Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress: Which Should You Choose?
An honest comparison from a WordPress agency that has talked plenty of people out of WordPress. Real Australian pricing, three year costs, what you can take with you, and a recommendation for each type of business.
Choose Squarespace if design matters most and you are building it yourself. Choose Wix if you need bookings, quotes or a small shop live within a fortnight with no technical help. Choose WordPress if the site is a lead generating asset you plan to grow for years. Running costs sit near $300 to $700 a year on Wix or Squarespace, against $700 to $2,500 a year to run WordPress properly.
We build on WordPress. Read the rest knowing that. Also know we have talked plenty of enquiries out of a WordPress build because Squarespace was genuinely the better answer for them, and a platform that suits the business always beats a platform that suits the agency.
What is the actual difference between Wix, Squarespace and WordPress?
Wix and Squarespace are closed systems. You rent software, hosting, security and updates as one bundle, and you build inside the boundaries they set. WordPress is open source software installed on hosting you choose, so nobody sets boundaries and nobody does the maintenance unless you arrange it.
That one structural difference explains nearly every trade off below. A closed platform gives you fewer decisions and fewer things that can break. Open software gives you control, then hands you the responsibility that comes with it. Neither is morally superior. They suit different businesses at different stages.
| Comparison | Wix | Squarespace | WordPress (self hosted) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical monthly cost, AUD | $17 to $59 by plan | $25 to $85 by plan | Software free, hosting $15 to $60, plus licences |
| Ease of use, non technical owner | Best of the three, drag anything anywhere | Very good, more structured and harder to make ugly | Steepest, fine once set up well, painful when it is not |
| Design control | High freedom, lower ceiling on polish | Less freedom, best looking result straight out of the box | No ceiling, quality depends entirely on who builds it |
| SEO capability | Sound basics, limited technical depth | Sound basics, limited technical depth | Full control down to server and redirect level |
| Ecommerce | Workable to a few hundred products | Strong for small image led catalogues | WooCommerce handles complex pricing, B2B and large catalogues |
| Ownership and portability | You rent it, the site cannot be exported | You rent it, partial export only | You own the files and the database, move host any time |
| Who maintains it | Wix | Squarespace | You, or whoever you pay to |
| If you leave | Rebuild from scratch | Blog posts and basic pages transfer, design does not | Take the lot, keep your URLs |
What does each platform actually cost in Australia?
Wix business plans run roughly $17 to $59 a month in Australian dollars on annual billing. Squarespace sits roughly $25 to $85 a month depending on whether you need a shop. WordPress software costs nothing, but quality Australian hosting runs $15 to $60 a month, a premium builder or theme licence adds $100 to $250 a year, and someone has to keep it updated.
Both platform prices move around, so check before you commit. The bigger variable is the build. A DIY Wix or Squarespace site costs you nothing but 30 to 60 hours of evenings and weekends. A designer built Squarespace site usually lands between $2,000 and $5,000 excluding GST. A properly scoped WordPress build for an Australian small business typically runs $4,000 to $9,000 excluding GST, more for anything with memberships, integrations or a real catalogue behind it. If you want to see what sits inside that number, our WordPress web design service page breaks the scope down.
The line most people forget is maintenance. WordPress core, plugins and PHP versions all need updating, and an unmaintained WordPress site is the single most common way small Australian businesses get hacked. Budget $50 to $150 a month for that, or accept the risk knowingly. On Wix and Squarespace, that work is already in the subscription. That is a real advantage and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Rule of thumb: if nobody in your business will own the website after launch, and there is no budget for someone else to own it, a neglected WordPress site will serve you worse than a tidy Squarespace one. Choose the platform your business can actually look after.
Which platform suits which kind of Australian business?
Squarespace suits businesses where the visual impression closes the sale. Wix suits businesses that need functionality fast and cheap. WordPress suits businesses where the website has to do commercial work over years, especially organic search.
Concrete versions of that:
- A Newtown photographer, a wedding celebrant, a yoga studio, a small architecture practice. Squarespace. The templates are better looking than most mid tier custom builds, the built in scheduling handles bookings, and the whole thing can be live in a week for the price of a decent camera bag.
