Wix vs Squarespace for a small business in 2026

Wix gives you more control and more features. Squarespace gives you a better looking site with less effort. Both are genuinely good products, both bill you every month for as long as the site exists, and neither one touches your Google Business Profile or your local SEO. That last sentence decides it for most local businesses.

I have built on both. I have also inherited plenty of abandoned sites on both. The platform was almost never the reason they failed.

The real difference between them

Squarespace is opinionated. It gives you a smaller set of templates and pushes you into keeping things tidy, which is why Squarespace sites look better on average. It is quite hard to make an ugly one.

Wix is permissive. Drag anything anywhere, add an app for almost any function, change any detail. That freedom is why Wix sites vary from genuinely excellent to a shambles, usually depending on how much patience the owner had.

So the question is not which platform is better. It is which failure mode you would rather have: too few options, or too many.

Which one will you actually keep updating?

This matters more than any feature list. A website that has not changed in eighteen months underperforms whichever platform it sits on.

Squarespace wins here for most non-technical owners, in my experience. The editor is calmer, there are fewer ways to accidentally break the layout on mobile, and people go back into it more often because it does not feel like a chore.

Wix wins if you enjoy the fiddling. Some owners genuinely do. A photographer I know spends a happy Sunday every month rearranging her Wix gallery and her site is better for it.

Be honest with yourself here. Most people overestimate how much website admin they will do.

What about pricing?

Both sit in a similar band for a small business plan, roughly in the mid teens to low thirties per month depending on tier, billing period and whatever promotion is running. Check the current pricing on their own sites, because both change it and any figure I print here would be stale within months.

The more useful framing is the five year number. Whatever the monthly fee, multiply by sixty and add your own time. A builder subscription at around £20 a month is roughly £1,200 over five years before you have written a word of content or done anything to get found. That is not expensive for what it is. It just is not the whole cost, which is the point made in the true cost of free versus paid website builders.

Which is better for getting found on Google?

Neither, and both. Technically they are close enough that it does not decide anything. Squarespace produces slightly cleaner page structure out of the box. Wix gives you more direct control over the details if you know what to change. Both produce fast enough, indexable pages in 2026.

The old advice that Wix is terrible for SEO is years out of date. Ignore anyone still repeating it.

What genuinely decides local visibility is not on either platform. It is your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your name address and phone being consistent across listings, and having actual pages about the actual towns you serve. A salon owner in Reading asked me last year which builder ranks better. Her real problem was that her Google profile had the wrong opening hours and two photos from 2019. No builder fixes that.

That work is covered in more detail in what local SEO actually costs in the UK.

Who each one genuinely suits

Choose Squarespace if: you want it to look professional without design skill, you sell a service rather than a large catalogue, you value fewer decisions, and you will do a light update every month or two. Restaurants, therapists, consultants, photographers, small studios.

Choose Wix if: you want specific functionality like complex booking, memberships, or a particular integration, you are comfortable in software, and you would rather have the option than the guardrail. Also a fair choice if you already know it.

Choose neither if: you do not want to be the person maintaining a website at all. That is a legitimate position and it is most local business owners. In that case the builder is not the product you need, because the thing that brings you work is the ongoing local visibility work, not the pages. DIY versus done for you sets out the honest trade.

The ownership question nobody asks until it is too late

You cannot really export a Wix or Squarespace site. You can take your blog posts, your product list, your text and your images. You cannot take the design or the structure. Moving means rebuilding.

That is fine if you know it going in. It is unpleasant to discover in year four when your business has changed and you feel stuck. Neither platform is doing anything dishonest here, it is simply how hosted builders work, and it is the same reason owning your website matters more than most people think when they sign up.

Both are better on this than the average “free website” offer from a directory, for what it is worth.

So which one

If you are going to build it yourself and you want a straight answer: Squarespace for most service businesses, Wix if you need a specific feature Squarespace does not have. You will not regret either badly.

If what you actually want is for someone else to handle the site, the Google profile, the reviews and the local pages so you can get back to the job, that is what our plans do, from £49 a month with no contract. The pricing page shows what sits in each tier.

And if you already have a Wix or Squarespace site you like, keep it. The site is rarely the reason the phone is quiet. Nobody can promise you rankings or leads, but the work that moves the needle is almost always the profile, the reviews and the local pages, not a platform migration. Tell us what you have and we will say plainly whether changing anything is worth your money.