Wix Vs Squarespace Vs WordPress: Which Is Right for a UK Small Business?

Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress is one of the most searched questions in UK small business, and it is also one of the worst served. Look at the results Google returns for it today: the top organic result is a Reddit thread, and almost every page underneath it belongs to a site that earns a commission when you sign up. People go to Reddit because they have worked out that the reviews are sponsored.

So here is our position before you read a word further. Proxima earns nothing from Wix, Squarespace or WordPress. No affiliate links, no referral fees, no partnership. We build bespoke websites for a living, which means the honest answer to this question sometimes costs us work, and we would rather tell you the truth than sell you a build you do not need. This guide is about brochure-style websites for UK service businesses, the professional practices, clinics and trades we work with, rather than online shops.

Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress: the short answer

If you want the decision without the detail:

• Choose Squarespace if design matters most, you want the fewest ways to make a mess, and you would rather pay a little more than fiddle. It is the best default for a service business building its own first site.
• Choose Wix if you want maximum flexibility for the money and do not mind tinkering. It has a genuinely free tier for testing an idea, and more features per pound.
• Choose WordPress if you intend to own the thing, keep it for years and grow it. It is the only one of the three you can pick up and move, but it asks the most from you or from whoever maintains it.

The real decision, though, is not about templates or features, which are closer than the comparison sites pretend. It comes down to two things almost nobody weighs properly: what you actually pay over five years, and whether you can ever leave. Both are covered below.

Wix vs Squarespace pricing: what you actually pay in the UK

All figures below are UK prices at the time of writing in July 2026, on annual billing, and both platforms change them regularly, so treat these as the shape of the cost rather than a quote.

Wix runs from Light at around £9 per month, to Core at £16, Business at £25, and Business Elite at £119. Wix also has a genuinely free tier, which is useful for testing, though it carries Wix's own adverts and puts your site on a wixsite.com address rather than your own domain. Pay monthly instead of annually and it costs more (Light rises to roughly £11.50).

Squarespace runs from Basic at around £12 per month, to Core at £17, Plus at £29, and up to about £79 at the top. UK prices include VAT. There is no free tier, only a 14-day trial, and monthly billing again costs more (Core is around £24 billed monthly rather than £17 annually).

WordPress is where the honest maths gets interesting, because the software itself is free and that free is doing a lot of heavy lifting in most articles. What you actually pay is:

• A domain, roughly £10 to £30 per year
• Hosting, roughly £3 to £10 per month for shared hosting, or £20 to £50 per month for managed WordPress hosting
• A premium theme, typically £30 to £70 as a one-off, if you use one
• Plugins, which is where it bites: a properly maintained small business site can run £250 to £500 per year in licences

Two things worth saying plainly. First, watch the renewal trap: introductory hosting and domain prices frequently double or triple at renewal, so the first year is never the real number. Second, a builder at £16 per month is about £192 a year, every year, forever, and that rent buys you no equity in the thing you are renting. Which brings us to the part that actually matters.

Wix vs Squarespace: which is easier to live with day to day?

On the surface these are close, and anyone telling you one is dramatically better is usually being paid to. The difference is philosophical.

Wix gives you freedom. It is genuinely drag and drop: you can put any element anywhere. That is liberating for about an hour, and then it becomes the problem, because nothing stops you making something that looks wrong. Spacing drifts, the mobile layout needs its own attention, and the result often looks like a website built by someone who was allowed to do anything. Wix also now runs two editors, the classic Wix Editor and the newer Wix Studio, which is where its development effort is going. That split confuses a lot of people choosing today.

Squarespace takes freedom away, on purpose. Templates are constrained, and the constraints are the feature. You cannot easily make a Squarespace site ugly, which for a busy business owner with no design training is worth more than any feature list. The trade is that when you want something the template does not do, you are stuck, or you are in custom CSS, which is not what you signed up for.

WordPress asks the most. It is not really comparable on ease, because you are not just designing, you are also responsible for updates, security, backups and the slow accumulation of plugins. That is fine with someone maintaining it, and a genuine liability without.

For a non-technical owner building their own site this weekend, Squarespace gives you fewer ways to go wrong. That is the honest answer.

