Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress (2026) — The Essential Comparison

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In this detailed Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress comparison, I take you through the key features of these three leading website builders, and help you choose the right platform for your project.

I’ll start my full deep dive with a look at ease of use.

1. Ease of use

When building test websites with all three platforms, I found Squarespace to be the easiest of the three to build with. Its interface is sleek and intuitive, and its ‘Fluid Engine’ drag-and-drop editor allows you to easily position content on both desktop and mobile versions of your site, while still maintaining a fully responsive design.

(A responsive design is one that automatically adjusts itself to display correctly across all device types — mobile, tablet and desktop).

Wix gives you two main editing experiences: its long-established ‘Wix Editor’ and its newer ‘Wix Harmony’ editing experience. Both provide flexible drag-and-drop editing, with Harmony offering a more modern, streamlined interface and a fully responsive approach to site design.

However, while Wix gives you plenty of control over your layouts, the overall editing experience is a little less polished than Squarespace’s. The Wix Editor in particular can feel somewhat clunky or sluggish at times, while Harmony — although considerably slicker than the older Wix interface — doesn’t yet feel quite as smooth or intuitive to use as Squarespace’s Fluid Engine.

WordPress’ latest ‘Gutenberg’ editor provides a block-based editing approach that’s more visual and intuitive than previous versions of the CMS. However, for many users, particularly those new to website creation, WordPress can still feel a bit overwhelming. Although Gutenberg offers a fairly integrated editing experience, users may find themselves switching between the back-end editor and the front-end view to fully see how their changes impact the live site.

Some WordPress plugins like Elementor or Divi can help provide a more Squarespace-like experience, but these can add ‘bloat’ to proceedings and even slow your site down.

2. Templates

When it comes to the number of built-in templates on offer, Wix offers the largest range of themes — a selection of over 3,100 free ones is available in its template directory.

WordPress comes second with around 300 built-in themes (with free access to these themes depending on your plan). Squarespace offers the smallest selection — 202.

Unlike Wix and Squarespace, however, which provide all users with full access to their theme libraries regardless of plan, WordPress.com restricts theme availability based on your subscription level. This means that certain themes and advanced customization options are only accessible to users on higher-tier plans, limiting the design flexibility for those on lower-tier plans.

However, WordPress.com users on the Business or Commerce plans have the option to install custom themes not only from third-party suppliers like ThemeForest, Elegant Themes, StudioPress, and many others — but also from an extensive library of over 15,000 themes available on the wordpress.org website.

(WordPress.org is the sister version of the platform that users install on their own hosting.)

Across these various theme sources, I estimate that as many as 20,000 third-party themes can be used with the hosted version of WordPress — probably more than any other website builder on the market today.

So in terms of the total quantity of available themes, it’s definitely a win for WordPress.com.

As for template aesthetics, this is a subjective area — but there’s a lot to be said for the look and feel of Squarespace templates. They generally provide sleek page layouts featuring a modern approach to typography, images and color schemes.

The quality of template design in WordPress.com and Wix is good too, but arguably not quite as consistently classy as Squarespace. And given the greater number of templates on offer for both tools, Wix and WordPress theme quality can vary rather widely.

One important thing to watch out for with Wix’s site templates is that, unlike Squarespace and WordPress’ templates, not all of them are fully ‘responsive’ — only the newer “Harmony” ones are. As mentioned earlier, responsive templates are website designs that automatically adjust and optimize their layout and content to look good on any device type.

Consequently, some Wix users — those using the old Wix Editor — have to spend extra time editing the mobile version of their site to make sure it displays correctly on smartphones.

3. Small business tools

All three platforms provide tools that can help you run a small business, but Wix offers the most comprehensive set of built-in business features. These include a CRM for managing contacts and leads, email marketing tools, forms, automations, appointment scheduling and invoicing.

Because these features are all tightly integrated with each other, this makes Wix particularly useful if you want to manage a lot of your day-to-day business activity from one place.

Squarespace is strong here too, particularly for service-based businesses. It provides good data capture forms, email marketing, invoicing and client-management tools, and its Acuity Scheduling product offers powerful appointment-booking functionality. However, some of these features involve additional fees.

WordPress.com provides useful built-in tools for forms, newsletters, payments, subscriptions and website analytics. But compared with Wix and Squarespace, it relies much more heavily on plugins and third-party services for things like CRM, appointment scheduling and invoicing.

