Website builders provide non-designers with a straightforward solution to building a website. With its affordable pricing and easy-to-use interface, Wix is a tough one to beat. Still, Squarespace comes in a close second with its drag-and-drop blocks that allow you to put together a professional-looking website in a matter of minutes. Our comparison guide outlines the good and bad of each to assist you in finding the best website builder for your site.
Squarespace Compared to Wix
Wix is the best website builder for most users. With a few clicks, you can move elements around on your website to create a page that looks just like what you’ve designed in your head. There’s no coding necessary, making it an excellent choice for just about any individual or business who needs an eye-catching website at an affordable price. Try Wix for 14 days with a 100% money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied.
Squarespace is most likely to help out creatives with their websites. Squarespace includes numerous highly visual premade templates, making it a great option for photographers, artists, and other creators. With built-in blogging tools, Squarespace also gives writers a solid option. Take advantage of the 14-day free trial to try it out.
More Top Website Builders
We reviewed dozens of the best website builders on the market, narrowing the choices to the top five that are best for most individuals and businesses. See all of our top picks to determine which website builder might be the best option for the site design and functionality you need.
Where Squarespace Shines
Ease of Use: Practically anyone can set up a Squarespace website quickly and without frustration. Squarespace has a structured editor with plenty of customization, letting you create a site that looks just like you envisioned without having to go through intensive processes or learning to code the backend.
Blogging and Content Management: Squarespace is one of the best website builders for blogging and content management, thanks to its multiple handy features for writing. If you’re familiar with WordPress, you’ll notice a lot of similarities in Squarespace’s blog editor, including post scheduling, categories, and customizable URLs. Squarespace also lets you syndicate your posts with your social media channels, add contributors, and create multiple blogs for one site.
Premade Templates: Squarespace templates are some of the most beautiful and professional to come from a website builder. They’re all premade and ready to go, and you can tweak them to your heart’s content to get the precise look and feel you’re going for. The templates require zero coding experience, yet they look like you’ve hired a professional designer to code your site. There are currently more than 100 templates to choose from.
Mobile Apps: Squarespace doesn’t keep its customers tied to their desktops or laptops when they need to take care of their websites. Instead, Squarespace offers mobile apps. There are a few different ones, including the general Squarespace app, which you can use to quickly update pages, write new blog posts, and make other site changes on the go. You can also use Commerce to manage your Squarespace shop, or Analytics to learn more about your website traffic.
Image and Font Selection: As a complete solution to your website needs, Squarespace includes stock images and fonts you can use to customize the look of your site. The platform offers 600 Google fonts and 1,000 Adobe fonts with all plans. For images, Squarespace partners with Unsplash, allowing free use of their images on your site, and also offers cheap access to Getty photos.
Analytics: Squarespace’s analytics provide a full website overview of traffic, visitor demographics, visitor activity, and SEO. All this information remains in the Squarespace dashboard for you to view whenever you’d like, or you can use the Analytics app on your mobile device.
Where Squarespace Falls Short
Several Image-Heavy Templates: While Squarespace templates are excellent for turning photos and artwork into a visually stunning website, many of them are very image-heavy. This is great for your site’s aesthetic appeal, but not so great for loading times. So while you might find a theme you love, you might not be able to utilize its full potential without sacrificing some speed.
Website Navigation: Organization is key when it comes to website navigation. Squarespace offers a two-level menu system, meaning that you can have a drop-down sub-menu trailing from your primary menu. But that’s where the hierarchy ends. If you have a larger site that calls for a more complex navigation system, you may find Squarespace unable to keep up with your needs.
Pricey Ecommerce Plans: If you have an ecommerce site, you’ll either need to pay for one of Squarespace’s ecommerce plans or pay Squarespace’s 3% fee for every shop transaction. At first glance, $35/month for the lower plan seems fair, but that plan doesn’t include must-have features for many shops, like shipping calculations and abandoned cart recovery. For those, the price is $54/month—double the price of Wix’s lowest ecommerce plan that includes these features.
Clunky Backup Process: Unlike with other website builders, there’s not a super simple way to back up a Squarespace site. Nor are there any automatic backups. Backing up a site requires site owners to download their data with an XML file, which doesn’t actually allow them to download the full site, as product pages, drafts, and other pieces aren’t included in an XML. Plus, beginners likely won’t know what to do with that file if they ever do need it to restore site data.
Where Wix Shines
Simple Setup: Not sure what kind of design you need for the site you’re trying to create? Wix ADI chooses the best setup for you. Answer some questions about the goals of your site, and Wix’s artificial intelligence will conjure up the right layout and design for you. Of course, you’re free to customize it from there, but the initial setup couldn’t be more straightforward.
Customization: Wix is one of the most customizable website builders. Its unstructured editing tool means that you can literally place elements exactly where you want them to be on your site, giving you full control over the finished product. There’s no need to touch an ounce of code, making Wix an excellent choice for beginners or anyone who simply doesn’t want to mess with coding.
