Squarespace vs WordPress: which is right for a small business?

This gets argued as though one is good and one is bad. They are tools for different situations.

Squarespace, honestly

What it is good at. You can have something presentable live in a weekend without involving anybody. The templates are genuinely well designed, the hosting and security are included, and nothing breaks on update day because you do not do updates.

What it costs you. The site is not portable. There is no meaningful export: if you leave, you rebuild. You are limited to what Squarespace decides to support, and when you need the one thing it does not do, there is no way round it. Stop paying and the site goes.

WordPress, honestly

What it is good at. You own it. The content exports, the site can move host, and another developer can pick it up. There is no ceiling on what it can be made to do, and the cost does not scale with how many pages you add.

What it costs you. Somebody has to be responsible for it. Updates, backups, security and hosting are real jobs. Built badly, which usually means built on a page builder with twenty plugins, it is slow and fragile, which is where its bad reputation comes from.

The question that decides it

Who is building this?

If the answer is “me, at weekends, and it is a small site”, use Squarespace. Genuinely. You will get something decent live, and the money you save is better spent on photography.

If the answer is “an agency”, the argument for Squarespace mostly disappears. Its advantage is that it is easy for a non-developer. If a developer is doing the work anyway, you are paying the limitations without getting the benefit.

The one that matters later

Ask what happens if you want to leave.

With WordPress: you export the content, move the files, point the domain. It is a morning’s work for somebody who knows what they are doing.

With Squarespace: you rebuild. Three years of blog posts, your URL structure and your rankings all have to be recreated somewhere else.

That is not an argument against Squarespace. It is an argument for knowing about it before you choose, rather than in year four.

What about SEO?

Both can rank perfectly well. Squarespace handles the basics competently. WordPress gives you more control, which matters at the point where you are competing for something difficult.

Neither ranks on its own. The content and the structure do that.

Our answer

Building it yourself, under ten pages: Squarespace. Having it built, or expecting it to grow, or wanting to own it: WordPress, built properly, which means custom fields rather than a page builder.

That is how we build: WordPress web design.