store, without a developer.
• WordPress suits a business that publishes often, has several people editing, needs a particular plugin or wants a site that any developer can pick up and any host can run.

If you need a few pages, a phone number and a contact form, any of the three will do, and the best one is the one you will keep up to date. If you already pay for a booking tool your customers know, start from that: you may only need a builder that links to it well.

Two kinds of tool

Wix and Squarespace are hosted builders. One company runs the software, the hosting and the security, and you rent the whole thing by plan. You never install or update anything, and you can only do what the platform allows.

WordPress comes in two forms, and comparisons often mix them up:

• WordPress.org is free software that you install on hosting you choose and pay for. You, or someone you hire, look after updates, backups and security. In return you can install any plugin and move the site to any host.
• WordPress.com is a hosted service built on the same software and sold by plan, like Wix and Squarespace. Its support pages say plugins can be installed on every paid plan but not on the free one, and it blocks some plugins, such as caching and security plugins, because it runs its own.

So when someone says WordPress takes more work, they mean WordPress.org. When they say WordPress can do anything, they also mean WordPress.org, with plugins. Check which one a review is talking about before you trust it.

Price the second year, not the first

The figure on each pricing page is the plan. A business site has more bills than that, and some first-year extras stop at renewal. Wix and Squarespace both include a free domain for the first year with most yearly plans, and from the second year you pay for it.

Write down every bill with its renewal date, then compare the totals for the second year:

• The plan, paid monthly or yearly. Yearly costs less per month and is paid upfront.
• The domain, once the free first year ends.
• Email on your domain, such as Google Workspace. Squarespace's pricing page includes one account free for the first year on its plans above the lowest. After that it is a bill of its own, as on any platform.
• Booking software. Wix includes scheduling on its plans that take payments. Squarespace's scheduling is Acuity, which has plans of its own. On WordPress it is a plugin licence or a booking tool you embed.
• Apps, extensions and plugins from other companies, each with its own monthly or yearly fee.
• Fees on sales. Squarespace's lowest plan adds a transaction fee on store sales and its higher plans do not. The payment provider charges its own fee on every card payment, whichever platform you use.
• For WordPress.org: hosting, premium theme and plugin licences, backups, and the hours of whoever runs the updates.

Take a two-chair barbershop that wants customers to pick a barber and a time and pay a deposit. On Wix, the year-two list is a plan that includes scheduling, the domain and card fees. On Squarespace, it is the website plan, an Acuity plan with enough calendars for two barbers, the domain and card fees. On WordPress.org, it is hosting, the domain, a booking plugin or tool, card fees and someone's time. Only once the lists are complete does comparing the totals mean anything.

If you are weighing a builder against paying a studio, what decides the price of a website lists the work a quote should cover.

Bookings

Booking is where the three differ most, so decide how customers will book before you choose.

Wix has its own scheduling for services, classes and staff, listed on its plans that accept payments. Bookings, payments and customer records sit in one dashboard. The catch is that your bookings live inside Wix as well, so leaving Wix means moving them too.

Squarespace sells scheduling through Acuity, a company it owns. Acuity's plans differ by how many calendars you get, and its own plan page lists text reminders from the middle plan and access for other software on the top one. Acuity also works without a Squarespace site, with a booking page of its own.

WordPress has booking plugins, or you embed a booking tool's widget or link to its booking page. A plugin keeps everything on your site and adds one more thing to update. A booking tool you link to works the same on any builder, so you can change builder later without changing how customers book.

If your customers already book through a tool they know, such as Fresha for a salon or Square Appointments, keep it and give the site a clear button. Our booking software comparison covers what to check in the tool itself: deposits, text reminders, staff calendars and whether other software can connect to it.

Forms, and where each enquiry goes

A contact form is only useful if every message reaches someone. Each platform handles forms differently, and each has its own way of failing quietly.

On Wix, your plan sets how many forms you can have, how many fields each one holds and whether a form can take payments or file uploads. Wix's developer documentation says that after a move to a lower plan, a form over the new limit is switched off and stops taking submissions until it fits again. If you downgrade, test every form that day.

On Squarespace, each form sends its submissions where you choose: an email address, a Google Drive spreadsheet, Mailchimp, Zapier or Squarespace's own contact list. You can pick more than one, so pick two, such as email and the spreadsheet, and a lost email still leaves a record.

On WordPress, forms come from a plugin. By default WordPress sends its emails through the web server, and those often land in spam. Most sites add a plugin that sends through a proper email service instead.

Whatever you choose, send a test enquiry from a phone after every plan change, theme change or plugin update, and once a month anyway. A broken form shows nobody an error. The enquiries just stop.

Editing, and who can change what

Wix lets you drag any element anywhere on the page. That freedom is why people like it, and it is also how a page that looks right on a laptop ends up with overlapping text on a phone. Check the mobile view after every change.

Squarespace builds pages from sections and blocks on a fixed grid. That makes it harder to break and harder to do anything its templates did not plan for. Its lowest plan allows two contributors, and its higher plans allow as many as you need. Wix also limits how many people you can invite by plan.

