WordPress vs Wix vs Squarespace 2026: Real Costs Compared
Wix is the easiest fit for many small businesses that want tools in one service. Squarespace puts polished design first. WordPress offers the most control over costs, hosting and future features, but needs more setup and maintenance. Choose according to the work your site needs to do.
What it costs: year 1 and year 2
Wix’s pricing page, which shows yearly prices only.
Hosted builders charge one plan price. WordPress costs are split between hosting, a domain name, and any paid themes or plugins you choose. The comparison below adds them up for the first two years, because the second year is where intro prices end and domain renewals start.
WordPress with yearly Hostinger Premium and free software costs $47.88 initially and $151.87 next year, including a $19.99 domain renewal after its free first year. A $143.52 four-year prepayment, equivalent to $2.99 monthly, instead leaves only the $19.99 domain fee in year two. Adding Kadence Essentials at $99 and Yoast Premium at $118.80 to the yearly setup brings totals to $265.68 and $369.67.
The FastComet example uses $23.88 hosting initially, then $119.40 annually at $9.95 monthly, plus a $19.99 domain: $43.87 in year one and $139.39 in year two.
Annual Wix Light costs $204 initially and $225.35 with its $21.35 domain renewal; Core costs $348 and $369.35 and enables selling. Wix’s monthly-billing prices were only available inside checkout, so they are not included.
Annual Squarespace Basic costs $228 initially and $248 after a $20 domain renewal. Monthly Basic costs $310 then $320, with a $10 domain in year one rather than a free one. Annual Core costs $348 then $368; monthly Core at $39 monthly plus the domain costs $478 then $488. Basic takes a 2% store-sales fee, while Core removes it.
A few things stand out:
- WordPress with free plugins is the cheapest option in year one, even with a separate domain. The catch is the renewal. Hostinger’s Premium plan roughly triples from $47.88 to $131.88 a year, and FastComet’s Starter plan goes from $23.88 to $119.40. Our Hostinger review and FastComet review break down those renewal prices.
- The 48-month prepay is the cheapest way to run WordPress for several years, at $143.52 for four years of hosting. You pay it all upfront, and Hostinger’s refund window is 30 days.
- Paid extras change the picture. Add a premium theme and a premium SEO plugin and WordPress costs about the same as Wix Core or Squarespace Core in year two. Our test site used only free plugins and did the job.
- Monthly billing costs more on both builders. Squarespace says paying annually saves up to 36%, and neither builder gives a free domain on monthly plans.
Transaction fees if you sell
The standard US payment examples are 2.9% plus $0.30 for WooPayments, Wix Payments and Squarespace Basic/Core. WooCommerce adds no platform fee, Wix lists none on ordinary product sales, and Squarespace adds 2% on Basic but none from Core.
Membership fees depend on the WordPress plugin. Wix Pricing Plans charges 4% on Core, 2% on Business and none on Business Elite; Squarespace digital content charges 7%, 5%, 1% and 0% across Basic through Advanced. WooCommerce can sell on any suitable hosting plan, Wix needs Core from $29 monthly and Squarespace Basic starts at $19.
On Squarespace Basic, $1,000 a month in store sales adds $20 a month, or $240 a year, in platform fees. At that point Core ($10 a month more) is the cheaper Squarespace plan.
Ease of use
Wix and Squarespace gave us styled starting sites without installing software. Wix generated more draft copy, products and posts; Squarespace produced a clean layout quickly. Both still needed review. Wix invented contact details and added an unwanted bookings page, while Squarespace omitted a requested blog and left placeholder branding.
WordPress took more setup: a free Kadence starter design plus form and SEO plugins. The import gave us useful pages, but some needed a permalink-settings save before loading. The form worked, while unedited pages retained sample content. Plugin recommendations and upgrade prompts added noise along the way.
The difference continues after launch. Wix and Squarespace manage the platform; WordPress asks you to maintain the theme and plugins. That extra work buys freedom to change hosts and assemble a different set of tools. See Wix vs WordPress and WordPress vs Squarespace for their specific trade-offs.
Design and templates
WordPress offers roughly 8,700 free themes plus starter libraries, including 93 Kadence templates in this check. Layouts can use blocks, a builder or code, with full code access and later theme changes that retain content.
Wix’s more than 2,000 templates use free-form drag-and-drop, with custom work limited to its developer tools; changing templates means creating another site and copying content. Squarespace’s 202 templates use grid-based blocks, with code injection from Core. Its 7.1 sites are restyled rather than switched between templates.
Squarespace has the most consistent look out of the box. Wix has the most templates and the most freedom inside its editor. WordPress has no ceiling at all: the free Kadence theme we used looked professional after one import, and if you outgrow the block editor you can add a page builder (our page builder comparison covers the options). The flip side is that WordPress designs vary a lot in quality, and you have to judge them yourself.
