Wix vs Squarespace for small businesses – which is right for you?

I built my first ever website with Wix. It was a site for an author, and it did the job really well. I have used Squarespace to create some sample websites and was really impressed by how easy it was to have something that looks great, really quickly, with very little tech expertise. If you’re a small business owner looking to get a professional website live for a local service, an independent shop, a sole trader, or a small team, this comparison is for you.

The general Wix vs Squarespace debate covers a lot of ground. This Wix vs Squarespace for small businesses comparison focuses specifically on what you actually need from a website, which platform delivers it better, and what the real differences look like when you’re trying to tell people what you do and make it easy for them to get in touch or book.

What small businesses actually need from a website

Before the comparison, it’s worth being clear about what a small business website is trying to do – because the requirements are different from a personal blog or a large ecommerce store.

A small business website typically needs to:

• Look professional and credible at first glance
• Clearly communicate what you offer and who it’s for
• Make it easy for potential customers to contact you, book, or enquire
• Be found in local search results
• Be manageable without a full-time developer
• Remain up to date without significant ongoing effort

Neither Wix nor Squarespace requires technical knowledge. Both can produce professional results. The differences are in how they get you there and what they’re optimised for.

Ease of getting live

Wix

For getting a professional-looking business website live as quickly as possible, Wix is the faster option.

The drag-and-drop editor is the most intuitive of any mainstream website builder. Elements go where you drag them. There’s no grid system to learn, no section structure to understand. For a business owner who wants to get something live this week rather than spending time learning a platform, Wix’s editor reduces the friction at every step.

Wix ADI – the AI-assisted setup – takes your business type and preferences and generates a starting design. For common small business types (café, salon, plumber, personal trainer, therapist), the output is often close enough to your vision that you spend customisation time rather than design time.

The free plan lets you build and preview before paying anything – useful if you want to see what the result looks like before committing.

Squarespace

Squarespace’s editor takes slightly longer to get comfortable with. It’s section-based rather than free-form – elements live within structured sections rather than floating freely on the page.

The initial learning curve is real , typically an hour or two before the editor’s logic feels natural. After that, the experience is efficient and the results are consistently professional.

Squarespace Blueprint, the AI-assisted setup, guides you through design decisions based on your business type and preferences, producing a polished starting point with less manual decision-making.

Winner for speed to launch: Wix – lower initial friction for complete beginners.

Design quality and professional appearance

Squarespace

This is Squarespace’s defining strength and the main reason it’s the platform many design-conscious small businesses choose.

The templates are genuinely beautiful. Sophisticated typography, generous whitespace, and considered layouts produce a professional output that reflects well on your business before anyone reads a word. For businesses where visual presentation affects how credible you appear a boutique, a photographer, an architect, a restaurant, a wedding venue Squarespace’s design quality is a real competitive advantage.

The section-based editor means it’s harder to accidentally create something that looks inconsistent or amateurish. The constraints guide you towards layouts that work, which is genuinely useful for business owners without design backgrounds.

Templates are interchangeable on Squarespace; you can switch your template without losing your content, giving you the flexibility to evolve your brand’s look over time.

Wix

Wix has over 900 templates, the largest library of any mainstream website builder. For a small business, there’s almost certainly a template designed for your specific type of business. Restaurant, gym, law firm, florist, accountant, childminder, the specificity of Wix’s template library is genuinely useful.

Quality varies more than Squarespace’s smaller, more curated library. The best Wix templates are attractive and modern. The average is decent. Choosing carefully from the library matters; the difference between a well-chosen Wix template and a poorly chosen one is more noticeable than the equivalent difference on Squarespace.

One critical caveat: you cannot switch Wix templates after you’ve started building your site without rebuilding from scratch. Choose your template at the beginning with real care, it’s a longer-term commitment than it might seem.

Winner for design quality: Squarespace – more consistently professional output, less variance between good and mediocre.

Business-specific features

Wix

Wix has invested heavily in business-specific tools, and the result is a surprisingly comprehensive suite for common small business needs.

Wix Bookings – appointment scheduling built into the platform. Customers can book services, classes, or appointments directly through your site. Calendar integration, automated reminders, and online payment for bookings. For service businesses, salons, fitness instructors, tutors, therapists, and consultants, this is a genuinely useful feature that saves you from paying for a third-party booking tool.