So, if you’re looking for the platform that provides the widest range of small-business tools out of the box, Wix is the strongest choice.

4. Ecommerce features

Although Wix, Squarespace and WordPress are more ‘generalist’ website building platforms than the likes of Shopify and BigCommerce, you can absolutely use all three to create an online store.

All Squarespace plans facilitate ecommerce selling (but note that its $25 per month ‘Basic’ plan applies a 2% transaction fee for any goods sold).

With Wix and WordPress, ecommerce features are only available on certain plans in both platforms, namely:

One thing to note is that WordPress.com’s commerce features are technically powered by the WooCommerce plugin — a very powerful ecommerce solution that delivers considerably more flexible selling options than Wix or Squarespace’s built-in ecommerce features.

Here’s a table with a full breakdown of the key ecommerce tools and features across the three platforms:

As you can see, there are a lot of ecommerce variables to consider!

So to simplify things, my key takeaways on selling online with Wix, Squarespace and WordPress are as follows:

If you’d like to dig further into the ecommerce features of these three platforms, you may find the following resources helpful:

Ultimately, however, because WooCommerce’s selling capabilities are considerably more powerful than the default selling options you get from Squarespace or Wix, I’m going to award WordPress a win here.

5. Pricing and value for money

All three platforms let you pay on a monthly or annual basis. The cheapest monthly fees for each are as follows:

So, it’s pretty clear that WordPress gives you the cheapest way to get going with a professional website.

It’s worth noting though that you can’t do much in the way of design customization on WordPress’s ‘Personal’ plan — you can’t even change the fonts or colors of your theme. To be able to do that, you’ll need to be on the ‘Premium’ plan or higher, which costs $18 per month.

If you’re looking to build an ecommerce website, Squarespace is technically the cheapest option, as its ‘Basic’ ($19-$25 per month) plan gives you good ecommerce selling features — albeit with a transaction fee of 2% on all goods sold.

WordPress’ ecommerce tools are available on its $70 per month ‘Commerce’ plan ($45 per month if paying annually).

While this plan is more expensive than Wix and Squarespace’s cheaper ecommerce plans, it gives you access to the full range of ecommerce capabilities (via WooCommerce). Getting your hands on the full set of ecommerce tools in Squarespace and Wix will cost you $139 per month and $159 per month respectively.

And finally, a word about pricing discounts.

Of the three platforms, WordPress.com provides the best discount deals, giving you as much as 69% off its standard pricing when you pay for a 3-year plan.

(This brings the price of its ecommerce plan down to $31.50 per month, but obviously involves a fairly long financial commitment on your part.)

This is a significantly bigger discount than you can access in either Squarespace or Wix.

Finally, if you pay for an annual plan, all three platforms provide you with a free custom domain for one year.

6. Blogging

If you’re serious about blogging, WordPress.com is the clear winner in this three-way comparison.

Originally built as a blogging platform, WordPress.com offers a rich array of features that cater to serious bloggers. It lets you easily categorize and tag posts, manage multiple authors, and roll back to previous versions of your content thanks to the platform’s robust revision history feature.

Additionally, WordPress.com provides both HTML and WYSIWYG editors, giving you precise control over how your blog content appears. It also lets you make use of SEO tools like Yoast and other advanced features (particularly on the higher-tier plans) that are tailored to support more professional blogging needs.

Wix comes second, with a solid blogging tool that supports categories, tags, autosave, and revision history. While it doesn’t offer the same depth of features as WordPress.com, Wix’s blogging tool is intuitive and user-friendly, making it a great option for those who need a straightforward solution without too much fuss.

As for Squarespace, blogging with it comes with a few key drawbacks that you don’t encounter in WordPress.com or Wix.

For example, its categorization options are more basic, lacking the flexibility and advanced taxonomy features that WordPress.com offers.

Additionally, Squarespace sites all come with a 1,000-page limit, making it unsuitable as a platform for creating extremely large blogs. By contrast, both Wix and WordPress.com allow you to publish an unlimited number of blog posts, making them more scalable options for extensive blogging.

One final thing to watch out for is blog export capabilities: while WordPress and Squarespace let you export your posts, Wix doesn’t. So if blogging is going to be a key part of what you do, and you want the option to migrate to another platform in future, you’ll need to bear that in mind.

7. Search engine optimization

When it comes to search engine optimization features, Wix and Squarespace are pretty decent, but WordPress.com ultimately offers the most extensive SEO functionality of the three.