The biggest practical difference is switching. On WordPress you can change themes and keep every post and page. On Wix you cannot switch templates at all without rebuilding, and on Squarespace 7.1 you restyle the site you have. Our Squarespace vs Wix guide covers both builders’ template rules in detail.
Winner: WordPress for flexibility, Squarespace for polish with no effort.
SEO
All three handle the basics: editable page titles and descriptions, automatic sitemaps, clean URLs, mobile-friendly pages and free SSL.
- WordPress gives the most control. On our test site, Yoast SEO (10+ million active installations, according to WordPress.org) took about a minute to configure and adds title and description fields, schema markup and an XML sitemap. Rank Math is the main alternative; our Rank Math vs Yoast comparison weighs the two.
- Wix gives more technical control than Squarespace, including robots.txt editing, canonical tags, bulk redirect imports and custom URL structures for blog posts and products.
- Squarespace is simpler and does a sensible job by default, which is fine for most small sites.
Winner: WordPress, then Wix.
Ecommerce
WooCommerce is free, has more than seven million installations and imposes neither a product cap nor a platform fee. Extensions add subscriptions, bookings and memberships. Wix includes its store from Core at $29 monthly, allows 50,000 products and includes dropshipping, marketplaces and social selling without a listed store platform fee.
Squarespace includes a store on every plan with a 10,000-product site limit and a 2% Basic platform fee. It includes abandoned-cart emails throughout and Google Shopping from Core. The easiest starting point and the most flexible long-term store need not be the same platform.
Wix is the easiest way to start selling with a real catalog. Squarespace suits a small, good-looking shop or digital products next to a portfolio. WooCommerce is the most flexible and has no platform fee, but you run it yourself, and a busy store usually needs better hosting than a $3.99 plan. If your goal is a sales funnel rather than a catalog, see our ClickFunnels vs WordPress comparison.
Winner: WordPress for a store you plan to grow, Wix for a quick start.
Speed
We ran Google’s Lighthouse tool (version 13.5.0) three times on our finished WordPress test homepage, which was served from the test environment on the same computer. The mobile performance score was 88 on all three runs, with a Largest Contentful Paint of 3.8 seconds, zero Total Blocking Time, no layout shift, 855 KiB of page weight and 35 requests. A desktop run scored 98.
Treat that as a measurement of one test page, not a prediction. A local test skips real network distance, has no traffic, and has no caching or CDN set up. Your host, images and plugins will matter more than the platform. For comparison, our Squarespace vs Wix test measured two official live demos over the internet: a Wix portfolio demo scored 71 on mobile and a Squarespace demo scored 60.
Winner: none clearly. All three can be fast or slow depending on what you put on the page. On WordPress, speed is in your hands; on the builders, it is mostly in theirs.
Ownership and moving away
- WordPress: you own the files and the database. You can download a full copy of your site and move it to another host at any time with a migration plugin (see our All-in-One WP Migration guide).
- Squarespace: exports an .xml file in WordPress format with pages, one blog and its posts, and galleries. Store pages, styles and custom CSS stay behind. Squarespace says the site must be active and public; on our trial site the export ran but the file held no page text or posts.
- Wix: your site must run on Wix’s servers, and Wix’s help center says blog posts cannot be exported to other platforms. The site menu on our test site offered duplicate and transfer to another Wix account, but no download. Leaving means copying content by hand.
Winner: WordPress, by a wide margin.
Support and upkeep
Wix and Squarespace both list 24/7 customer support on paid plans, and they handle hosting, security and updates for you. With WordPress, support comes from your host (our Hostinger review notes that its support now starts with an AI agent) plus free community forums and each plugin’s own support. You also own the upkeep: updating WordPress, the theme and every plugin, and keeping backups. Our test site already had five things to update.
Winner: Wix and Squarespace.
Which is best for starting a blog?
WordPress, for almost anyone who wants a blog to grow. It was built as a blogging tool, and it still has the deepest set of publishing features: categories and tags, scheduled posts, full control over URLs, SEO plugins like Yoast, and the option to add a newsletter, ads or memberships later. If the blog is mostly an email newsletter, see how it compares in Ghost vs WordPress. Most importantly, the blog is yours. If a host raises prices, you move.
- Squarespace is a good second choice for a blog that sits next to a portfolio. It has no post limit, looks great with little effort, and can export one blog to WordPress format if you leave later.
- Wix works for a hobby blog, and its free plan lets you start at $0. But Wix says blog posts cannot be exported, so you are tied to Wix for as long as you keep the blog.
- Free options: a Wix free plan shows Wix branding and a wixsite.com address. If you want free and Google-owned, our WordPress vs Blogger comparison covers that route.
A typical new blog on WordPress costs $47.88 in year one on Hostinger’s 12-month plan with a free domain, and the free Kadence theme plus Yoast SEO cover the basics. Plan for about $152 in year two when the intro price ends.