Wix vs Squarespace: which is better for UK small business?

How we compared them, and the limits of any comparison

A few honesty notes on the limits of any "Wix vs Squarespace" article:

• Pricing volatility. Builder pricing changes more than most software. Annual-billed promo rates often hide year-two renewal jumps. We have used standard-rate annual billing throughout. Verify both providers' current rates on their UK pricing pages before you commit; a £4 a month difference compounds to £48 a year.
• Feature parity moves quickly. Both Wix and Squarespace ship multiple feature updates a month. A claim like "Wix has X and Squarespace doesn't" can stop being true within a quarter. We have stuck to the structural differences that have been stable across the last 18 months, not the marketing-page bullet of the week.
• There is no "best" without context. Most "Wix vs Squarespace" articles end with "it depends on your needs" because it genuinely does. We have committed to actual recommendations for actual situations further down.

Now to the comparison.

Pricing: what each actually costs in the UK

Wix UK plans (annual billing, VAT-inclusive)

Wix Studio, a separate product aimed at agencies and freelancers, runs a parallel pricing structure starting at £9 a month. For a standalone small business it offers no advantage over Classic plans.

Squarespace UK plans (annual billing, VAT-inclusive)

Honest year-one cash comparison, like for like

Take a standard small UK business: five to ten page service site, custom domain, basic SEO foundations, no shop. Both providers' Core plans are the realistic match.

The headline price is roughly level. Squarespace is slightly cheaper in year one if you stick to its built-in tools. Wix can run up a higher bill because its app marketplace is bigger and tempts you to bolt extras on.

The honest cost picture is broader than these numbers, though. The biggest cost on either platform is your time, and that's a section of its own further down.

Ease of use: getting from zero to a working site

Wix's editor: maximum freedom, more rope

Wix uses a pixel-precise drag-and-drop editor. You can put anything anywhere. That sounds great until you realise that "anywhere" includes everywhere it shouldn't go. Without a designer's eye, Wix sites can end up looking cluttered, mismatched, or jarring on mobile because the desktop and mobile layouts are edited separately and easy to drift apart.

What Wix does well:

• Maximum design flexibility, every element movable.
• A massive app marketplace for adding anything later (booking, chat, subscriptions, custom forms).
• AI-assisted setup that builds a first-draft site from your answers to a few questions (now standard across the industry).

What you should know:

• The freedom can be a trap. The default-state Wix site is rarely the published-state Wix site without a few hours of layout refinement.
• Mobile layouts must be checked and tuned separately. Skip this and your site looks fine on your laptop and broken on your customer's phone.

Squarespace's editor: curated, faster to "looks good"

Squarespace uses a section-based editor. You pick a section type (hero, services grid, testimonials, contact), it slots into your page, and you fill in the content. The constraints are deliberate: you cannot break the layout because the layout is decided for you.

What Squarespace does well:

• Section blocks give you a polished result with very little design effort.
• Mobile layouts are derived automatically and look good without separate work.
• Typography pairings and colour palettes ship pre-curated, so the default settings are usually fine.

What you should know:

• Less flexibility than Wix. If you want a custom-shaped layout, Squarespace makes it harder.
• Fewer third-party app integrations. If your business depends on a niche tool, check it's supported before you commit.
• The opinionated design works for some industries (creatives, hospitality, premium retail) better than others (industrial trades, B2B services).

Beginner verdict

If you have never built a website before and want the highest chance of a clean, professional-looking result with the least effort, start with Squarespace's free trial. If you want flexibility, expect to fiddle, and like having options, start with Wix's. Both have free trials. Spend a Saturday morning trying each on its own free trial before paying anything. You will know within an hour which one's editor your brain prefers.

Design and templates

The template-count trap

Wix marketing emphasises the 900+ number. In practice, a small business is choosing from maybe 30 to 50 templates in their sector. The 900 is a fan-out across every possible industry, including ones you will never use.

Squarespace ships 150-odd templates total, fewer per sector, but each one looks designed by someone with taste. The trade-off is real: less choice, but the worst Squarespace template is markedly better than the worst Wix template.

