Squarespace vs WordPress: The Real Differences That Matter

Let's cut to the chase: Squarespace and WordPress serve fundamentally different types of users. Squarespace is an all-in-one website builder where everything's included. WordPress (specifically WordPress.org) is an open-source platform where you assemble the pieces yourself.

If you want something that just works out of the box with minimal technical hassle, go with Squarespace. If you need unlimited customization and don't mind getting your hands dirty, WordPress is the answer.

Here's the detailed breakdown to help you decide.

Quick Verdict: Who Should Use What

Choose Squarespace if:

Choose WordPress if:

Pricing: The Real Numbers

Here's where it gets interesting. On paper, WordPress looks cheaper. In reality? It depends.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace offers four plans (billed annually):

All plans include hosting, SSL certificate, a free domain for the first year, and unlimited storage. For most small businesses, the Core plan at $23/month hits the sweet spot — you get code injection for tracking pixels, no Squarespace transaction fees on physical products, and the key marketing tools like pop-ups and announcement bars.

Check out our Squarespace pricing breakdown for more details, or grab a Squarespace coupon code to save on your first year.

WordPress Pricing

WordPress.org itself is free. But you need:

A realistic WordPress budget for a small business site: $150-300/year for basic shared hosting setup, or $300-700/year with managed hosting and premium tools.

WordPress.com (the hosted version) offers plans from free to $45/month. The Business plan at $25/month gives you plugin access and custom themes. But honestly? If you're paying that much for WordPress.com, you might as well use self-hosted WordPress.org with better hosting, or just use Squarespace.

The Real Cost Comparison

For a basic business website:

When you factor in the time cost of managing WordPress updates, security, plugin conflicts, and troubleshooting — Squarespace often comes out ahead for non-technical users.

Ease of Use: Night and Day

Squarespace wins this category hands down for beginners. The platform takes care of all technical maintenance — your only job is to create pages, customize designs, and publish content. Contact forms, newsletter signups, scheduling, and even course hosting are built in from the start. No plugins required.

WordPress throws a lot at you from day one. You'll need to:

The WordPress plugin library has over 60,000 options. Sounds great until you're searching "photo gallery plugins" and getting hundreds of results with no clear winner. On Squarespace, there's one gallery block. It works. It looks good. You move on with your life.

That said, WordPress's complexity is also its strength. Once you learn the system, you can build virtually anything. Squarespace has guardrails that keep things simple but also limit what you can do.

Design and Templates

Squarespace is famous for beautiful, polished templates — around 190 options, all designed with a consistent visual quality. The drag-and-drop editor is intuitive and lets you customize colors, fonts, spacing, and layouts without touching code. On higher-tier plans, you can add custom CSS and JavaScript.

WordPress offers thousands of themes (around 31,000 between official repository and third-party marketplaces). Quality varies wildly. Free themes might look dated or break with updates. Premium themes ($30-200) are generally better maintained but still require more hands-on configuration.

The WordPress block editor (Gutenberg) has improved significantly, but it's still not as polished as Squarespace's editor. For truly custom designs, most WordPress users add a page builder plugin like Elementor or Divi — which adds complexity and potentially cost.

Winner: Squarespace for out-of-the-box design quality. WordPress for unlimited design freedom (with more effort).

Features and Functionality

Blogging

WordPress started as a blogging platform and it shows. You get the most robust publishing tools available — scheduling, multiple authors, user roles, categories, tags, excerpts, password-protected posts, and infinite customization via plugins.

Squarespace has solid blogging features — better than most website builders — but more limited than WordPress. You can schedule posts, add multiple authors, create tags, and integrate social media. For most business blogs, it's plenty. For serious publishers, WordPress is the clear choice.

Ecommerce

Both platforms can sell products, but the approach differs:

Squarespace ecommerce:

WordPress ecommerce:

For small shops selling fewer than 100 products, Squarespace handles everything you need. For complex stores with specific requirements (subscriptions, memberships, advanced inventory, multi-vendor marketplaces), WordPress + WooCommerce is more capable.

See our comparison of Squarespace vs Shopify if ecommerce is your primary focus.

SEO

Both platforms can rank in Google. Neither has a meaningful SEO advantage out of the box.

Squarespace includes built-in SEO tools — customizable titles and descriptions, clean URLs, automatic sitemaps, and SSL certificates. They've added AI-powered SEO suggestions on newer plans.

WordPress requires an SEO plugin (Yoast SEO or Rank Math are popular) but offers more granular control over technical SEO settings. If you know what you're doing, WordPress gives you more levers to pull.

For most small business sites, SEO comes down to content quality and backlinks, not platform choice.

Support and Maintenance

Squarespace provides 24/7 email support and live chat during EST business hours. Because it's a closed platform, support can actually fix most issues.

WordPress.org has no official support. You're on your own with documentation, forums, and Google searches. Some premium themes and plugins include support from their developers, but it's inconsistent.

Maintenance is the bigger difference:

This is where Squarespace's higher monthly cost often pays for itself in time saved.

Site Speed and Performance

Squarespace sites typically score 40-50 on Google PageSpeed Insights. Not stellar, but consistent. You don't have much control over optimization beyond image compression and keeping pages clean.

WordPress performance varies wildly. A well-optimized WordPress site can score 99. A poorly configured one might score 10. You control the hosting, caching, image optimization, and plugin bloat — which is both powerful and dangerous.

With quality managed WordPress hosting (Kinsta, WP Engine, Cloudways), you can easily outperform Squarespace. With cheap shared hosting and too many plugins, you'll be slower.

Who Should Pick Squarespace

Squarespace is ideal for:

The platform handles the heavy lifting so you can focus on running your business. Check out our Squarespace reviews for real user experiences.

Try Squarespace free for 14 days →

Who Should Pick WordPress

WordPress makes sense for:

WordPress powers 43% of the web for good reason. Its flexibility is unmatched. Just go in with eyes open about the maintenance burden.

What About Switching Later?

Migrating from Squarespace to WordPress is doable but not trivial. You can export blog posts and pages, but designs don't transfer. Expect to rebuild the look of your site.

Moving from WordPress to Squarespace is similar — content can move, but you'll recreate the design in Squarespace's system.

The honest advice: pick the platform that fits your needs now and for the next 2-3 years. Don't choose WordPress "just in case" you need its features someday. By then, you might be redesigning anyway.

Final Recommendation

For 80% of small business owners reading this: start with Squarespace. The Core plan at $23/month gives you everything you need to build a professional, functional website without becoming an IT person. The design quality is better than what most people will achieve on WordPress without professional help.

Choose WordPress if you have specific technical requirements, a dedicated web team, or the time and interest to learn the platform deeply.

Both are legitimate choices for building a successful online presence. Squarespace just gets you there faster with less friction.

For more comparisons, check out Squarespace vs Wix and Squarespace vs Webflow. Or explore our list of best website builders for small business to see all your options.