Three platforms, three confident sales pitches, and a decision most business owners make once and then live with for a decade. The monthly prices are close enough to be irrelevant. What actually separates them is what happens in year five, and none of the three will tell you about that up front.
Choose Wix if you are building it yourself this weekend and will never need anything the editor does not offer. Choose Squarespace if design matters most and you want it to look good without design skills. Choose WordPress if someone else is building it, or if you want the option to move hosts later. The deciding factor is not features, it is exit: a Wix site cannot be moved off Wix, and a WordPress site can be moved anywhere.
What each one is genuinely good at
Wix
The easiest of the three to use, by a clear margin. Drag anything anywhere, and it stays where you put it. For a sole trader who needs a presence by Monday and has no budget for a designer, it does the job honestly.
The cost is at the edges. The editor's freedom produces layouts that behave unpredictably on mobile unless you rebuild them there separately. Page speed is consistently the weakest of the three. And the platform is a closed system: everything you build lives inside it permanently.
Squarespace
The best-looking result for the least design effort. The templates are genuinely well made, and a Squarespace site built by someone with no design training usually looks better than a WordPress site built by the same person.
The trade-off is the ceiling. When you need something the template does not do, there is frequently no way to do it. Suits photographers, studios, restaurants and anyone whose site is essentially a beautiful brochure.
WordPress
Runs a very large share of the web, and the reason is flexibility. There is a plugin for almost anything, full control over every meta field and schema type, and the whole site can be exported and moved to a different host on a different continent.
The cost is maintenance and exposure. Plugins update, sometimes conflict, and occasionally break the site. Popularity makes it the largest target for automated attacks. An unmaintained WordPress site is a genuine liability in a way an unmaintained Squarespace site is not.
What they actually cost in Australia
- Wix — roughly $17 to $45 a month for a business plan
- Squarespace — roughly $25 to $55 a month
- WordPress — the software is free; hosting is $10 to $50 a month and premium plugins and a theme commonly add $200 to $600 a year
Over five years the three land far closer together than the monthly prices suggest, and none of those figures include anyone building the thing, which is where the real money goes. That side is covered in how much a website costs in Australia.
There is one line missing from all three of those figures, and it is the one that decides whether the site ever changes: none of them include a person. A Wix or Squarespace subscription is not paying somebody to keep the site current, it is renting you the tools and the login so you can do it yourself, on an evening, after work. Most business owners genuinely intend to. Very few do it twice.
It is worth holding that next to what having it done costs. Our Maintain plan is $50 a month, which is $600 a year, and it covers Cloudflare hosting, SSL, the domain, uptime monitoring, security patching and two content changes a month made by us. That is inside the same $360 to $720 a year a DIY subscription costs, and the difference is not the features, it is who does the work. The full plan breakdown is on the packages page, and the running costs of a site with nobody looking after it are set out in what it costs to keep a website alive.
Which is best for SEO?
All three can rank, and the platform is a much smaller factor than the industry likes to pretend.
WordPress gives the most control, through plugins that expose every meta field, schema type and redirect. That control is worth exactly nothing if nobody uses it, and most small WordPress sites do not. Squarespace and Wix both cover the basics competently and both limit you at the edges, particularly around structured data and page speed.
A well-structured Squarespace site beats a neglected WordPress site every time. Site speed, page structure and content quality outweigh the platform choice by a wide margin. Choose on what you can maintain, not on which platform an SEO blog told you is best.
The question nobody asks until it is too late
Can you leave?
You own your domain and you own your words. You do not own the site. On Wix and Squarespace the site is built inside the platform and cannot be exported as a working website. Squarespace offers a partial export that produces a rough WordPress import. Wix offers nothing comparable. In both cases, moving means rebuilding.
WordPress is different in kind: files and database, both exportable, movable to any host. That is the single most important practical difference between the three, and it is the one least likely to come up in a sales conversation.
When none of the three is the right answer
All three ship framework weight a small business site does not need. Wix and Squarespace load a rendering engine before they load your content. WordPress assembles every page from a database on request, then leans on caching to hide it.
For a site that is essentially pages of text and images, which describes most local business websites, all of that machinery buys you an editor and costs you speed. A statically built site delivers the same pages as finished files: dramatically faster on mobile, nothing to hack, nothing to update weekly.
That is what we build, and the trade-off is honest. There is no self-service editor, so content changes come through us on a monthly support plan. For a business that changes its site a few times a year, that is a better deal than a dashboard nobody logs into. For a business publishing daily, it is not, and we will say so. The technical comparison is in WordPress vs Astro.
Choosing, in one paragraph
Building it yourself with no budget and no design eye: Wix. Building it yourself and the look matters most: Squarespace. Hiring someone, or you need real functionality, or you want the freedom to move later: WordPress. Speed and search performance are the point rather than a bonus, and you are happy for someone else to handle changes: statically built. Any of the four beats spending six months deciding.
If you would rather talk it through than guess, tell us what the site needs to do and we will tell you which of the four fits, including when the answer is not us.
Written by Newcastle Web Co, web design & seo in Cameron Park NSW 2285. Last updated 31 August 2026.
