Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress vs a Custom Website: Which Is Right for Your Small Business? (2026)

Our view is plain, though there are nuances: Wix and Squarespace are excellent tools if you want to build your own website. But if you’re paying a professional to build it, we think there are better options.

No one platform is right for everyone. The biggest questions are how involved you want to be in building, updating and looking after your website, and what your budget is.

On this page: The quick answer · Domains · Wix · Squarespace · WordPress · Custom · SEO and speed · Shopify · Cost · Moving later

The quick answer: how involved do you want to be?

Our rule of thumb: Building it yourself? Wix or Squarespace. Want a professional build you can update yourself? WordPress. Want someone to build it and look after it? Custom. Selling products? Start with Shopify.

Your domain and your website are two different things

One of the most common questions we hear is some version of “I bought my domain on Wix. Can I still use another provider?” Yes. Your domain name and your website don’t have to be with the same company.

Your domain is your address on the internet, like yourbusiness.com, registered with a company such as GoDaddy, Squarespace, Wix or Cloudflare. Your website platform builds and runs your site, and hosting puts it online. You can keep your domain where it is and point it at a website hosted anywhere, so changing websites never means losing your web address.

Wix: great for building your own website

We genuinely like Wix for what it does. If you have the time to learn its editor, you can pick a starting design, arrange sections visually and publish without writing code. Wix handles hosting and updates, and it has useful SEO settings for page titles, descriptions and URLs.

Where we draw the line is when you’re hiring a developer. Wix is proprietary: your website has to run on Wix, and you can’t export it as a working site and host it somewhere else. So there’s a bit of a lock-in situation. Building inside a visual editor also limits how much control a developer has over performance and technical SEO. Plenty of professionals build on Wix, and Wix Studio adds developer tools, but our preference is still custom code or even WordPress when a client is paying for professional development.

There’s also the learning curve. Roughly a third to half of the people who call us have already started a site in Wix, Squarespace or WordPress and gotten stuck. AI website builders make the first draft faster, but you still have to get the content, design and details right.

Our take: great if you’re building it yourself. Not what we’d choose for a professionally built site.

Squarespace: a strong DIY choice with a design focus

Squarespace falls into much the same category for us. It offers attractive starting designs, a visual editor and built-in hosting, and you can absolutely build a beautiful website with it. Design quality depends on the person doing the work, not the platform.

Like Wix, though, Squarespace is proprietary. You can export some content, but not your design as a working site, and the platform decides much of the technical setup. That’s a reasonable trade-off when you’re building the site yourself, and less appealing when you’re paying a developer.

One point people miss: your Squarespace subscription pays for the platform and hosting, not for anyone to make edits for you. Unless you’ve hired someone, that’s still your job.

Our take: excellent for a polished DIY site. When a professional is doing the work, we’d usually recommend something else.

WordPress: more flexibility, more responsibility

WordPress is different. It’s open-source software, so you choose your host and can move a self-hosted WordPress site to another one. Its huge library of themes and plugins covers forms, bookings, memberships, stores and SEO.

We particularly like WordPress for businesses that want to update their own content regularly. If you’re often changing services, adding pages or publishing articles, a content dashboard is valuable.

The downside is complexity. We don’t find the WordPress admin particularly intuitive for beginners (or for anyone really). Depending on how the site is built, editing a page can mean accidentally breaking a layout, and a well-configured site that locks the design down takes planning. WordPress also needs ongoing maintenance: themes, plugins and the core software all need updates, and an unattended site can get hacked. An SEO plugin won’t optimize your site on its own, either.

Our take: a strong choice when you want a professional build plus control over your own content, and someone is looking after the maintenance.

Custom-coded websites: more control, less hands-on editing

This is our preferred approach for most small-business websites. Instead of working inside a visual editor, we write the site with modern tools like React and Astro. We build the layout around the business rather than pouring the business into a template, and we decide exactly what each page loads.

The trade-off: our standard custom websites don’t come with a self-service editing dashboard. To change wording, swap a photo or add a section, you ask us, and our Care Plus and Pro plans include small updates every month. For some owners that’s a drawback. For many it’s the point: they want a site that looks good, works and is looked after, not another dashboard to learn.

Custom work also costs more upfront than doing it yourself.

Our take: the right fit when you have the budget for professional help and would rather run your business than maintain a website.

Which is better for SEO and speed?

All of these platforms cover the SEO basics: page titles, descriptions and clean URLs. Beyond that, SEO is mostly your content, your site’s structure and your business’s reputation, and no platform does that for you.

Where they differ is control. Visual builders make most technical decisions inside their own systems, which is convenient if you don’t code and limiting if you do. Building on Wix or Squarespace is like putting a governor on the engine. In code, a developer controls what the browser downloads and how each page loads. That doesn’t guarantee a better ranking, but if we’re responsible for a site’s speed and technical SEO, we want that control.

What about Shopify?

If you mainly sell products online, Shopify is usually our first recommendation. It’s built around products, inventory, payments, orders and shipping, and we find its admin the most approachable of the lot for store owners. WordPress with WooCommerce, or the store features in Wix and Squarespace, can work for smaller shops, and a site that only needs an occasional payment button doesn’t need Shopify at all.

Expect subscription fees, transaction costs and app expenses. And like Wix and Squarespace, it’s a hosted platform you can’t simply pick up and move.

What a website costs over three years

Every website has running costs, whether you build it yourself or hire someone. Wix, Squarespace and Shopify bundle hosting into their subscriptions. WordPress and custom sites need hosting of their own, and a simple custom site is inexpensive to host. Rough US ranges:

Planning ranges, not quotes: 36 months at annual-billing rates, excluding design and development, domains, paid apps or plugins, transaction fees, email and professional edits. Prices checked November 2026.

The biggest number missing from that table is time. Build it yourself and you pay in hours. Hire a developer and you pay more upfront for someone else to do the work. And a builder’s subscription doesn’t pay anyone to update your site for you. When you compare proposals, ask what the upfront fee covers, what the monthly fee covers, and what happens when you need a change.

Can you move your website later?

Before you pick a platform, know what happens if you want to leave. Keeping your domain, exporting your content, moving your design and moving a working site are four different things.

A managed platform can be worth some lock-in if it saves you time. Just know the trade before you commit.

How we build websites at LocalForge

We build custom by default, and we also work in WordPress and Shopify when they’re the better fit. We prefer custom because it lets us build around each business and take responsibility for the finished site.

You own your website: your content, copy, images, page structure and the design made for you. Ask for an export at any time and we hand it over free, as static website files (HTML, CSS and images). Your domain is yours, and there’s no long lock-in contract. Our standard builds have no editing dashboard, so changes go through us. See our pricing page for the plans.