What "professionally designed" actually means

Neither builder will make your site look like an agency build for free. To get an agency-grade result from either:

• Replace every stock photograph with your own.
• Rewrite every line of placeholder copy in your own voice.
• Pick one consistent colour scheme and stick to it.
• Resist the urge to use every section type the editor offers.

If you stop at "picked a template and changed the colours", customers will see a Wix or Squarespace template they have seen before. There is no shortcut around the time investment in customisation.

Design verdict

If your business is visually-led (photographer, florist, restaurant, designer, wellness brand), Squarespace's higher design floor is worth the slightly smaller template choice. If you are in a sector where customers care more about competence than aesthetics (plumber, electrician, solicitor, accountant), Wix's flexibility and bigger app ecosystem matter more than the average template's prettiness.

SEO: can you actually rank with either?

What both builders include

• Page title and meta description editing per page.
• Custom URLs (with sensible URL structures by default).
• Sitemap.xml produced automatically, submitted to Google Search Console.
• Robots.txt access (basic).
• Image alt text fields.
• Mobile-responsive output (mostly).
• HTTPS by default.

Where they differ on SEO

For most local small businesses, the page-builder SEO tools are not your problem. Your problem is whether you have done the off-platform work: claimed and filled out your Google Business Profile, gathered Google reviews, listed your business consistently across UK directories. That work is the same on Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, or a custom site. For the full playbook on getting found, see How to get your business found on Google.

SEO verdict

Both builders are SEO-capable. Neither is SEO-managed. The "built-in SEO" boxes in either tool are checkboxes, not strategy. If SEO is a primary part of your growth plan, you either commit two to four hours a week to learning and doing it yourself, or you pay someone to do it. The platform you pick is downstream of that decision, not upstream of it.

E-commerce: selling on each platform

Wix ecommerce specifics

• No transaction fees on Wix Payments, the platform's built-in processor. Standard card-processing fees still apply (around 2.4% + 20p in the UK).
• POS hardware integration for in-person sales.
• Subscription products, multi-currency, automated sales tax, dropshipping integrations.
• Available from the Core plan (£16/mo) upward.

Squarespace ecommerce specifics

• 3% Squarespace transaction fee on Core (£17/mo), in addition to the card-processor fee. Removed on Plus (£29/mo) and Advanced (£79/mo).
• Tight integration with email marketing (Squarespace Email Campaigns) and member areas.
• Cleaner default product page design than Wix.
• Squarespace Commerce Advanced (£79/mo) adds subscriptions, advanced shipping, abandoned-cart recovery and custom checkout, but at the price you are getting into "should I look at Shopify?" territory.

Ecommerce verdict

For most small UK shops with up to 100 SKUs, Wix Core is the cheaper, more flexible choice. Squarespace makes sense when the product is photographable, the brand is visual-first, and the 3% fee is acceptable as the cost of the polish (or you upgrade to Plus to remove it). For dedicated ecommerce at any scale, Shopify is still the better tool than either builder.

Support: when something breaks

What Wix offers

• 24/7 phone support, with a callback system so you don't wait on hold.
• Live chat (limited hours on lower tiers, 24/7 on Business and above).
• Comprehensive knowledge base with video walkthroughs.
• Social media support.

What Squarespace offers

• Email support, typical response within 24 hours, faster on higher tiers.
• Active community forum (genuinely useful for "how do I do X").
• Curated help articles.
• No phone support.

Support verdict

For a non-technical business owner, Wix's support is a meaningful upgrade. Squarespace's support is fine if you are comfortable troubleshooting via email and can wait a day, and if you are happy enough searching the help centre. If you anticipate needing to ask a human "why is my booking form not sending confirmations", Wix gives you the phone number.

Switching between them

What you can move:

• Domain names, easily (just point the DNS).
• Text and image content, with effort (copy-paste, manual upload).
• Blog posts on Squarespace, via WordPress export then re-import (lossy).

What you cannot easily move:

• Page layouts and designs.
• Custom code customisations.
• Ecommerce product data, in any clean way.
• URL structure (which means SEO equity is mostly lost unless you set up 301 redirects manually).
• Customer accounts, order history.

