Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress: Which Is Actually Best? (2026)

Every "Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress" article on the internet follows the same formula: list some features, declare a winner, collect affiliate commissions. Most of them were last updated in 2024 and still reference pricing tiers that no longer exist.

This one is different. We ran real Lighthouse tests, pulled Core Web Vitals data from Google's Chrome User Experience Report, and compared actual pricing as of January 2026. Every number is cited. If something has changed since publication, the source links will show you.

The quick comparison

Sources: Wix pricing, Squarespace pricing, CrUX Technology Report, W3Techs via Colorlib, HTTP Archive Web Almanac

Wix: the flexible middle ground

Wix has come a long way from the Flash-based website builder it was in 2006. As of 2026, it powers 4.3% of all websites globally and grew 32.6% year-over-year, making it the fastest-growing CMS in the world.

Pricing (AUD, billed annually)

Source: Wix AU pricing, January 2026

Be aware that Wix advertises monthly prices but charges annually. The A$17/mo Light plan means A$204 paid upfront. Monthly billing costs more. After the first year, your free domain auto-renews at A$12 to A$16 per year.

What Wix does well

The drag-and-drop editor is genuinely good. G2 users rate Wix's drag-and-drop functionality at 9.3 out of 10. You can place elements anywhere on the page, not just within pre-defined content blocks. For people who want precise control over layout without touching code, this is a real advantage.

The app marketplace is enormous. With 500+ apps covering bookings, restaurants, events, forums, and CRM integrations, Wix can handle use cases that Squarespace simply cannot. A yoga studio that needs online booking, a restaurant that needs table reservations, a gym that needs membership management: Wix has purpose-built apps for all of these.

Wix's AI site builder (ADI) works reasonably well for getting a basic site up in minutes. PCMag Australia gave Wix an Editors' Choice award in part because of how quickly a non-technical user can go from nothing to a published site.

Trustpilot rating: 4.6 out of 5 from 22,859 reviews. That is a genuinely high score at that volume.

Where Wix falls short

Performance is Wix's biggest weakness. We ran Lighthouse tests on three Australian Wix sites. Mobile performance scores came in at 51 (The Flower Room), 48 (Skinnymixers), and 39 (Petbarn). The average: 46 out of 100.

Independent testing backs this up. MakingThatWebsite's side-by-side comparison found Wix's average Largest Contentful Paint (the time until the main content appears) is 6.8 seconds on mobile. Squarespace averaged 3.6 seconds for the same test.

The culprit is Wix's freeform editor. It generates heavier page structures with more JavaScript than Squarespace's template-based approach. Every Wix app you add makes this worse.

You cannot export your site. If you decide to leave Wix, you cannot take your design, pages, or site structure with you. Blog posts can be exported as XML. Everything else must be rebuilt from scratch on whatever platform you move to. This is the single most important thing to understand about Wix: you are renting, not owning.

Customisation has a ceiling. Despite the drag-and-drop flexibility, you cannot access the underlying code. Developers cannot optimise what they cannot control. Once your business needs outgrow what Wix's editor and apps can do, you hit a wall.

Who Wix is for

Small businesses that need specific integrations (bookings, memberships, events), want to build the site themselves, and are not heavily dependent on mobile search performance. If your business model relies on walk-ins or word-of-mouth rather than Google, Wix's speed disadvantage matters less.

Squarespace: the design-first choice

Squarespace's templates have always been its calling card. Photographers, creatives, restaurants, and portfolio-based businesses gravitate toward it because the default designs look professional with minimal effort.

Pricing (USD, billed annually)

Squarespace prices in USD globally. Australian users pay in USD with their bank's exchange rate applied.

Source: Squarespace pricing, March 2026

Note: Squarespace is rolling out new plan names (Basic, Core, Plus, Advanced) in the US. Other regions, including Australia, may still see the legacy plan names (Personal, Business, Commerce Basic, Commerce Advanced). The pricing is the same either way.

What Squarespace does well

Pages load faster than Wix. Squarespace ranked first among all CMS platforms for Interaction to Next Paint (INP), with 95.85% of sites achieving good INP scores. Its average mobile LCP of 3.6 seconds is nearly twice as fast as Wix's 6.8 seconds.

The reason: Squarespace uses CDN technology aggressively and generates cleaner, lighter page code. The trade-off is less design freedom, since template constraints keep the code lean.

The templates genuinely look good out of the box. Most Squarespace sites look professional without a designer touching them. For creative professionals, this is the platform's core value proposition. G2 users rate Squarespace 4.4 out of 5 (1,082 reviews), slightly higher than Wix's 4.2.

All plans include unlimited storage and bandwidth. Wix limits storage to 2 GB on its cheapest plan. Squarespace gives you unlimited storage on every plan, including the $16/mo tier.

Built-in analytics are solid. Every plan includes website analytics showing traffic, referral sources, and popular content. Wix gates this behind higher-tier plans.

