Squarespace, Wix or WordPress for a Small Business Website

If you'll edit the site yourself and want the fewest moving parts, Squarespace or Wix is usually the easier fit. If you want full control and someone will keep the software updated, WordPress gives you more room to grow. Any of the three can carry a small business site that Google understands; how it's set up matters more than which logo is on the dashboard.

This comparison is for one kind of owner: the one who logs in on a Sunday night to change holiday hours, add photos from last week's job and fix the typo a customer pointed out. If someone else will do every edit, read the section on leaving anyway, because that part still lands on you.

A note on names: "WordPress" below means the free software from WordPress.org, installed on hosting you pay for. WordPress.com is a hosted service built on the same software, and in day-to-day use it sits closer to the other two.

The comparison at a glance

	Squarespace	Wix	WordPress (self-hosted)
Editing for a non-technical owner	Structured sections, fewer layout choices	Place things freely; check the phone view after changes	Depends on the theme and builder chosen at setup
Who keeps it running	The platform	The platform	You or your web person: updates, backups, hosting
Page titles, descriptions, URLs	Editable per page	Editable per page	Editable per page, usually through an SEO plugin
Speed on phones	Set mostly by your images and add-ons	Set mostly by your images and apps	Anywhere from lean to very heavy
Leaving later	Partial content export; the design stays behind	No full-site export; plan on a rebuild	Files and database move to any host
Costs to list	Plan, domain, paid add-ons	Plan, domain, paid apps	Hosting, domain, paid themes and plugins, upkeep

The rest of this post explains each row and how to test it yourself before you commit.

Editing: try your own five edits

Squarespace keeps you inside a grid of prebuilt sections. That feels limiting if you have a strong picture in your head and helpful if you don't, because the page usually still holds together on a phone after you change it.

Wix lets you drag elements anywhere on the page. The freedom is real, and so is the cost: a layout you arranged by eye on a laptop can need separate fixes in the mobile view. If you pick Wix, make checking the phone version part of every edit, not something you do once a year.

WordPress editing depends on decisions made before you ever log in: the theme, and whether a page-builder plugin sits on top of it. A well-built WordPress site can be the easiest of the three to update, with a plain field for hours and a block for photos. A poorly built one wraps every heading in layers of boxes that only the builder understands, and one wrong drag breaks the layout.

The fair test is your own list. Write down the five edits you'll actually make in a year. For a hypothetical landscaping crew in Mechanicsville, that might be seasonal hours, new project photos, a spring cleanup page, a price change and a new crew photo. Do those five edits on a trial of Squarespace and of Wix (check each one's current trial terms), and ask whoever would build a WordPress site for a test login so you can do the same there. An hour of this tells you more than any review site will.

Speed on phones

All three can produce a page that loads quickly on a phone, and all three can produce one that crawls. The causes are the same on every platform: a hero photo uploaded straight from a camera, a background video, and a pile of add-ons such as chat widgets, review sliders, booking embeds and pop-ups.

On Squarespace and Wix you can't change the code underneath, so your speed controls are the images you upload and the add-ons you switch on. On WordPress you control everything, which also means a site can get far heavier than either builder would let it.

To compare, run a few live sites through Google's PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting: your current site, plus two or three local business sites you know are built on the platform you're considering. Pick sites similar to yours in size and photo count, not the platform's own showcase pages, which are built by people who do this all day.

Control over titles, descriptions and URLs

Each of the three lets you set a custom page title and meta description for every page and change the page's URL. Squarespace and Wix keep these in each page's settings; on WordPress, an SEO plugin usually adds the fields below the editor. Menus move between versions, so check each platform's current help pages for where they sit.

What matters for a local business is what you do with that control:

• One page per service you want to be found for, rather than one page listing everything.
• A page title that names the service and the place, such as "Gutter Cleaning in Mechanicsville" followed by your business name.
• URLs that stay put. Changing a URL later means adding a redirect from the old address to the new one. All three support redirects (Squarespace through URL mappings, Wix through its redirect manager, WordPress through a plugin or your host), but each change is one more thing to keep track of.

None of the platforms writes good titles for you. Out of the box, a title is often just the page name, like "Services" or "Home", plus the site name.

If you work from home, the site also has to say where you work without printing your street address. That's a matter of wording, not platform, and how home-based businesses stay on the map with a hidden address covers what to put on the page instead.

Cost over three years

Platform prices change, and a first-year rate can differ from the renewal, so build your own sheet from the prices each platform shows you today. List these lines for each option:

1. The plan you'd actually need. Some features, such as selling online or certain booking tools, sit on higher tiers.
2. Domain renewal, if you aren't registering the domain elsewhere.
3. Business email, if it isn't included.
4. Paid add-ons or apps: booking, forms, review widgets, extra storage.
5. For WordPress: hosting, any paid theme or plugin licenses (often renewed yearly), and maintenance, whether that's your time or a monthly fee to someone.

Multiply monthly lines by 36 and yearly lines by 3. Then add the line people leave out: your own time. Say you'd spend two extra hours a month wrestling an editor that doesn't suit you, and your hour is worth $50 to you. That's 72 hours and $3,600 over three years, which can outweigh the price gap between two plans.

What happens if you leave

This is the row that bites later, so plan for it now.

Register your domain at a registrar in your own name, with your own login, even if the builder offers to handle it. If you leave the platform, the domain comes with you, along with every listing, business card and link that points to it. It's the same ownership question that sits in one row of the worksheet for comparing SEO proposals, and it's worth asking anyone who builds or runs a site for you.

Content is less portable. Squarespace's export covers some content types and not others. Wix doesn't currently offer a full-site export, so moving off it usually means rebuilding the pages and copying text and photos across by hand. Check both platforms' current help pages before you rely on either. A WordPress site can be moved to another host as files plus a database, with its theme and plugins along for the ride.

Whatever you pick, keep your own copies: original photos in a folder you control, page text in a document, and a list of every page URL. If you ever rebuild, that list is how you set up redirects so the old addresses (the ones Google has indexed and other sites link to) land on the closest new page instead of an error.

Matching the platform to the owner

• You want it to look tidy with little effort and you'll make small, regular edits: Squarespace.
• You want to place things exactly where you like and you'll check the phone view every time: Wix.
• You have someone to maintain it, or you expect many pages, custom features or a specific quoting setup: WordPress.

If you'd rather hand the build to someone else, our Richmond web design page explains how we approach small business sites.

If you already have a site and can't tell whether the platform or the setup is holding it back, send the address through our free SEO snapshot. We'll tell you what we'd fix first on the site you have now, before you think about moving.