Wix Restaurants – menus, online ordering, table reservations, and delivery management. Built for food businesses specifically.

Wix Events – event listings, ticket sales, and RSVP management. Useful for venues, classes, and event-based businesses.

Wix Blog – capable blogging for businesses that want to publish news, articles, or updates alongside their main site.

Google Maps integration – embed your location map cleanly for local businesses.

Contact forms -multiple form types, customisable fields, connected to your email.

Wix Chat – a live chat widget built into the platform.

Squarespace

Squarespace’s business features are clean and well-integrated, if slightly less extensive than Wix’s for certain specific use cases.

Squarespace Scheduling (via Acuity) – appointment booking integrated into Squarespace sites. Clean, professional, and well-implemented. Comparable to Wix Bookings in core functionality.

Squarespace Commerce – product sales built in on appropriate plans. For a business with a small shop alongside their main site, Squarespace’s commerce is clean and well-designed.

Squarespace Member Areas – gated content for paid members or subscribers. Useful for businesses offering exclusive content or community access.

Email Campaigns – built-in email marketing for sending newsletters and updates to customers. Available on higher plans.

Google Maps and local business features – location embedding and business information display.

Winner for business features: Wix – broader range of built-in tools for specific business types, particularly bookings and food service.

Local SEO

For a small business, local SEO appearing in search results when potential customers in your area search for what you offer is often the most valuable type of search visibility.

Wix

Wix’s local SEO capability has improved significantly. The platform now integrates with Google My Business, allows you to add local business schema markup, and provides an SEO checklist that covers local optimisation basics.

For most small businesses, Wix’s local SEO tools are adequate; you can do the fundamentals without needing additional tools.

Squarespace

Squarespace’s SEO fundamentals are solid, with a clean URL structure, customisable metadata, an automatic sitemap, and good page speed. Local SEO specific features, such as Google My Business integration and local schema markup, are supported.

Both platforms are comparable in terms of local SEO basics. Neither matches the depth of self-hosted WordPress for competitive local SEO, but for most small businesses competing in local search, both do the job.

Winner on local SEO: Draw – comparable capability for local business SEO fundamentals.

Pricing

Pricing is quoted separately for the US and UK sites for both platforms, so here’s each one side by side rather than picking a single “main” figure.

Wix

Free plan – genuine free plan available, in both the US and the UK. yourname.wixsite.com subdomain, Wix branding on site, no custom domain.

	USA	UK
Light custom domain, removes branding, 2GB storage	~$17/month	~£9/month
Core adds ecommerce basics, 50GB storage	~$29/month	~£14/month
Business advanced ecommerce, 100GB storage	~$39/month	~£18/month

For a standard small-business website without e-commerce, the Light plan at ~$17/month (USA) or ~£9/month (UK) covers everything you need.

Squarespace

No free plan – 14-day free trial available.

	USA	UK
Personal full website, no ecommerce	~$16/month	~£11/month
Business basic ecommerce (3% transaction fee), professional email	~$23/month	~£16/month
Commerce Basic full ecommerce, no transaction fee	~$39/month	~£23/month

For a small business website without a shop, the Personal plan at ~$16/month (USA) or ~£11/month (UK) is the right starting point.

Cost comparison

	Wix		Squarespace
	USA	UK	USA	UK
Entry paid plan	~$17/month	~£9/month	~$16/month	~£11/month
With ecommerce	~$29/month	~£14/month	~$39/month	~£23/month
Free option	Yes		No (trial only)
Annual difference (entry)	~$204/year	~£108/year	~$192/year	~£132/year

Neither platform is dramatically cheaper than the other at the entry level in either market – the difference is small enough that it shouldn’t be the deciding factor.

Winner on price: Wix – the genuine free starting option gives it the edge, even where the paid entry price is close.

Ongoing management

Wix

Once live, a Wix site is easy to maintain. Updates to text, images, and content are handled through the same editor you used to build it. Adding new sections, new pages, or new features is straightforward.

The Wix dashboard handles your business tools, bookings, messages, contacts, and email campaigns in one place. For a small business owner managing their website alongside running a business, the integrated dashboard reduces context switching.

Squarespace

Squarespace is also clean and manageable in the long term. The editor becomes more efficient once you understand its section-based logic, and site-wide changes updating colours, fonts, or spacing are handled through the style panel rather than page by page.

