Which is right for your small business?
It’s one of the questions I get asked most often, usually by someone who’s been putting off building a website for six months because they can’t work out where to start.
Squarespace. Wix. WordPress. They all promise to be easy. They all have templates that look lovely in the demo. And they’re all completely different in ways that really matter, especially if you’re running a small service-based business and you want your website to actually work for you, not just exist.
So let’s cut through it.
Squarespace
Squarespace is where a lot of small business owners start, and it’s not a bad place to begin.
The templates are genuinely beautiful. The interface is clean and intuitive. Everything, hosting, security, domain, is bundled into one monthly price, which makes budgeting easy and removes the hassle of managing separate accounts. If you want to get something live that looks polished without needing any technical knowledge, Squarespace will do that for you.
What does Squarespace cost?
Squarespace’s current UK plans (billed annually, including VAT) run from around £14.40/month for a basic site up to £20.40/month for the Core plan, which suits most service-based small businesses. You get a free custom domain in year one; after that, a .co.uk domain renews at around £8/year.
The pricing is transparent and predictable, which is one of Squarespace’s genuine advantages. You know exactly what you’re paying.
Where do the limits appear?
Squarespace works brilliantly within its own system, but that system has edges. You can’t always do exactly what you want, and customisation is limited compared to other platforms. Blog functionality is basic. SEO options are improving but still restricted. If you want to add a booking system, email marketing, or more complex features, you’re often dependent on Squarespace’s own tools or a limited set of integrations.
The real limit is this: when your business evolves and you want more control, you’ll need to rebuild elsewhere. Your Squarespace content doesn’t migrate neatly to another platform.
Best for: Creatives, portfolio businesses, and service providers who want something beautiful and simple. Not ideal if SEO, blogging, or long-term flexibility matters to you.
Wix
Wix markets itself heavily as the easiest option, and in terms of pure drag-and-drop simplicity, it probably is.
There’s a huge library of templates. You can get something live relatively quickly. And for someone who’s never built a website before, the learning curve is genuinely gentle.
What does Wix cost?
Wix’s entry-level Light plan starts at £9/month (annual billing) but that only gets you 2GB of storage and basic features. To remove Wix’s own ads from your site, you need at least this paid plan. For anything resembling a proper small business site with e-commerce and analytics, you’re looking at the Core plan at around £16/month, which gives you 50GB of storage.
Here’s where the costs can creep up: Wix’s app marketplace is extensive, but many of the useful tools, booking systems, email marketing, advanced forms, are paid add-ons, running anywhere from £3 to £20/month each. It’s easy to start at £9/month and find yourself paying considerably more once you’ve added the things your business actually needs.
Where do the limits appear?
Wix has a reputation for weaker SEO, which matters a great deal if you want Google to find you. The code it generates can be messy and slow, which affects both search rankings and user experience.
The bigger issue is migration. If you ever want to move platforms, which many businesses do once they’ve outgrown Wix, it’s genuinely painful. Your content doesn’t export cleanly, which means a lot of manual work or starting again.
The free plan also places Wix branding on your site, which undermines trust immediately and isn’t something I’d recommend for any business taking itself seriously.
Best for: Getting something live quickly as a starting point. Not something I’d recommend building a long-term business on.
WordPress
Full disclosure: WordPress is what I build on, and it’s what I recommend for most of the service-based businesses I work with. But not just because I know it well, because it’s genuinely the right tool for the job.
WordPress powers 43% of the internet. It’s the most widely used platform in the world, and for good reason. It’s endlessly flexible, outstanding for SEO, and you own your content completely. It lives on your hosting, not on someone else’s platform. If you ever want to move things around, change designers, or scale up, you can.
What does WordPress cost?
This is where it gets a bit more nuanced, because WordPress (the software) is free, but you pay for the components separately.
A realistic breakdown for a small service-based business looks something like this: domain name around £10–15/year; hosting from about £5–20/month on shared hosting, or £15–60/month for managed hosting (which handles security and updates for you); a premium theme like Divi, which I build with, at around £89/year; and a handful of essential plugins, most of which are free.
In practice, most small businesses I work with are paying somewhere in the region of £15–30/month for everything ongoing. That’s genuinely competitive once you factor in what you’re getting.
Where do the limits appear?
There’s a learning curve, I won’t pretend otherwise. WordPress isn’t quite as drag-and-drop as the others straight out of the box. And because you’re managing your own hosting, you’re also responsible for keeping things updated and secure (or paying someone to do that).
The flip side: there are essentially no limits on what WordPress can do. Thousands of plugins cover almost any functionality you can think of. Storage depends on your hosting plan, not the platform itself. And unlike Squarespace or Wix, your content is yours entirely, it’s not locked into any platform’s ecosystem.
With the right setup (and I always make sure clients can manage their own sites before I hand them over), it becomes very straightforward to maintain.
Best for: Service-based businesses that want a professional, scalable website they genuinely own — one that works hard for SEO and grows with them.
So which one should you choose?
The honest answer is: it depends on what your business needs the website to do.
A reflexologist in her first year who needs a simple, beautiful site to show her services and take bookings has different requirements from an interior designer building a portfolio, growing a blog, and focusing on Google visibility.
The mistake most people make is choosing a platform based on what they’ve heard of, or what a friend used, or what’s cheapest in year one, without thinking about what they’ll need in year three.
That’s how you end up rebuilding. And rebuilding costs far more than getting it right the first time.
Before I build any website, I have a conversation with every client about exactly this: what does your site need to do right now, and where do you want to be in two years? The platform choice flows from that.
If you’re building a serious service business and you want a website that gets found on Google, reflects your brand properly, and is easy for you to manage yourself, I would point you toward WordPress every time.
Thinking about building or rebuilding your website?
I build WordPress websites for small service-based businesses, the kind of site that actually gets found, looks the part, and you can update yourself without needing to call anyone.