Squarespace vs Wix: Which Is Actually Better?

If you have watched a YouTube video in the last five years, you have probably seen a Wix advert. Their marketing is everywhere, and they have invested heavily in making Wix feel like the default choice for anyone building a website. Credit where it is due: Wix has improved enormously over the past few years. It is a genuinely capable platform now.

But improved does not mean identical. Squarespace and Wix take fundamentally different approaches to web design, and those differences matter when you are trying to build something that looks professional, performs well, and represents your business properly.

Design Quality

This is the biggest differentiator, and it is the reason most of our clients choose Squarespace.

Squarespace templates are curated, cohesive, and designed to look polished from the moment you start building. Every template follows consistent design principles. Fonts, spacing, colour palettes, and layout proportions all work together. It is genuinely difficult to make a Squarespace site look bad, which is a design achievement in itself.

Wix gives you more freedom, and that sounds like a good thing until you see the results. With absolute positioning and freeform drag-and-drop, Wix lets you put anything anywhere on the page. In practice, this means it is very easy to create something that looks messy, inconsistent, or unprofessional. The templates are more numerous but less consistently polished than Squarespace's. For someone without design training, this freedom often works against them.

If you are a professional designer, Wix's flexibility might appeal. For everyone else, Squarespace's opinionated design approach produces better results with less effort.

Code Quality and Performance

Under the hood, the two platforms are quite different. Squarespace generates cleaner, more semantic HTML and CSS. This matters for page speed, accessibility, and how search engines read your content.

Wix has historically had issues with code bloat, meaning the underlying code is heavier than it needs to be. They have made significant improvements with their Wix Studio rewrite, but Squarespace sites still tend to load faster and score better on tools like Google PageSpeed Insights out of the box.

For most business owners, you will never look at your site's source code. But you will notice if your site feels sluggish, and your visitors will too.

SEO

Both platforms offer solid SEO fundamentals: custom meta titles and descriptions, alt text, sitemaps, and SSL. In 2026, neither has a dramatic SEO advantage over the other for the typical small business website.

Where Squarespace edges ahead is in URL structure. Squarespace URLs are clean and predictable. Wix URLs have historically included hash fragments that were not ideal for SEO, though they have largely fixed this. Squarespace also generates cleaner markup, which helps search engines parse your content more efficiently.

The reality is that both platforms can rank well. Your content strategy, keyword targeting, and backlink profile matter far more than which builder you use.

E-commerce

Squarespace includes e-commerce capabilities on all plans. The Core plan ($23/month) gives you zero transaction fees, advanced analytics, and everything most small businesses need to sell online. Product pages are beautifully designed and integrate seamlessly with the rest of your site.

Wix also offers e-commerce across multiple plans, with their App Market providing additional functionality through third-party integrations. Wix has more e-commerce add-ons available, but the quality and reliability of third-party apps varies.

For a curated, consistent shopping experience, Squarespace wins. For sheer breadth of e-commerce features and integrations, Wix has more options, though not all of them are well-executed.

Ease of Use

Both platforms are designed for non-technical users, and both do a good job of it. Wix uses a freeform editor where you can drag elements anywhere on the page. Squarespace uses a structured grid system (Fluid Engine) that guides you toward clean layouts.

Wix feels more intuitive at first because it behaves more like a presentation tool. But that initial ease can create problems: elements that overlap accidentally, inconsistent spacing across pages, and mobile layouts that need significant manual adjustment.

Squarespace has a slightly steeper initial learning curve, but the structured approach means your site stays consistent and professional-looking as you add and edit content. Most of our clients are fully comfortable editing their Squarespace sites within an hour of training.

Pricing

Wix starts at $17/month for its entry plan (ad-free) and goes up to around $159/month for their top business plan. Squarespace starts at $16/month and goes to $99/month.

At comparable feature levels, the pricing is similar. But Squarespace includes more in its base plans. You do not need to buy extra apps or add-ons for core functionality like contact forms, galleries, basic analytics, and SEO tools. With Wix, you may find yourself adding paid apps from the Wix App Market to get functionality that Squarespace includes by default.

When Wix Might Be Better

Wix could be the better choice if you want maximum creative freedom and have design experience, if you need very specific third-party integrations available through the Wix App Market, or if you are building a highly interactive site with complex functionality that benefits from Wix's broader app ecosystem.

When Squarespace Is Better

Squarespace is better if you care about design quality and want your site to look polished without hiring a designer, if you want a clean, fast-loading website with good SEO fundamentals built in, if you value simplicity and do not want to manage third-party apps, and if you want to focus on your business rather than tinkering with your website.

Our Honest Take

Wix has come a long way, and dismissing it would be unfair. But for the businesses, charities, and creative professionals we work with, Squarespace consistently produces more professional results with less ongoing fuss. The design quality is noticeably higher, the platform is more stable, and clients find it easier to maintain their sites long-term.

If you are weighing up Squarespace and Wix for your next project, we are happy to chat through the specifics. Book a discovery call and we will give you our honest recommendation.