- A sole trader mobile mechanic or a startup consultant who needs a professional presence this month and has no budget for a build. Wix. The editor is the friendliest of the three, the AI setup gets you to a rough draft quickly, and one bill covers everything.
- A Sydney plumber, electrician or roofer competing for suburb by suburb search traffic against ten other trades with the same offer. WordPress. You will want dozens of service and location pages, tight internal linking, fast templates and full control over redirects. That is grinding work and WordPress is built for it.
- An accounting firm, a law practice, a mortgage broker or a medical clinic with multiple locations, compliance requirements and an ongoing content program. WordPress. Custom post types, staff and location structures, gated resources and integrations with practice software are all straightforward here and awkward or impossible on the closed platforms.
Retail is its own conversation. If products are the whole business, Shopify usually beats all three, and we will say so rather than push a WooCommerce build you do not need. WooCommerce earns its place when pricing is complicated, when you sell to trade and retail at different rates, or when content and commerce need to live in the same system.
What does three years really cost?
Over three years a DIY Wix or Squarespace site costs roughly $900 to $2,000. A designer built Squarespace site lands near $3,600 to $7,800. A professionally built and maintained WordPress site runs $5,150 to $18,100. Figures below exclude GST and assume a ten page business site.
| Three year cost, ten page business site | Wix or Squarespace, DIY | Squarespace, designer built | WordPress, agency built |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initial build | $0 | $2,000 to $5,000 | $4,000 to $9,000 |
| Platform or hosting, 36 months | $900 to $1,300 | $1,300 to $1,900 | $700 to $2,200 |
| Apps, licences and add ons | $0 to $700 | $300 to $900 | $450 to $1,500 |
| Maintenance and updates | Included | Included | $0 if you do it, up to $5,400 if we do |
| Your own time | 30 to 60 hours | 5 to 10 hours | 2 to 5 hours |
| Realistic three year total | $900 to $2,000 | $3,600 to $7,800 | $5,150 to $18,100 |
Look at the time row before you look at the money row. Sixty hours of your own labour is not free, and for a tradie billing $110 an hour it is the most expensive line in the table by a distance. It is also the row that decides whether the site ever actually gets finished. We have lost count of the half built Wix sites sitting on a subdomain because the owner ran out of Sunday nights.
The other thing the table hides is that WordPress costs stay flat as the site grows while platform costs step up. Adding two hundred pages to WordPress changes nothing on the invoice. Adding memberships, a second currency and advanced ecommerce to Squarespace pushes you to the top plan and then into apps.
What can you actually take with you if you leave?
From WordPress you take everything: files, database, theme, plugins, images and URL structure, moved to any host in an afternoon. From Squarespace you get a partial XML export that carries blog posts and basic pages but not your design, shop pages, galleries or custom code. From Wix you take your domain, your contacts and whatever text and images you copy out by hand. The site itself cannot leave.
This matters more than most people think at signup and exactly as much as they feared three years later. A rebuild is not just design cost. It is re-planning the URL structure, redirecting old pages, rewriting content that was locked in a proprietary editor and hoping the search rankings you built survive the move. Budget several thousand dollars and a nervous month.
It also shapes your negotiating position. If your site lives somewhere you can export, you can change agency, change host or bring it in house without asking permission. We build that way deliberately and we do not use lock-in contracts, because a client who stays by choice is worth more than one who stays because leaving is too hard.
Is WordPress genuinely better for SEO?
For a ten page local business site, no. Wix and Squarespace both handle title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, clean URLs, sitemaps, redirects and mobile rendering perfectly well, and we have watched Squarespace sites outrank WordPress sites in Sydney service categories without it being close. Content and links decide those fights, not the platform.
WordPress pulls ahead once the site gets complicated. The gaps that show up on closed platforms are real but specific:
- Wix locks blog posts under a fixed URL pattern you cannot restructure, which becomes a headache during a migration.
- Custom structured data beyond the built in types is possible on both through code injection, but it is fiddly and easy to break on a template update.
- Neither gives you server level control, so no edge caching rules, no log file analysis, no fine grained crawl management.
- Bulk work is slow. Rewriting four hundred title tags or mapping several hundred redirects during a replatform is an afternoon in WordPress and a genuinely miserable week elsewhere.