Squarespace’s analytics are cleaner than Wix’s, showing traffic, popular pages, and conversion data in a straightforward dashboard.

Winner on ongoing management: Draw – both are well-suited to ongoing management by non-technical business owners.

The portability question

One consideration that most small-business website comparisons skip is what happens if you want to change platforms later.

Wix portability

Poor. Wix’s export functionality is very limited; the content doesn’t migrate cleanly to other platforms. If you decide to move to WordPress or Squarespace later, you’re largely rebuilding from scratch.

For a business that plans to stay on the platform long-term, this doesn’t matter. For a business that might significantly grow its web presence and eventually need more capability, it’s worth knowing this before you commit.

Squarespace portability

Better than Wix. Blog posts export as XML that imports cleanly into WordPress. Product data exports as CSV. The design needs rebuilding, but the content comes across more cleanly.

Winner on portability: Squarespace – more options if you want to move later.

Wix vs Squarespace for small businesses – which should you choose?

Choose Wix if:

You want to live as fast as possible. The drag-and-drop editor and ADI setup get you to a live, professional site faster than any other option. If this week matters, Wix.

Your business has specific needs that Wix’s tools cover. Restaurants, booking-based services, and event businesses, Wix’s built-in tools are genuinely useful and save you from paying for third-party alternatives.

Budget is a consideration. The free starter plan and lower entry-level price make Wix slightly more financially accessible.

You want to try before committing financially. The free plan lets you build and see the result before spending anything.

Choose Squarespace if:

How your business looks matters as much as what it says. For businesses where visual presentation affects credibility, creative services, food and hospitality, retail, and wellness, Squarespace’s design quality reflects better on your business.

You want consistent, professional results with less design decision-making. Squarespace’s constrained editor produces more reliable professional output than Wix’s free-form approach.

Is there any chance you’ll want to move platforms later? Squarespace’s export functionality gives you more options if your needs grow.

Consider neither if:

If your business website also needs to be a content platform a blog that drives traffic, content that ranks in Google, eventual display advertising both Wix and Squarespace have meaningful limitations. Self-hosted WordPress gives you the content capability, SEO control, and ad network compatibility that neither hosted platform matches.

Find out which platform is right for your business – take the quiz →

Frequently asked questions

Wix vs Squarespace for small businesses – which is better?
There’s no single winner – it depends on your business. Wix is faster to launch, cheaper at entry level (with a genuine free plan), and has more business-specific tools like booking and restaurant features. Squarespace produces more consistently polished, premium-looking sites and is more portable if you outgrow it. Choose based on whether speed and tools or design and flexibility matter more for your business.

Which is better for a local service business – Wix or Squarespace?
For a local service business prioritising speed to launch and business-specific tools (booking, contact forms, local maps), Wix has a slight edge. For a local service business where looking premium matters a high-end salon, a luxury event venue, an upscale restaurant Squarespace’s design quality is worth the modest extra cost.

Can I take payments on Wix or Squarespace?
Yes, both support e-commerce and payment processing. Wix’s Core plan and above support e-commerce. Squarespace Business plan and above support ecommerce (with a 3% transaction fee on Business; no fee on Commerce Basic and above).

Which is better for a restaurant website?
Wix has a dedicated restaurant product (Wix Restaurants) with built-in menu management, online ordering, and table reservations. For restaurants specifically, Wix’s purpose-built tools give it an advantage. Squarespace produces more beautiful restaurant sites, but without the same depth of operational tools.

Which is easier to update yourself without a designer?
Both are designed for non-technical self-management. Wix’s drag-and-drop is slightly more immediately intuitive. Squarespace’s site-wide style controls make brand-wide updates (changing a colour or font across the whole site) faster once you understand the system.

Do I need web hosting if I use Wix or Squarespace?
No – both are fully hosted platforms. Hosting is included in your plan. You don’t need to arrange, pay for, or manage hosting separately. Read our full explainer →

Can I use my existing domain name with Wix or Squarespace?
Yes – both platforms allow you to connect a domain you already own. You update your domain’s DNS settings to point at Wix or Squarespace. The process takes about 10 minutes, and DNS propagation completes within a few hours. Read our domain connection guide →