WordPress vs Squarespace vs Wix: Which Is Right for Your Business?

WordPress, Squarespace or Wix? Three perfectly respectable options, all promising to make your website dreams come true. Helpful, isn’t it?

The trouble is, what’s wonderful for one business might be a right old headache for another. Some platforms make getting online wonderfully simple, while others give you more room to create something tailored to your business.

Throw budget, functionality and future plans into the mix, and there’s rather a lot to think about. So, let’s get stuck into the differences and work out which one might suit you best.

Squarespace: Lovely out of the box

Squarespace knows how to make a good first impression.

Beautiful templates, polished layouts and enough built-in features to get a professional-looking website up and running without too much fuss.

Squarespace has made a name for itself by making good-looking websites relatively easy to create and manage. And fair play to it, because that’s exactly what plenty of businesses need.

You can publish content, manage products, take bookings and look after the essentials of SEO without needing to know your way around a line of code. But there’s only so much freedom within a platform designed to keep things simple.

As requirements become more specialised, you might find the available tools don’t quite stretch to what you’ve got in mind.

Wix: Plenty of freedom, very little fuss

One of Wix’s biggest selling points is how much you can do yourself. Move things around, experiment with designs, add new functionality and generally have a good play without needing a developer hovering over your shoulder.

Its SEO capabilities are considerably more sophisticated than they used to be, too, so the idea that Wix can’t support a decent search strategy is rather outdated.

Where we’d be a little more cautious is with the long-term picture.

But a platform that makes adding things easy doesn’t necessarily make deciding what you actually need any easier. It’s quite possible to end up with a website that’s collected more extras than it knows what to do with.

And if you eventually want to move platforms, you’ll generally need to rebuild rather than simply take the existing site along for the ride.

WordPress: A little more room to make it your own

Now, it probably won’t come as much of a surprise that we’re rather fond of WordPress at Giant Peach.

It’s open-source, wonderfully flexible and gives us the freedom to build websites around what a business actually needs, rather than what a template happens to allow.

That might mean clever integrations, more complex content or a design that feels unmistakably yours. And when it’s built properly, your team can get on with updating pages and publishing content without needing a developer on speed dial.

Of course, all that flexibility comes with a little responsibility. Hosting, security, updates and maintenance need looking after, and a badly built WordPress site can cause more headaches than it solves.

But get those foundations right, and you’ve got a platform with an awful lot going for it. We’ve explored the benefits, drawbacks and finer details in our guide to why businesses choose WordPress.

WordPress vs Squarespace vs Wix: How do they compare?

Here’s a quick look at how the three platforms stack up.

Consideration	Squarespace	Wix	WordPress
Getting started	Straightforward	Straightforward	More setup involved
Design flexibility	Attractive templates with customisation options	Flexible drag-and-drop editor	Extensive freedom with custom development
SEO capabilities	Good built-in SEO tools	Good built-in and advanced SEO tools	Highly configurable with plugins and custom development
Custom functionality	Depends on built-in features and integrations	Wide range of apps and platform tools	Extensive plugin and bespoke development options
Hosting and maintenance	Hosting and core maintenance managed for you	Hosting and core maintenance managed for you	Requires hosting, updates and ongoing maintenance
Pricing model	Monthly or annual subscription plans	Monthly or annual subscription plans	Free software, but hosting, development and maintenance cost extra
Moving platforms	Some content can be exported, with limitations	Usually requires rebuilding the website	Can move between hosts, although migration complexity varies
Best suited to	Design-led businesses with relatively straightforward requirements	Businesses wanting hands-on control over design and editing	Businesses needing bespoke functionality, integrations and greater control

Of course, a comparison table can only tell you so much.

A brilliantly built Wix website could run rings around a WordPress site that’s been thrown together without much thought. And there’s little point paying for all the bells and whistles if your business only needs a perfectly good bell.

So, how do you work out which platform deserves your attention?

Which website platform should you choose?

If you’re after a good-looking website without too many complications, Squarespace could be just the ticket.

Prefer to roll up your sleeves and get involved with the design yourself? Wix has plenty going for it.

But if your website needs to connect with your CRM, manage a substantial collection of content or support customer journeys that don’t quite fit the usual mould, WordPress is well worth a look.

It gives you the freedom to build around how your business actually works.

The important thing is thinking beyond what you need today. After all, nobody wants to spend good money on a lovely new website only to find themselves back at the drawing board a year later.

Let’s find the right fit for your business

We’ve been around the CMS block a few times at Giant Peach.

We’ve tried plenty of platforms, fallen in love with a few and even built some of our own along the way.

These days, WordPress and Shopify are our firm favourites, but we’re not about to start recommending technology before we’ve even heard what your business needs.

We’d much rather get to know you, understand what you’re trying to achieve and work out the best way to get there.

After all, there’s no prize for having the cleverest website in the world if it’s not doing what you need it to.

Fancy a chat about your website?