WordPress vs Squarespace for a small UK business

If you’re weighing up WordPress against Squarespace for a small business website, here’s the short version. Both are decent platforms. The right one depends on how much of the ongoing work you want to do yourself, or pay someone else to do.

Squarespace is a single subscription. It includes hosting, updates and a secure connection (the padlock in the address bar) as standard. WordPress comes in two different shapes: a hosted WordPress.com plan that works in a similar way, or the free, self-hosted WordPress.org software, where you find your own hosting and take on more of the upkeep. This post sets out what each option costs, who looks after security, how easy each is to move away from later, and where a hand-built site fits in as a third choice.

The quick answer

Squarespace suits an owner who wants one subscription to cover design, hosting and updates, and is comfortable with its limits if they ever want to move the content elsewhere. WordPress.com suits an owner who wants a similar, hosted setup but built on WordPress. Self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org) suits an owner who wants more control over hosting and setup, and is willing to manage updates and security themselves, or pay someone to. We’ve set out the detail below, with sources throughout so you can check the figures yourself.

WordPress.com or WordPress.org first

Before comparing WordPress with Squarespace, it helps to separate the two versions of WordPress, because they change the cost and the workload completely.

WordPress.com is the hosted service. You sign up, pick a plan, and WordPress.com looks after the hosting, updates, backups and security for you, in a similar way to Squarespace. WordPress.org is different: it’s the free software behind WordPress, which you download and install on hosting you choose and pay for separately. On self-hosted WordPress, security “depends on your host and hosting package”, according to WordPress.com’s own comparison of the two.

In this guide, “WordPress” on its own means self-hosted WordPress.org, since that’s what most small businesses mean when they ask about WordPress. We say “WordPress.com” when we mean the hosted plan.

What each one costs

Prices change often, so check the official pages before you commit. The figures below were correct at the time of writing, in September 2026.

Squarespace replaced its old plan names with Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced in 2025, and a UK reviews site tracking the change reports price rises that many existing customers met at renewal in 2026. If you’re already on an older Squarespace plan, it’s worth checking what you’re due to pay next. Squarespace also charges a 2% transaction fee on its Basic plan for anything you sell, dropping to 0% on Core, Plus and Advanced, with card processing through Squarespace Payments adding roughly 1.5% to 2% plus 25p per transaction, per the same pricing guide.

For self-hosted WordPress, the software costs nothing, but the running costs sit elsewhere. Shared hosting typically runs £2 to £25 a month, managed WordPress hosting (where the host takes on more of the technical side) typically runs £7 to £120 or more a month, and a year of hosting once introductory offers end commonly lands around £150 to £350, per a UK hosting cost guide. A premium theme is often a one-off £30 to £100, and paid add-ons commonly cost £100 to £500 a year, per a WordPress cost breakdown. If you pay someone to maintain the site, professional maintenance commonly runs £50 to £200 or more a month, per a maintenance cost guide. These are typical ranges only, and your costs will vary depending on your host, your add-ons and how much you do yourself.

Who looks after updates and security

Squarespace is a hosted platform, so it applies its own platform updates and secure connection, and the owner doesn’t patch anything themselves. That’s one of the things the subscription is paying for.

Self-hosted WordPress puts that job on you, or on whoever hosts the site for you. That doesn’t make it unsafe by default, but the responsibility for keeping the software current sits with the owner or their host, not with WordPress itself.

The scale of that responsibility is worth knowing. Patchstack’s State of WordPress Security in 2026 report recorded 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, up from 7,966 the year before. 91% sat in add-ons rather than in WordPress’s own code, and once a flaw goes public, the report found a fifth are attacked within six hours, nearly half within a day, and seven in ten within a week.

In July 2026, a flaw in WordPress’s own core software, nicknamed wp2shell, let attackers take over sites without a password, and WordPress fixed it in an emergency release, version 7.0.2. We’ve written up what happened, and why it didn’t touch any site we build, in our full wp2shell post.

Squarespace doesn’t publish a comparable count of vulnerabilities, so there’s no fair way to say one platform is simply “more secure” than the other in raw numbers. What’s clear is who carries the job of keeping the software current: Squarespace itself on Squarespace, and you or your host on self-hosted WordPress.

Moving your site later

If you build on Squarespace, moving away later is more limited than many owners expect. Squarespace’s own export help article sets out what a standard export includes: layout pages, one blog page and its posts (up to 1,000 comments per post), text and image blocks, and gallery pages. It doesn’t export album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio or store pages, page-specific headers, footers or sidebars, extra blog pages, dropdown menus, audio or video blocks, product blocks, drafts, or style and design settings. Images aren’t included in the export at all and have to be saved separately, and Squarespace is clear that content can’t be moved from one Squarespace site to another using export and import.

WordPress content is generally easier to move, because it uses a standard, widely supported structure that other systems and hosts know how to read. WordPress.com itself describes moving from a hosted plan to self-hosted WordPress as a supported path, though there’s no official figure for exactly how complete that move is in every case, so it’s worth checking your own content, type by type, before you rely on it.

Being found on Google

Neither platform guarantees good search results on its own. Google’s own guidance applies whichever one you use: every page should have a distinct, descriptive title, because Google may rewrite one it finds vague, and every page benefits from its own short description for people deciding whether to click through in the search results.

There’s no dated, independent source comparing how WordPress and Squarespace sites perform in search by default, so treat any claim that one platform is simply better for being found on Google with some caution. What we can say is that WordPress runs on 40.3% of all websites, and Squarespace on 2.4%, according to W3Techs’ own comparison. That’s a measure of popularity, not of search performance.

Which is right for you

Squarespace is a reasonable fit if you want one subscription to cover hosting, updates and a secure connection, you’re happy designing within its templates, and you’re not planning to move platforms later. Self-hosted WordPress, or a hosted WordPress.com plan, is a reasonable fit if you want more control over hosting and setup, and you or your host are willing to keep the software current. If you’d rather hand the whole job to someone else and never look at a login screen, there’s a third option.

A third option: nothing to log in to or update

We build a different kind of site: pages built by hand rather than assembled by a platform each time someone visits, with nothing for you to log in to, learn or update. When you want a change, you email us and we make it.

Our own pricing page sets out the current rates: builds start from £395 for a new business needing three pages, or £795 for a standard site, with single pages from £195. The first year of hosting and a .com or .co.uk domain are included, and ongoing care plans start from £35 a month if you want us to keep an eye on things after that.

The trade-off is worth saying plainly: you don’t edit the site yourself. Every change goes through us by email, rather than through a login you manage. For some owners that’s the whole point. For others who want to make their own edits day to day, WordPress or Squarespace will suit better.

You can read more about how we build on our website design and build page. We work with small businesses across North Wales, and nearby in Wrexham and Chester.

Get in touch

If you’re still weighing up WordPress against Squarespace, or want to talk through the hand-built option instead, get in touch and tell us a bit about your business. We’ll give you a straight answer about which route fits, even if it’s not the one that earns us the work.