SEO: In its beginning years, Wix didn’t have the greatest built-in SEO features, but now it includes basic and advanced SEO features, like clean URLs, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, robots.txt files, and instant indexing with Google. Wix even gives users a personal SEO plan that walks through setting up a site through Google Search Console to improve search engine visibility and rankings.
App Options: The Wix App Market is filled with more than 250 apps—similar to WordPress plugins and Squarespace integrations—that add functionality to your site. The App Market is a breeze to navigate and has everything from marketing and selling tools to navigation and design elements.
Affordability: Wix offers a 100% free plan that’s not just a trial. Start with this plan for as long as you want to test out Wix’s features and capabilities. You’ll probably need to switch to a paid plan eventually, as the free one sticks Wix advertising on your site with a less-than-desirable Wix subdomain URL. However, paid plans start at just $13/month for personal use and $23/month for business use, which is relatively affordable compared to other website builders and hosting plans.
Automatic Backups: You can create a manual backup of your site at any time by logging into your Content Manager dashboard and clicking a button. But every week, Wix does an auto-backup of any site that’s had changes since the last backup, giving website owners peace of mind that their site is safe on the web.
99.98% Uptime: In addition to those two kinds of backups, Wix proactively monitors and optimizes their infrastructure to make sure all Wix sites are available to visitors anytime. Maintenance happens in a manner that never requires your site to go down. Plus, the combined power of data centers running on AWS, Google Cloud, and Fastly (as well as Wix’s own) and the autoscaling built into Wix plans will result in no site-loading hiccups for your visitors, no matter how many are stopping by at once.
High-end Security Compliance: For any data at all, from your site’s own to visitor payments, Wix practices the highest level of industry security standards. That is bolstered by a team of Wix experts whose sole purview is to monitor and optimize the infrastructure, as well as dedicated teams ready to help if ever your site should experience a direct cyberattack.
Where Wix Falls Short
Capped Storage Space: With today’s HD photos and videos, it’s necessary to have plenty of storage space with a hosting plan. There are several paid Wix plans to choose from, but each one has a cap on the amount of storage you can have. The highest amount comes with the Business VIP plan for $49/month, which includes 50 GB of storage. In comparison, Squarespace offers unlimited storage on all of its plans, including its lowest-prices Personal plan for $12/month.
Mobile Page Speed: If you have a website in today’s digital world, it needs to be mobile responsive, plain and simple. With responsiveness comes speed, which Wix mobile sites lack compared to other website builders. In a comprehensive study from Backlinko that considered more than 5 million desktop and mobile websites, Wix fell among the slowest hosting providers in terms of mobile speeds.
Open Design: One of Wix’s prominent and popular features is also one of its downfalls: its unstructured drag-and-drop builder. While this form of editing is great for people who kind of know what they’re doing with website design, it can be a headache for complete beginners. The open-ended format means that anything can move. If you’ve ever designed a website, you know how significantly a small move can impact its look and function—and it’s not always easy to restore it.
Customer Support: Wix’s contact options are relatively limited, especially if you aren’t a customer yet. Head to the contact page, and there’s no phone, live chat, or email to contact with questions. Once you have an account, you can use the ticketing system to get questions answered that aren’t already answered in the Help Center, but there’s still no option for other forms of support, like live chat, that could get your problems solved quicker.
The Final Verdict on Squarespace Compared to Wix
Squarespace and Wix are incredibly comparable website builders. With premade templates and drag-and-drop editing, these two are versatile and simple enough for almost anyone to use to build their websites. Honestly, you can’t go wrong with either one.
If pricing is your primary concern, Wix is the better option. It has a free plan to get you started, and its low-tier paid plans offer several advanced features that you need to pay more for in Squarespace.
If blogging and mobile speed are your site’s most important focuses, Squarespace should be your choice. Wix falls short with mobile speed compared to other website builders and doesn’t quite compare to Squarespace’s robust content management system.
However, Wix’s flexible pricing and its quick-to-start setup make it an ideal option for most people, which is why we choose it as our top pick. With over 700 premade templates and the ability to edit them any way you’d like, Wix makes it easier than ever before to get the site of your dreams.
Read our in-depth review of the best website builders to learn more about other top picks, like Shopify and Weebly, and how they stack up.
Comparing The Best Website Builders
We spent hundreds of hours testing out the top website builders, including Wix and Squarespace. Check out our full comparison guide here.
- Wix – Best website builder for most users
- Squarespace – Best website builder for creatives
- Web.com – Fastest way to build a new website
- Shopify – Best ecommerce website builder
- WordPress – Best for bloggers and content creators
- Weebly – Best free website builder
When you’re in the market for a new website, it doesn’t get much easier to create one than using a website builder like Squarespace or Wix. In our opinion, Wix slightly edges out Squarespace with its open-ended editing tools, affordable packages, and SEO-friendly websites. Take advantage of the 14-day free trial to make sure it’s right for you and your site before committing.