The honest framing: treat the decision between Wix and Squarespace as a 3-year commitment. The cost of switching after year one is often higher than the cost of having picked the other one first.

Which should you actually choose?

Choose Wix if:

• You are a service business, trade, or non-creative SME (plumber, electrician, accountant, solicitor, B2B services).
• You want maximum flexibility and don't mind making design decisions.
• You will sell products and want full ecommerce without per-sale transaction fees on the lower tier.
• Support matters to you and you want phone access to a human.
• You need a specific integration (booking, chat, subscription) likely to be in Wix's larger app marketplace.

Choose Squarespace if:

• Your business is visually led (photography, design, hospitality, premium retail, wellness).
• You want the highest design floor with the least design effort.
• You will sell a small number of products and don't mind the 3% transaction fee on Core (or you'll upgrade to Plus to remove it).
• You value the curated, opinionated editor that makes "looks unprofessional" harder to achieve.
• You don't need phone support and can wait a day for email replies.

Now the reframe both of those builders never mention

Both Wix and Squarespace are DIY builders. They give you the editor; you do the work. That work is real:

• 20 to 60 hours to set up a working small-business site.
• Ongoing maintenance, updates, content additions, SEO.
• Learning the platform, then teaching yourself local SEO, then claiming and optimising your Google Business Profile, then building reviews.
• A site that, despite the polish of the editor, still looks templated unless you put a designer's hours into it.

The hidden question Wix and Squarespace are answering is: "I want to build my own website." If your actual situation is "I need a website but I do not want to build one myself, and I cannot afford an agency", neither Wix nor Squarespace is solving your problem. They are both selling you the wrong tool, politely.

That's the gap a managed monthly service like ours, Masser, is built to fill. One flat monthly price for the design, the hosting, the domain, security, local SEO foundations, and the editing tools you can use yourself in seconds. From £35 a month billed annually. The site is built around your business, not picked from a template shelf, and you see it built in front of you in about fifteen minutes before you decide anything. No upfront fee, no retainer, no calls to book.

When Masser is NOT the answer for you:

• You genuinely enjoy the building process and want hands-on design control. Use Wix.
• You have a strong visual brand identity and want maximum design polish you can perfect yourself. Use Squarespace.
• You need a very specific integration that a managed service cannot support.
• You have a complex ecommerce operation that needs Shopify or a custom build.

For most non-creative, non-technical small UK businesses, though, the honest comparison is not Wix vs Squarespace. It is DIY vs managed, and the DIY option costs you a lot more than its monthly price suggests. The cash difference disappears the moment you account for the 30+ hours of your time.

The cost everyone forgets: your time

Worked example, illustrative only

Take Wix Core at £16/mo, billed annually. Standard 5 to 10 page service site. You value your time at £40/hour.

Both worked examples here are illustrative, not promises. Your actual hours on either route will vary with your technical comfort, how much copy you need to write, and how complex your site is. The Masser figures below are typical for a standard onboarding, not a service-level guarantee. The shape is what matters: the time cost on DIY is real, and it dwarfs the cash cost on any DIY route.

For comparison, Masser Essential at £35/mo billed annually:

The cash bill is higher. The fully loaded cost is lower. The shape of the trade-off is "would you rather spend around £210 of cash and 42 hours of your time, or £420 of cash and 2 hours of your time?" For most time-poor small-business owners, that is a very easy answer.

For the full UK website cost breakdown across DIY, freelancer, agency, and managed monthly routes, see How much does a website cost in the UK?.

Three-way summary

• You have time, you enjoy design, you want full flexibility: Wix Core.
• You have time, your brand is visual-led: Squarespace Core (or Plus to remove transaction fees).
• You don't have time, you want a working site without spending evenings on it: Masser Essential, or another managed monthly service.

For the broader picture, see also How to get a website for your business (covers DIY, freelancer, agency, and managed in honest depth) and How to get your business found on Google (the work neither builder will do for you).

Frequently asked questions