Where Squarespace falls short

The extension ecosystem is tiny. Squarespace offers roughly 36 extensions. Wix has 500+. WordPress has 60,000+. If you need a booking system, a membership portal, a forum, or a niche integration, Squarespace probably does not have it. You are limited to what the platform provides natively.

Ecommerce on the Business plan carries a 3% transaction fee. On top of whatever your payment processor charges. A business doing $10,000 per month in sales pays $300 per month in Squarespace transaction fees alone. You need the $36/mo Commerce Basic plan to eliminate this. This is the most common hidden cost complaint from Squarespace users.

Trustpilot tells a different story. Despite the high G2 rating, Squarespace scores 1.2 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 1,357 reviews. The gap between G2 (where ratings tend to skew positive) and Trustpilot (where frustrated users go to vent) is the largest of any platform in this comparison. Common complaints: billing issues, limited customer support, and difficulty cancelling.

Design flexibility is constrained. You work within Squarespace's templates. You can customise colours, fonts, and content, but the structural layout is fixed. For businesses that need something that does not fit a template, this becomes a problem.

Who Squarespace is for

Creative professionals (photographers, designers, artists), small service businesses that want a clean site with minimal effort, and anyone who values design quality over customisation depth. If you do not need a booking system, a membership portal, or heavy ecommerce, Squarespace delivers the best out-of-the-box experience.

WordPress: the powerful default

WordPress is the default. It powers 42.4% of all websites and holds 59.8% of the CMS market. Nearly every web agency in Australia builds on WordPress. There are more WordPress developers, more WordPress themes, and more WordPress plugins than any other platform.

But for the first time in 20 years, WordPress is shrinking. It declined 1.0 percentage points between March 2025 and March 2026, while Wix grew 0.8 points and Squarespace grew 0.2.

Pricing

WordPress.org (the self-hosted version) is free to download. The costs come from everything around it.

A typical small business WordPress site costs A$300 to A$1,500 per year to run, depending on hosting quality and whether you outsource maintenance. That is often more expensive than Wix or Squarespace once you factor in the full stack.

What WordPress does well

Flexibility is unmatched. With 60,000+ plugins and thousands of themes, WordPress can do almost anything. Ecommerce (WooCommerce), learning management, membership sites, job boards, directories, multi-language sites: if there is a use case, there is a WordPress plugin for it.

You own everything. The code is open source. Your database is yours. Your content is yours. You can move to any hosting provider, hire any developer, and modify anything. There is no vendor lock-in. One practitioner on r/LawFirm put it directly: "You must buy the domain and the hosting. Your name must be on these accounts."

SEO control is the most granular. Plugins like Yoast and Rank Math give you control over schema markup, canonical URLs, XML sitemaps, redirect management, and structured data at a level that Wix and Squarespace cannot match. For businesses competing in high-value search verticals, this matters.

The developer ecosystem is massive. More agencies know WordPress than any other platform. If your developer gets hit by a bus, you can find another one tomorrow. That is not true for most other platforms.

Where WordPress falls short

Performance is the worst of the three. According to Google's CrUX data, only 43.4% of WordPress sites pass all three Core Web Vitals on mobile. The median mobile Lighthouse score is 38 out of 100.

We saw this firsthand. Our Lighthouse tests on three Australian WordPress sites returned mobile performance scores of 27 (Smiths Lawyers), 35 (Domain.com.au), and 47 (Canstar Blue). Only realestate.com.au scored respectably at 70, and that site has a full engineering team behind it.

The root cause is slow TTFB (Time to First Byte). Only 32% of WordPress sites have good TTFB, compared to 60%+ for Wix and Squarespace. WordPress needs to query a database and execute PHP on every page load. Wix and Squarespace serve pre-built pages from a CDN.

Sites built with Elementor (the most popular WordPress page builder) are even worse: only 26.99% pass Core Web Vitals.

Plugin management is a real burden. A typical WordPress business site runs 15 to 30 plugins. Each plugin is a potential security vulnerability, a potential compatibility conflict, and a performance drag. WordPress sites need regular updates to core, themes, and plugins. Skip updates and you risk getting hacked. Do updates without testing and you risk breaking something.

An agency owner on r/webdev shared what happens when businesses try to escape this: a client moved their custom WordPress site to Wix, saving $80,000 per year in agency fees. The WordPress ecosystem creates ongoing costs that the other two platforms absorb into their monthly fee.

The learning curve is steep. G2 data rates WordPress at 84% for ease of setup, compared to 91% for Wix. WordPress requires you to choose and configure hosting, install the software, select a theme, install plugins, and handle security. None of that is hard for a developer, but it is a lot for a business owner doing it themselves.

Who WordPress is for

Businesses that need maximum flexibility, have a developer (or agency) to manage it, and require features that website builders cannot provide. Multi-language sites, complex ecommerce with WooCommerce, membership platforms, or sites with custom business logic. WordPress is also the right choice for any business that insists on full ownership of their website's code and data.

Head-to-head: real performance data

Most comparison articles just list features. Here is actual data from Google's Chrome User Experience Report and our own Lighthouse tests.

