For a five-page small business site, Wix and Squarespace cost $17-$49/mo and handle maintenance for you, but your pages, forms and bookings stay locked inside their editor. WordPress on managed hosting costs more up front and gives you files, database and a domain you can move anywhere. The decision is about exit cost, not launch cost.
What does a five-page site need?
Most small business owners describe the same thing: a home page, an about page, a services page, a contact page with a working form, and one more for testimonials or pricing. Maybe appointment booking later. Maybe a shop someday. That list fits on every platform in this comparison. None of them will fail you at launch.
The differences show up in month 14. That's when the promotional pricing ends, when you want to add a booking system, when a developer asks for FTP access and you discover there isn't any, or when your marketing person wants to install a tool the platform doesn't support.
Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress: what each one costs
Here is what a working five-page site runs on each platform, using published list pricing as of early 2026. All figures assume annual billing, which is where the advertised numbers come from.
| Wix (Core) | Squarespace (Business) | WordPress + managed hosting | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform/hosting | $17/mo | $23/mo | $89/mo per site (TopSyde) |
| Domain | Free year 1, then ~$20/yr | Free year 1, then ~$20/yr | ~$15/yr at a registrar you control |
| Contact form | Included | Included | Included (plugin) |
| Booking | Wix Bookings, from $29/mo plan | Acuity, from $20/mo | Plugin, $0-$149/yr |
| Ecommerce transaction fee | 0% on paid plans | 3% on Business plan | 0% (processor fees only) |
| Backups you can download | No | No | Yes |
| Move the site elsewhere | Rebuild | Rebuild | Copy files and database |
| Year 1 total (no booking) | ~$204 | ~$276 | ~$1,083 |
| Year 3 total (with booking) | ~$1,100+ | ~$1,500+ | ~$3,250 |
The builders win on price. That's not a close call, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. A café, a solo therapist, a side-project landing page: Squarespace is a reasonable answer and I say so to people regularly.
What the table doesn't show is the third column buys back time that the first two columns spend. On a builder you are the person who notices the form stopped sending, who checks whether the booking app update broke the layout, who reads the email about plan changes. On managed hosting that's somebody else's job. Whether that trade is worth $66/mo depends entirely on what an hour of your time is worth and how much the site matters to revenue.
Where owners get stuck on Wix and Squarespace
Three patterns come up over and over in support threads and in the migration requests that land in our inbox.
The plan you need is two tiers above the one you priced. Squarespace's Business plan carries a 3% transaction fee on commerce, so the moment you sell anything you're pushed to Commerce at $28-$52/mo. Wix Core doesn't include Wix Bookings on every configuration, so the booking feature that sold you on Wix arrives with an upgrade. Nobody lies about this. It's in the pricing table. People just don't read pricing tables for features they plan to add in year two.
Third-party tools that assume server access. Your accountant wants a specific invoicing integration. Your marketing agency wants a tracking script in the head of every page with custom logic. Your SEO contractor wants to edit the robots.txt and serve structured data. Builders support some of this and refuse the rest, and you find out which after you've committed. We wrote about how much third-party scripts cost a page in what Microsoft Clarity adds to a WordPress page load, and the measurement approach applies to any platform. On a builder you often can't measure it at all because you can't see what's loading before the renderer runs.
Leaving is a rebuild, not a migration. Squarespace exports a WordPress-compatible XML file containing blog posts, basic pages and galleries. It does not export your layouts, your product pages, your form submissions, your member accounts or your booking history. Wix exports blog content and a CSV of store products. Everything else is a screenshot and a rewrite.
Squarespace's own support documentation is direct about the limits of its export, and Wix's is too. The platforms aren't hiding it. But an owner who hears "you can export your content" reasonably assumes that means "you can move your site," and those are different sentences.
What portability is worth in real dollars
According to W3Techs, WordPress runs 43.4% of all websites and about 61% of sites using a known content management system (2026). That share matters for a practical reason that has nothing to do with loyalty: it means the tooling exists. Migration plugins, developers who've done it 200 times, documentation, forums, plugins for every niche. When you want to leave a WordPress host, you copy a database and a folder of files. We cover the process in how to migrate a WordPress site without breaking it, and it's a known procedure with known failure points.
Put a number on it. A five-page site rebuild by a freelancer runs $2,500-$6,000 depending on how custom the original was. If there's a chance you'll move platforms in the next five years (new brand, acquisition, an agency that only works in WordPress, a feature the builder never shipped), you're carrying that rebuild as a contingent liability. The $66/mo difference between Squarespace Business and managed WordPress buys about 38 months before it equals the low end of a rebuild.