Be fair about the other direction too. A WordPress site running six page builder plugins, an unoptimised slider and 4MB hero images will lose to a default Squarespace template on page speed every day of the week. WordPress gives you the ceiling. It does not give you the floor. If search traffic is the whole point of the project, the build quality matters more than the logo on the login screen, which is what our approach to building sites for search is set up around.
One caution worth stating plainly: nobody can guarantee rankings on any platform, and under Australian consumer law anyone promising a number one position is making a claim they cannot support. Treat that as a signal to walk away.
So which one should you choose?
Choose Wix if
You are a sole trader or new business, the budget is under about $1,500, you will build it yourself, and you need practical functions like online bookings, quote forms or a handful of products without learning anything technical. Wix is the most forgiving editor on the market and there is no shame in using it. Plenty of profitable Australian businesses run on one.
Choose Squarespace if
Your work is visual and the site is a portfolio as much as a sales tool, or you simply want the best looking result for the least effort. Photographers, studios, cafes, celebrants, creative consultants and personal brands are consistently better served here than by a budget WordPress build. If your alternative is a $2,500 WordPress site from a one person shop that vanishes in eighteen months, take Squarespace.
Choose WordPress if
The website is expected to generate leads through search over several years, you publish content regularly, you need integrations with booking, CRM or practice management systems, or you have more than about twenty five pages. Also choose it if ownership matters to you commercially, which it should if the site is a genuine business asset rather than an online brochure. Compare it against the other guides in our websites knowledge centre before you commit either way.
The wrong question is which platform is best. The right question is which platform your business can maintain, afford and grow into over the next three years. Answer that honestly and the choice usually makes itself.
Common questions
Can I move my Squarespace site to WordPress later?
Partly. Squarespace exports an XML file that brings blog posts and simple pages into WordPress, but product pages, galleries, index pages, custom CSS and the design itself do not come across. In practice a Squarespace to WordPress move is a rebuild with the text salvaged. Budget for a full build plus a redirect map so the pages you already rank for keep their equity.
Does Google penalise Wix or Squarespace sites?
No. That myth dates back to about 2013 when Wix sites were built in Flash and were genuinely hard to crawl. Both platforms now produce crawlable, indexable, mobile friendly pages. Google has said repeatedly that platform choice is not a ranking factor. If a Wix site is not ranking, the cause is almost always thin content, no local signals or no links, not the platform.
How long does each platform take to get live?
A DIY Wix or Squarespace site takes a determined owner one to three weekends for something presentable. A designer built Squarespace site usually runs two to four weeks. A properly scoped WordPress build for an Australian small business runs four to eight weeks, most of which is content, photography and approvals rather than development. Slow builds are nearly always waiting on copy.
Is Wix or Squarespace good enough for an online store?
For a small catalogue, yes. Under about fifty products with simple pricing and Australian shipping, both handle it comfortably and cost less than the alternatives. Once you have variable pricing, trade accounts, hundreds of SKUs or inventory syncing with another system, look at Shopify for pure retail or WooCommerce when content and commerce need to live together.
Do I need a developer to update a WordPress site?
Not for content. Editing text, swapping images, adding blog posts and updating staff pages are all straightforward once someone has set the site up sensibly. You do need someone for plugin and core updates, security monitoring, backups and PHP version changes. That is either an hour of your time each month or a maintenance plan, and skipping it is how sites get hacked.
What happens to my domain name if I switch platforms?
You keep it, provided the domain is registered in your name and you hold the login. Domains transfer between providers freely, usually within a few days. The risk is a domain registered by an agency or a platform under their own account. Check your registrar details now, before you need them, and make sure the registrant contact is you and not somebody else.
Is WordPress.com the same as WordPress?
No, and the naming causes real confusion. WordPress.com is a hosted service with plans and restrictions similar to Squarespace on its lower tiers. Self hosted WordPress, sometimes called WordPress.org, is the free software installed on hosting you control. Everything in this article about ownership, plugins and full control refers to the self hosted version.
Not sure which platform fits your business?
Tell us what the site needs to do and we will give you a straight answer, including when the answer is that you do not need us. Sydney based, building websites for Australian businesses since 2004.