Wix vs Squarespace SEO: can you actually rank on a website builder?

Yes. Let us kill this myth, because it costs people money.

"You cannot rank on Wix" was a fair criticism a decade ago and it is now mostly repeated by people selling something else. Both Wix and Squarespace let you set page titles and meta descriptions, edit image alt text, manage redirects, and produce reasonable technical output. For a local service business, the platform is almost never the thing holding you back.

What actually decides whether you rank locally is unglamorous and platform-agnostic: real pages for each service and area you serve, a complete and verified Google Business Profile, a steady flow of genuine reviews, and content that answers what people actually search. A tidy Squarespace site doing those things will beat a neglected WordPress site every time.

Where builders genuinely lag is at the sharper end: fine control over page speed and Core Web Vitals, precise page structure, and structured data. A well-built WordPress or custom site wins there, but only if it is built well. A bloated WordPress install carrying thirty plugins is slower than a clean Squarespace site, and Google notices. The platform sets your ceiling, not your floor.

Wix vs WordPress: the ownership problem nobody warns you about

This is the part the affiliate reviews leave out, and it is the single most important thing on this page.

You cannot take a Wix site with you. That is not our opinion, it is Wix's. Their own help centre states that "your site must run on Wix's servers" and explains that "the reason you can't use another host for your Wix site is that the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting since it uses Wix's proprietary technology and relies on Wix's services to operate". Your content belongs to you, and Wix is clear about that. The site does not travel. You can move a domain you bought through them, but the website itself cannot be exported and rehosted. If you outgrow Wix in four years, you do not migrate. You rebuild from nothing.

Squarespace is better, but less than it sounds. It offers an XML export, which sounds like portability until you read what is in it. The export covers your pages, a single blog, and text and image blocks. It does not include your design or CSS, and it does not contain your actual image files, only links pointing back to Squarespace's servers. Store, album, events, index, cover and portfolio pages are excluded, as is custom code, and if you run more than one blog, only one comes with you. It is a content export, not a site export. You will still be rebuilding, just with your words already typed.

WordPress is portable by design. It is self-hosted, you hold the files and the database, and you can move the whole thing to a different host in an afternoon. That portability is the entire reason it powers around 41.5% of all websites on the internet, and roughly 60% of every site running a known content management system. It is not more popular because it is easier. It is more popular because it is yours.

Here is why this matters more than any template count. You are not choosing a tool for this year. You are choosing how expensive your next website will be. Every year you spend on a closed platform is another year of design decisions, page structure and content that will have to be rebuilt by hand when you leave. For a business that intends to still be trading in ten years, that is a real cost, and it is invisible on the day you sign up.

What is the downside of Wix? And what is the downside of Squarespace?

The two questions people most often ask Google about this decision, answered straight.

The downside of Wix is the lock-in described above, first and foremost. Beyond that: the free tier puts Wix's adverts on your site and a wixsite.com address in front of your business name, which undercuts the credibility you were trying to build. The interface pushes upsells at you constantly. And the freedom that makes it powerful is the same freedom that lets a non-designer build something that quietly costs them enquiries.

The downside of Squarespace is the ceiling. The constraints that keep it looking good also mean that the day you want something specific, the answer is often no, or custom code. There is no free tier if you want to test properly. The export is content only. And you are paying a premium, particularly on monthly billing, for design guardrails you may eventually resent.

The downside they share is more fundamental: you are renting, forever, and the rent only goes one way.

Best website builder for a small business: a straight decision guide

Rather than a feature table, here is what we would actually tell someone who rang us and asked.

• Testing an idea, no budget, needs something up this week. Use Wix's free tier or Squarespace's trial. Genuinely. Do not spend money on a website for a business that does not have customers yet. Come back when it works.
• A new sole trader who needs to look credible and will barely touch the site again. Squarespace, on the cheapest plan that gets your own domain. Spend your effort on your Google Business Profile and getting reviews, which will do more for you than the website will.
• An established service business where the website is bringing in real enquiries. This is the point where DIY starts costing more than it saves, covered in the next section.
• A regulated or trust-heavy business. Solicitors, accountants and private clinics carry requirements a template was never designed for, whether that is SRA transparency rules on a law firm site, Making Tax Digital content for an accountancy practice, or CQC signalling and advertising rules for a private GP practice. The platform matters less than the fact that someone has thought about the compliance and the local search, which a builder will not do for you.
• A trade business living or dying on local search. The site needs to load fast on a phone and rank for your town. A builder can do this. Most tradespeople's builder sites do not, because nobody set them up properly. See what actually wins jobs for tradesmen.

