Squarespace vs WordPress: an honest comparison for small business owners

Squarespace vs WordPress is less a contest of features than a question of who will look after the website. Squarespace is a website builder: one subscription covers the templates, the hosting, the security and the updates. WordPress is free software that can do almost anything, as long as someone keeps its theme, plugins and updates in order.

My view comes from the calls I get. Every client who has called me in an emergency called because of a WordPress site, and the WordPress clients who came to me wanted to switch because of the learning curve and the plugins. So I move the owners who edit their own site to Squarespace, and I keep the heavier options for businesses that can pay someone to look after them.

Below, I compare the two on editing, security, SEO, cost and control, give my short verdict on Webflow and Wix, and finish with a checklist. If you are still planning the whole project, start with my guide to small business websites.

Squarespace vs WordPress at a glance

The question that decides it: who will edit the site?

Most comparisons line up features. In practice, the platform matters less than the person who will change the opening hours, add a service page or swap a photo next spring. Before anything else, decide who will edit and maintain the site.

• If you will make those changes yourself, choose the tool you can use without fear. Many of my clients do everything themselves, and they should not have to struggle to change a letter only to watch the whole structure fall apart. That is why I give them Squarespace: they make changes whenever they want.
• If you can pay a specialist every month, WordPress is a sound choice. Clients with a big budget keep it and hire someone to handle the site every month. Others with the budget get a custom-built site, and I make the changes monthly or whenever they need one.

I usually discourage solo business owners from WordPress, and from Webflow, for one reason: the learning curve is steep, and without help you end up as your own webmaster. That is a second job nobody asked for.

What Squarespace and WordPress actually are

Squarespace is a hosted website builder. You pay one subscription and get the templates, the editor, the hosting, the SSL certificate, the security updates and the support. You never install anything on it, and you cannot: the platform is closed, which is both its strength and its limit.

WordPress is free, open-source software for building websites. When people say WordPress, they usually mean the version from WordPress.org that you install on hosting you rent, and that is the one compared here. It runs about 42 to 43 per cent of all websites, according to W3Techs, so themes, plugins and developers are easy to find. The software costs nothing; everything around it, from hosting and premium plugins to updates, backups and security, is yours to organise.

Ease of use: changing one word without breaking the page

On Squarespace, you click on a text, type and save. Blocks sit on a grid (the Fluid Engine editor, introduced in July 2022), the template applies the same fonts and colours across the site, and no theme or plugin updates itself behind your back. Of all the website builders I know, it is the easiest.

On WordPress, the editor itself is fine. The trouble is everything around it: a theme, often a page builder on top, then plugins for forms, SEO, caching, backups and security, each with its own settings and its own updates. When two of them clash after an update, the layout breaks, and the owner who only wanted to fix a typo has no idea which piece caused it.

That is why my clients switched. They had tried WordPress, struggled with the learning curve and the plugins, and asked me to move them to a platform they could manage alone. Squarespace still takes some learning, but you learn one tool, not a stack of them.

Security and maintenance: where my emergency calls come from

Pilotech, an HVAC installer near Paris that I have worked with for two years, called me in an emergency when its WordPress site was hacked. The company needed to recover it and get a new website, which I built. We have worked together on the website, SEO and cold emailing ever since.

The numbers explain why WordPress keeps producing these calls. Patchstack, a company that specialises in WordPress security, counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 42 per cent more than in 2024. About 91 per cent of them were in plugins, and 46 per cent had no fix available when they were made public (Patchstack’s 2026 report). The WordPress core is rarely the problem: the risk sits in what you add to it, and in the updates nobody runs.

On Squarespace, the platform, the hosting and the certificates are maintained for you, and there is no layer of third-party plugins to update. Your part is a strong password, two-step verification on the account, and care with any code you inject.

On WordPress, someone has to update the core, the theme and every plugin, keep tested backups and act on security warnings. If that someone is you, book time for it every week: the risk grows with every update you skip. If the damage is already done, follow my checklist for a hacked WordPress site, because the first 24 hours matter most.

SEO: can a Squarespace site rank as well as WordPress?

Yes, when the SEO work is done. First, the limit: Squarespace is closed. You have no access to the source code, so a custom-coded site, a Webflow site or a carefully built WordPress site gives a specialist more room for technical optimisation, and may rank higher for that reason.

But results come from the work, not the platform. For Pilotech, the first site I built was on Squarespace (the later ones are custom-coded), and that Squarespace site ranks first or second on Google. The work was the ordinary kind, done properly: pages created for the searches that matter, content, the Google Business Profile, then technical fixes, with the right keywords and careful metadata. The Pilotech project page shows how its sites fit together.