Core Web Vitals pass rates (mobile, late 2025)

Source: CrUX Technology Report via HTTP Archive, SearchEngineJournal analysis

Our Lighthouse tests (mobile, January 2026)

We tested nine real business websites, three on each platform.

None of these are outliers. They are typical business websites on each platform. The WordPress sites consistently scored lowest, with LCP times regularly exceeding 10 seconds on mobile. Wix and Squarespace performed similarly, with Squarespace showing slightly better results on average.

For context, Google considers an LCP under 2.5 seconds "good." Only the CrUX field data for sites like Skinnymixers (1,288ms real-user LCP) and Carriageworks (1,602ms real-user LCP) actually hit that threshold, and that is because real users on fast connections pull the average down from what Lighthouse simulates on a throttled connection.

Why this matters for your business

A Deloitte study commissioned by Google found that a 0.1-second improvement in load time increased retail conversions by 8.4%. Google's own research found that 53% of mobile visitors abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

If you are spending money on Google Ads or SEO, every millisecond of load time affects the return on that spend. A WordPress site with an 11-second LCP is not just slow. It is actively losing you money.

The option nobody mentions

Every comparison article presents this as a three-way choice: Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress. Pick one.

There is a fourth option that most articles ignore, because most articles are written by affiliate marketers who earn commissions on platform signups.

Custom-built websites on modern frameworks (Next.js, Astro, Remix) exist in a different performance category entirely. These are what companies like Vercel, Stripe, and TikTok use for their own websites. Moydus estimates custom Next.js sites achieve around 92% Core Web Vitals pass rates, with sub-1-second LCP.

This is not about hand-coding HTML like it is 2005. Modern frameworks generate optimised static pages at build time, serve them from a global CDN, and include image optimisation, code splitting, and caching out of the box. No plugins. No database to hack. No monthly platform fees.

The trade-off is obvious: higher upfront cost and a smaller pool of developers who can build and maintain it. Custom sites start at $4,000 to $10,000 with an agency, compared to $0 to $39 per month on a website builder.

For a sole trader or micro-business, that math does not work. Use Squarespace or Wix.

For a professional services firm where a single client is worth $5,000 to $50,000, where mobile search performance directly affects lead generation, and where you want to own your website rather than rent it: a custom-built site pays for itself faster than most businesses expect.

How Much Does a Website Cost in Australia?

Real pricing data from 15+ Australian agencies, platform costs, and what you actually get at each price point.

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The decision framework

Choose Wix if:

• You want to build the site yourself with drag-and-drop
• You need specific integrations (bookings, memberships, events, restaurants)
• Your clients find you through word-of-mouth or social media, not Google search
• You are comfortable with vendor lock-in and cannot export your site later

Choose Squarespace if:

• Design quality matters and you want a professional-looking site with minimal effort
• You are a creative professional (photographer, designer, artist, architect)
• You do not need complex integrations or a large app ecosystem
• You want the simplest all-in-one solution at the lowest price

Choose WordPress if:

• You need maximum flexibility and custom functionality
• You have (or will hire) a developer to build and maintain it
• You need full ownership of your code, content, and data
• You are building something complex: multilingual sites, large ecommerce stores, membership platforms

Consider custom-built if:

• Mobile search performance directly affects your revenue
• You are spending money on Google Ads or SEO and want maximum conversion
• You need a site that loads in under 1 second, not 4 to 8 seconds
• You want to own your website outright with no ongoing platform fees

Sources

• CrUX Technology Report (HTTP Archive / Google) - Real-world CMS performance data from Chrome users
• Search Engine Journal: 2025 CMS CWV Rankings - Analysis of CrUX data by CMS platform
• W3Techs CMS Market Share via Colorlib (March 2026) - CMS usage statistics across all websites
• Wix AU Pricing (January 2026) - Australian Dollar pricing for Wix plans
• Squarespace Pricing (March 2026) - Full plan comparison with hidden costs
• White Peak Digital: Wix Pricing Australia - Detailed Wix cost analysis
• G2: Squarespace vs Wix - Side-by-side user ratings (1,082 vs 1,695 reviews)
• G2: Wix vs WordPress - Feature-by-feature comparison with user data
• MakingThatWebsite: Squarespace vs Wix (2026) - Side-by-side performance and feature testing
• CoreWebVitals.io: WordPress Guide - WordPress CWV benchmarks and TTFB analysis
• Stan Ventures: CMS Market Share Report 2025 - Year-over-year CMS growth data
• Moydus: Website Builder Comparison 2026 - Performance benchmarks across platforms
• Deloitte / Google: Milliseconds Make Millions - Impact of load time on conversions
• Google / SOASTA: Mobile Speed Benchmarks - 53% abandonment at 3+ seconds
• PCMag Australia: Wix Review 2025 - Editors' Choice website builder review
• WP Engine AU Pricing - Managed WordPress hosting costs in Australia
• Fluccs WordPress Management - Australian managed WordPress maintenance pricing