Wix and Squarespace both make it easy to handle the basics of SEO, giving you full control over URLs, meta descriptions, alt text and 301 redirects. But of the two, Wix provides more SEO hand-holding than Squarespace, in the form of its ‘SEO Assistant’ tool that guides beginners through the optimization process. It also provides a dedicated ‘SEO Dashboard’ that lets you access all your SEO settings in one place.

However, Wix does have an SEO drawback, in that its templates are only partially responsive; technically speaking, this can hinder your site’s performance in search rankings (if operating in a very competitive niche). By contrast, Squarespace and WordPress.com provide you with access to fully responsive templates, thus conforming more to Google’s guidelines on mobile-friendly design.

As mentioned above, WordPress.com gives you SEO tools that outshine the Squarespace and Wix equivalents. This is particularly the case if you’re on a higher-tier WordPress.com plan, because you get access to Yoast SEO — an industry-standard SEO tool that provides detailed content analysis, on-page optimization suggestions, advanced sitemap creation features and more.

WordPress.com, Wix, and Squarespace all work to ensure that their sites meet Google’s ‘Core Web Vitals’ targets, optimizing for speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.

However, with the additional flexibility provided by WordPress.com and its plugins, users can have more control over these optimizations, potentially giving WordPress.com a slight edge in achieving optimal performance.

8. Apps and integrations

When it comes to apps and integrations, WordPress.com is the clear winner in this contest. There is an enormous range of over 50,000 plugins available for it. These allow you to add virtually any functionality you can think of to your site.

Wix provides a decent range of options through its App Market, with around 2,356 apps covering various needs like forms, product reviews and live chat.

Squarespace trails WordPress and Wix by a long way here, providing just 55 extensions and a few out-of-the-box integrations. For anything more advanced, you’ll likely need to connect your Squarespace site to external services via the sync tool Zapier (meaning extra costs and complexity for your setup).

So, considering the many thousands of third-party tools available for it, WordPress.com wins when it comes to extensibility.

9. Customer support

Wix provides the most comprehensive range of options for getting direct help from its customer support team — you can contact the company via live chat, email, phone and X.

Squarespace comes second here, with the only difference between it and Wix being the absence of phone support.

WordPress supplies live chat and email support on ‘Premium’ plans and higher; however, you only get these on a 24/7 basis if you are on a ‘Business’ or ‘Commerce’ plan. (‘Premium’ plan users have to content themselves with office hours support.)

WordPress.com ‘Personal’ plan users don’t get any in-person support at all, unfortunately. They have to rely on the WordPress.com help center and user forums to find answers to any queries they may have.

So ultimately, Wix provides the most comprehensive and flexible customer service options.

10. Scalability

If you plan to grow your website into a large, complex site, WordPress.com is the best choice among the three platforms we’re discussing.

You can build a WordPress.com site with as many pages as you like, and the platform also lets you create multi-layered navigation structures, which can be essential for very large, content-rich sites.

Additionally, if your WordPress.com site eventually outgrows its limits, you can easily migrate to self-hosted WordPress.org (which offers even more flexibility and scalability than hosted WordPress).

In some ways Wix is the least scalable of the three platforms, as it caps the number of static pages at 100.

(Its dynamic page and mega menu creation features can help a bit here, though. As far as we know — Wix isn’t entirely clear on this point — you can create an unlimited number of blog posts with the platform too.)

Squarespace is good for smaller to medium-sized sites, but its 1,000-page limit (which includes blog posts) and restrictive two-tier navigation structure may prove frustrating as your site grows.

11. Multilingual features

All three platforms let you build a multilingual website, but their approaches vary widely in cost and flexibility.

Squarespace integrates with the Weglot translation service. This is user-friendly and good for creating automated translations with, but can become very expensive as your site grows (either in terms of the number of languages used or the word count involved). You can end up paying as much as $769 per month if you want to translate your site into more than 10 different language versions.

WordPress.com also requires the use of a third-party translation tool like Weglot, with other popular options including TranslatePress and Polylang (both starting at $99 per year).

(Unfortunately, the excellent ‘WordPress Multilingual’ plugin, aka ‘WPML,’ only works with the self-hosted version of WordPress, not the hosted version, WordPress.com.)