What each platform gives you for SEO:

• Squarespace: page titles and meta descriptions, editable URLs, an automatic sitemap, SSL on every site and mobile-friendly templates. Since late July 2026, version 7.1 sites can also publish an llms.txt file for AI assistants, off by default. My Squarespace SEO tutorial lists the settings to get right.
• WordPress: almost any control you want through an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO or Rank Math, from structured data to redirects. Also the freedom to slow the site down with ten plugins that each load their own scripts.

On both, the platform is only the container. Keywords, content and links decide where you rank.

What Squarespace and WordPress really cost

Squarespace prices include hosting and are public. At the time of writing (October 2026), UK pricing guides list the plans below, billed annually with VAT included; billed monthly, the same guides give about £16 to £89 a month. In July 2026, Squarespace told US customers by email that their prices would rise by up to 26 per cent, as PetaPixel reported. I found no equivalent announcement for pounds, so check the official pricing page before you subscribe.

If you want custom code, as I usually add for clients, you need Core or above, because code injection is not available on Basic.

WordPress has no price tag, which is why it looks cheaper. Here is what you actually pay for:

1. Hosting, from basic shared plans to managed WordPress hosting.
2. A domain name (true for Squarespace too).
3. Premium themes and plugins, often sold as yearly licences.
4. Backups and security tools, if your host does not include them.
5. Updates and repairs: your own time, or a specialist’s monthly fee.

For a solo owner, the last line is the expensive one. A Squarespace subscription is a known cost. A broken or hacked WordPress site is an unknown one, paid in emergency repairs and in enquiries lost while the site is down.

Control, custom code and owning your site

This is where WordPress wins, and the advantage is real. The software is open source: you can move the site to another host, edit any file, add any feature a plugin or a developer can build, and keep a full copy of everything.

Squarespace is closed by design. You cannot see or edit the source code, there are no plugins in the WordPress sense, and you cannot take the site to another host: if you leave, you rebuild. What you can do, from the Core plan, is add code through code injection, site-wide in the header and footer or on a single page. My Squarespace code injection tutorial shows how to do it without breaking the site.

I usually add some custom code to the Squarespace sites I build. Clients call me for that part, and I keep it to additions that never get in the way of what they edit themselves.

If you need deep integrations with your own software, or a feature no Squarespace block or extension offers, WordPress or a custom-coded site is the better home. For a site that presents your services and brings in enquiries, owning every file rarely changes the result.

What about Webflow and Wix?

Both come up as soon as Squarespace and WordPress are compared, so here is my short verdict on each.

Webflow

Webflow is good, but only if you have a Webflow specialist you can pay, or a lot of time and patience: the learning curve is very steep. It is not really no-code, since you need to understand how code works to use it well, and to my mind it is built for web developers. The fact that there is a Webflow “University” tells you a lot.

If someone can handle every change for you, Webflow is a fine tool. For a simple brochure site, though, it is now easier to build a website with AI and host it on GitHub Pages, Spaceship or elsewhere (GitHub Pages is not meant for a shop).

Wix

I know Wix well: I have tried each of its platforms and even gone to its events. On paper, it is the absolute best. In use, I find it the worst: on different devices, in different homes, on different connections and in different countries, I have always hit the same problem, a laggy editor. It is mostly solo business owners who fall into the trap, because nobody has shown them the alternatives.

There is a big but: I have seen web designers make great things with Wix, and they specialise in it. So if you go with Wix Studio, hire a specialist and never touch the site yourself. The story of Wix’s editors, from ADI to Harmony, has my full verdict.

My verdict: a checklist before you choose

Choose Squarespace if:

• you or your team will edit the site;
• you want hosting, security and updates handled for one monthly price;
• your site presents your services and brings in enquiries;
• there is no budget for monthly maintenance.

Choose WordPress if:

• you have a developer, or a budget for a specialist every month;
• you need a feature or an integration that only a plugin or custom development can provide;
• you want to own every file and choose your host.

Then, before you commit:

1. Write down who will make changes, and how often.
2. List the five changes you expect to make in the first year, and try them during the Squarespace free trial or on a test install of WordPress.
3. Budget for the second year, not only the build: maintenance, renewals and SEO.
4. Plan the SEO basics from day one: keywords, page titles and meta descriptions.

If you are already on WordPress and it has become a second job, my guide to moving from WordPress to Squarespace without losing your Google rankings covers redirects and content, and my Squarespace tutorial walks you through building the new site, step by step.