WordPress has editing roles built in. An editor can publish and manage everyone's posts, an author only their own, and a contributor can write but not publish, so a manager approves what the team drafts. That suits a law firm or a clinic where several people write and one person signs off.

Whichever you choose, give each person their own login. With a shared password nobody knows who changed the prices, and you cannot remove someone who leaves without locking everyone else out.

What you can take with you when you leave

Ask this before you build, because this is where the three differ most after bookings.

• Wix: its help centre says a Wix site must be hosted on Wix's servers and cannot be exported to another host. You can transfer the domain out and export contacts and store products as spreadsheet files. The pages have to be rebuilt elsewhere.
• Squarespace: it exports a file in WordPress's format with your basic pages, one blog with its posts, and text and image blocks. Store pages, product blocks, style settings and several page types are left out, so a move still means rebuilding the design and the store.
• WordPress.org: the whole site, its files and its database, moves to any host that runs WordPress. Nothing has to be rebuilt.
• WordPress.com: its export file holds posts, pages and comments, with media copied separately. Its support pages say the theme, customisations and plugins are not in that file, and that its Business and Commerce plans can download a full backup.

Whichever you choose, register the domain in the business's name, on an account you control. The domain is the one thing every platform lets you take with you, and your email address and every link to your site depend on it.

A rebuild is no disaster for a small site: the text and photos of ten pages can be copied across by hand. It hurts more for a site with a store, a large blog or years of pages that bring visitors from search, where every old address needs a redirect to its new page. A website redesign plans those redirects before anything moves.

Search and speed

All three let you write each page's title and description, make a sitemap for you and connect Google Search Console. None of them ranks a page by itself. Rankings come from what the page says and how well it answers the search, and that work is the same on every platform.

WordPress gives the most control through plugins, which matters more on a large site with hundreds of pages than on a ten-page business site.

Speed depends more on what you add than on the builder. Full-size photos, a video at the top, a chat widget, a booking widget and a handful of apps each slow a page down. On WordPress, every plugin and a heavy theme add weight. On Wix and Squarespace, apps and embedded widgets do the same.

Test your main pages in Google's PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting, and remove what you do not need before you blame the platform.

Who looks after it

Wix and Squarespace look after the software, the hosting and the security. Your job is the content: prices, opening hours, photos and the team page.

With WordPress.org, someone also looks after the site itself. WordPress installs its own minor and security releases automatically on most sites, but plugins and themes update by themselves only if you switch that on. An update now and then breaks a page, so whoever runs them should check the site afterwards, and backups should run without anyone remembering to start them.

Each plugin is one more piece of software from one more developer. Before you install one, check when it was last updated and whether its developer still answers questions on its support page. A plugin nobody maintains is a weak point in the site.

If nobody in the business wants that job, budget for someone to do it, or choose WordPress.com or a host that runs updates and backups for you. Website maintenance, line by line shows what that work covers.

Five businesses, five choices

• A wedding photographer with a portfolio, a contact form and a blog of recent weddings: Squarespace. The templates show photos well and there is little to maintain.
• A two-chair barbershop that wants customers to choose a barber, pick a time and pay a deposit: Wix with its scheduling, or any builder plus a booking tool. The second keeps the bookings safe if the site changes later.
• A law firm where five people write articles and a partner approves them: WordPress.org for its roles, on a host that runs backups, with one named person in charge of updates.
• A cafe with a menu, opening hours and a map: whichever the owner finds easiest. Put the menu on the page as text rather than a PDF, so it reads well on a phone.
• A cleaning company that plans quote forms, a chatbot and a link to its customer records: WordPress.org or a custom site, because each connection needs code that a hosted builder may not allow. WordPress or a custom website covers that choice.

Mistakes to avoid

• Comparing first-year prices. The discounts and the free domain end, and the second year is the real price.
• Building on a free plan, then finding that your own domain, more forms or extra code need a paid one. Wix needs a paid plan to connect your domain, and Squarespace's code injection, which most tracking and chat tools need, starts above its lowest plan.
• Letting a freelancer register the domain in their own name, or build the site on their own account. If that has already happened, get your website back sets out the order to recover it.
• Adding an app or plugin for every small idea. Each one is a bill, a slower page or one more thing to update.
• Choosing Wix for a site you already know a developer will take over, who will then have to work inside Wix or rebuild it.
• Leaving the template's demo text, stock photos and sample pages in place.
• Testing the contact form once at launch and never again.

When a builder stops being enough

A builder is the right answer for many small businesses, and you can set one up and run it yourself without paying anyone. It stops being enough when the site has to work with your other tools: requests written into your booking software, enquiries copied into your customer records, or a booking chatbot that takes requests after closing time. It also stops being enough when you would rather pay someone than spend your evenings on it.

If that is where you are, a studio can build on whichever platform fits the job or in its own code. GGSites recommends a platform after the free consultation and explains why, and the domain, hosting and accounts are set up in your name or handed over at launch. See websites for how a build runs and prices for where ours start.