Wix provides a more affordable option through its Wix Multilingual app, however: this supports over 180 languages. Basic manual translation with Wix Multilingual is free, and automatic translation beyond 3,000 words involves a one-time fee of $3 to $25 depending on the number of words involved.

I stumbled across a signficant issue when trying Wix’s multilingual features out, however: Wix Multilingual isn’t currently available for sites built using the new Wix Harmony editor.

So, because it provides a free built-in translation tool, and affordable pricing for automatic translations, I’d argue that the winner for creating multilingual websites is Wix.

12. Developer and customization options

When it comes to adding custom code, the options are fairly limited in both Wix and Squarespace.

Wix lets you insert HTML, CSS, and JavaScript by embedding code in headers or using custom HTML embed boxes within pages. However, access to the deeper code structure of the site isn’t provided.

Squarespace allows similar code injections through code blocks and a custom CSS editor; like Wix, its platform is a rather controlled environment.

Hosted WordPress, by contrast, offers more advanced custom coding capabilities than both Wix and Squarespace, particularly on its higher-tier ‘Business’ and ‘Commerce’ plans. On these plans, you can add custom CSS and JavaScript across your entire site; this opens up more extensive styling and interactivity options to you.

WordPress.com also allows you to upload custom themes that give you full control over the HTML, CSS and JavaScript of your site, again providing you with more control over design and layout than Wix and Squarespace.

While you can’t edit PHP directly in WordPress.com — as you can do with self-hosted WordPress.org — the ability to work with custom themes and the REST API for advanced integrations ultimately makes WordPress.com a stronger choice than Wix or Squarespace for users who need deeper customization options.

13. Backing up your site

When it comes to backing up your website, each platform offers different levels of control and security.

Wix provides a straightforward solution here, giving you automatic backups of content that are easy to restore whenever needed. You can also manually back up your site if you prefer.

Unfortunately, Squarespace completely lacks dedicated backup and autosave features — meaning that the only way to back up your site is via a manual export of all your content.

WordPress.com backups are provided via the Jetpack plugin. This offers advanced backup features, including real-time backups, daily backups and one-click restores, all of which makes backing up or restoring your site incredibly easy.

However, there is a slight catch here: Jetpack’s backup features are only available on the paid version of the plugin. But these start at just $8.95 per month — and for the peace of mind you’ll get, that’s a relatively small price to pay.

14. Hosting

Wix, Squarespace and WordPress.com all provide web hosting as part of your subscription plan, meaning they handle all the technical aspects of storing your website’s data on servers and making it accessible on the internet. This includes server management, security updates, and ensuring your site is available to visitors 24/7.

But WordPress.com has a bit of an edge over Wix and Squarespace in the hosting department.

It gives you global edge caching (which stores versions of your site on servers worldwide to reduce load times), and high-frequency CPUs (for faster processing power). These features ensure fast, reliable site performance.

Additionally, WordPress’ real-time backups automatically save your site’s data in case something goes wrong, and its ‘automated failover’ feature keeps your site online even if one server goes down.

By comparison, Wix and Squarespace provide decent hosting with built-in CDNs for faster global access, but they lack the same level of speed optimization.

Wix, in particular, can suffer from slower load times due to the heavy use of JavaScript and complex design elements in its themes; Squarespace offers good performance but with fewer options for optimizing server settings.

One thing to watch out for is the amount of storage you get bundled with your hosting — while WordPress and Wix place caps on this, Squarespace provides unlimited storage (for all file types except native video on most plans, with unlimited video storage provided on its top-tier ‘Advanced’ plan).

15. Free trials

Wix offers a forever-free plan that lets you create a simple website, but it features prominent Wix ads and doesn’t let you sell anything.

If you want to try Wix out properly — and gain access to all its ecommerce features — your best option is to start with a free trial, upgrade to a paid plan, and if it’s not the right fit, cancel within 14 days for a full refund. You can learn more about how to do this here.

Squarespace’s free trial lasts for 14 days and lets you experiment with all the platform’s premium features.

You can’t publish a Squarespace site while you’re on a free trial, but you can provide others with passworded access to it.

In the case of WordPress.com, the platform offers a very usable forever free plan. This is ad-supported, but it’s pretty functional, and a good way to try the platform out.

Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress: the conclusion

I hope this Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress comparison has helped you get a clearer picture of these platforms!

Having worked with all three to build websites and online stores, here’s my conclusion on how best to use them:

Do leave a comment below if you have any queries.

At a glance breakdown