That math only works if the rebuild is likely. For a business that will look the same in 2031 as it does now, it isn't, and you should take the cheaper platform.
When a builder is the right call
I'd pick Squarespace or Wix in these situations without hesitating:
You're testing an idea and the site may not exist in nine months. You have no budget beyond a few hundred dollars a year. The site is a brochure with a contact form and will stay that way. You have nobody technical anywhere near the business and no plans to hire one. You enjoy editing your own pages on a Sunday afternoon.
If three of those describe you, stop reading comparison posts and go build on Squarespace this weekend. The best site is the one that exists.
What changes the calculation is money moving through the site. Once the site books appointments, takes payments or generates leads you follow up on, downtime and data loss stop being an inconvenience and start being revenue. Website downtime runs $137 to $427 per minute for businesses that depend on their site, and on a closed platform your only recovery option during an outage is waiting for the vendor's status page to update.
When WordPress on managed hosting wins
Four signals, and you only need two of them.
You want booking, memberships, a store or a client portal within two years. You work with an agency, a freelancer or a marketing contractor who needs real access. Your site is a meaningful source of leads or sales. You want to own the asset the way you own your logo files.
The thing people get wrong about WordPress is assuming they've signed up for maintenance. Self-hosted WordPress on cheap shared hosting does come with homework: core updates, plugin updates, backups, security, the PHP version nobody upgraded. That's the version of WordPress that scared you off, and fairly.
Managed hosting removes that work from your calendar. What managed WordPress hosting covers in 2026 goes through the line items, but it comes down to updates tested before they're applied, backups taken and verified, malware scanning running continuously, and a human who answers when something breaks. You get the builder's promise (somebody else handles the infrastructure) without the builder's lock-in.
At TopSyde that's $89/mo per site, with TopSyde Sentinel handling malware detection, 24/7 monitoring on uptime and performance, and support that responds in under 2 hours during business hours. Our pricing page lists what's included, and the spec sheet has the technical details if you want to hand them to a developer before you commit.
How to decide in one afternoon
Write down three things: what the site does for revenue today, what you want it to do in 24 months, and who besides you will ever touch it.
If the answers are "not much," "about the same" and "nobody," take Squarespace. You'll be fine, and you'll spend $276 a year instead of $1,068.
If any answer involves money, growth or another person, the portable option is worth the premium. WordPress isn't better software, but an asset you can move is worth more than an asset you can't, and you won't know which you needed until the day you need to move.
For agencies and freelancers managing this decision on behalf of clients, the calculation is different again. Client sites on builders generate no recurring revenue and nothing to build on. What DIY WordPress hosting costs an agency every month breaks down the billable-hour side, and our agency plans cover the white-label arrangement.
Moving an existing site
If you're already on Wix or Squarespace and reading this because something has stopped working, the path out is a rebuild. There's no way around that. What varies is who does it and what you keep.
Blog posts transfer through the export file. URLs can be preserved with redirects so your search rankings survive, which matters more than most people realize. Design gets rebuilt in a WordPress theme, usually faster than the original build because the content and copy already exist.
We handle migrations as part of onboarding, including a 30-day money-back guarantee if the result isn't what you expected. If you want to see what that looks like on a live account before deciding, book a consultation or read through the service level terms first. Either is a reasonable next step. Rebuilding on the same platform you already outgrew is not.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I move my Squarespace site to WordPress without losing my Google rankings?
Yes, if you map the old URLs to the new ones with 301 redirects before launch. Rankings usually dip for two to six weeks and recover once Google recrawls. The content itself exports cleanly; the design and layout get rebuilt.
Is Wix or Squarespace cheaper than WordPress for a five-page site?
At list price, yes. Squarespace Business is $276/yr and Wix Core is $204/yr versus $1,068/yr for a managed WordPress plan starting at $89/mo per site. The gap narrows when you add booking apps, commerce plans and your own maintenance time.
Do I need a developer to run a WordPress site?
Not for editing pages, posts or images. The block editor handles that. You need help for custom functionality, and you need somebody handling updates, backups and security, which is what managed hosting covers so you don't have to hire for it.
What happens to my booking data if I leave Wix?
Wix does not export booking history, customer records or calendar data in a format another platform can import. Download what you can from the dashboard as CSV before you cancel, and plan to re-enter recurring clients manually in the new system.
Senior WordPress Engineer
8+ years WordPress & WooCommerce development
Rachel is a senior WordPress engineer at TopSyde specializing in WooCommerce performance and plugin architecture. She has built and maintained high-traffic e-commerce sites processing millions in annual revenue.