When a website builder stops paying for itself

DIY is never free. It is paid for in your time, and that is the calculation almost nobody runs.

If your work is worth £60 an hour and you spend thirty hours fighting a template, that site cost you £1,800 in billable time, plus the subscription, plus whatever the enquiries you did not get were worth. That is real money, spent quietly, on evenings you will not get back.

The signals that a builder has stopped paying for itself are consistent:

• The site gets visitors but almost no enquiries, so the problem is not traffic, it is what happens after the click.
• You have hit the template's ceiling and are working around it rather than with it.
• You cannot rank for the searches that matter, because the site has no real service pages and nobody set up the fundamentals.
• You are spending evenings on it, and you are not a designer.
• The website has quietly become a business asset rather than an experiment, and it is being maintained like a hobby.

When two or three of those are true, a proper build stops being an expense and starts being a return. At Proxima, the Presence package for smaller businesses starts from £1,800 (current intro pricing, against a list price of £2,250), and the Authority package, the usual fit for a business with several services and real local competition, is from £3,960. What each includes sits on the Pricing section.

And if none of those are true yet? Stay on Squarespace. We mean that. You will know when it stops working, and we would rather you came to us then than spent money you should be putting into your business today.

Frequently asked questions about Wix, Squarespace and WordPress

Is it better to use Wix or Squarespace?

For most UK service businesses building their own site, Squarespace. Its constraints make it much harder to produce something that looks amateur, which is the main risk when a non-designer builds a business website. Wix gives more flexibility and more features per pound, and has a free tier for testing, but it also gives you more ways to get it wrong, and you can never move the finished site off Wix.

What is the downside of Wix?

The biggest one is that you cannot export a Wix site to another host. Wix's own help centre confirms the site has to run on their servers because of their proprietary technology, so leaving means rebuilding from scratch. The free plan also displays Wix adverts and a wixsite.com address, and the drag-and-drop freedom makes design mistakes easy.

What is the downside to Squarespace?

Flexibility. The template constraints that keep Squarespace sites looking good also stop you the moment you want something they did not plan for. There is no free plan, monthly billing carries a premium, and the XML export only takes your pages, one blog, and text and image blocks, without your design, your image files or several page types.

Wix vs Squarespace: which is cheaper in the UK?

Wix starts lower, at around £9 per month on annual billing against Squarespace's £12, and Wix has a free tier Squarespace does not offer. Across the mid plans they are close, roughly £16 against £17 per month at the time of writing. Both cost noticeably more if you pay monthly rather than annually, and both raise prices periodically, so check current rates before committing.

Can I move my Wix site to another host?

No. You can transfer a domain you registered through Wix, but the site itself cannot be exported and hosted elsewhere, because it depends on Wix's proprietary platform. Moving away means rebuilding the website, which is worth knowing before you invest years of content into it.

Is WordPress better than Wix or Squarespace for SEO?

At the top end, yes, because it gives full control over speed, page structure and structured data. In practice, for a local business, the platform is rarely the limiting factor: real service pages, a complete Google Business Profile, reviews and useful content decide local rankings. A well-kept Squarespace site will outrank a neglected WordPress one comfortably.

Do I actually need a web designer, or can I just use a builder?

If you are starting out and testing an idea, use a builder. It is the right call and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. Bring in a designer when the website has become a real source of enquiries, when you have hit the template's limits, or when your sector carries compliance and local search demands a template cannot handle.

Not sure which way to go? Ask us and we will tell you straight

If you are weighing up Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress for a UK business and you want a second opinion from someone with no commission at stake, book a free 30-minute discovery call. If the answer is that you should build it yourself on Squarespace and spend your money elsewhere this year, that is what we will tell you.

Book your free discovery call, or read the Presence, Authority and Dominance packages if you have already reached the point where a builder is holding you back.