Looking to build a website for your business? Explore the features, benefits, and drawbacks of Wix, WordPress, and Squarespace to choose the best CMS. Whether you’re a small business or looking for advanced e-commerce, find the right platform for your brand.
Updated 22 November 2024
VP - Backend Technology at Appventurez
Are you a business owner who wants to build your brand’s online presence? Well, this is very important because almost every business irrespective of any industry has created a brand value that has helped them boost their sales and profitability.
Indeed, today startups, internet stores, MSMEs, or even huge companies and corporations need to have their online representation. When it comes to building a website for your business, there are a ton of CMS systems available online but there are a few parameters that you must look for before choosing the best one. Not every CMS system is suitable for your business requirements.
Now, the first question that will come to your mind is which CMS system to choose. To help create a website for your business, here is a comparison of the top 3 CMS systems that are used by organizations globally and own a whopping 70% share in the CMS industry. By the end of this blog, you will be able to make sure, Wix vs WordPress vs Squarespace, is which website builder to choose.
The main difference between Wix, WordPress, and Squarespace is Usage. WordPress is the most widely used website building platform followed by Wix and Squarespace.
Although these low-code website builders are some of the best in the industry, there is a list of specific features, advantages, and drawbacks of each of them. The choice of the platform will depend on what exactly you expect from your business, the type of website that you are going to create, your abilities, and your pocket. In the following article, we will rank WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace based on several criteria to enable you to make a better choice for your business.
It is also admired for its simplicity, where its users can easily and quickly develop websites due to the fact that the user does not require well-developed web development skills. Before rolling out, make your selection by dragging and dropping the items, thus creating a website without typing a single line of code.
From the platform, a user has access to a range of templates and widgets that are uniquely designed for easy customization. Wix is especially favorably designed for small business people, freelancers, and businessmen who need the site to be created as soon as possible. Now let’s see: is Wix better than WordPress?
An amazing tool that is part and parcel of Wix is the Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI). This tool enables you to come up with a website by merely filling in some questions, you will be presented with layouts and designs based on your business needs.
Wix is very simple and fast to use when developing a website, and this is perfect for businesses that want to be online within the shortest time possible and even do not want to spend considerable time mastering the Wix system. Wix is best for amateur individuals who just want to create a beautiful website immediately without spending much time on website design.
While not as simple as Wix, Squarespace does come with a barely higher learning curve than Wix, and drag-and-drop functionality should not be a problem if one is used to it. It is especially loved by photographers, artists, and designers because of the refined and stylish designs of templates.
What is even more convenient, using this platform you can add any necessary inputs to these templates easily and within a few moments while keeping a very good design.
Well, Squarespace is lacking the ADI feature like most of the other platforms, but it has an easy-to-use CMS. It’s easy to use, and ideal if you don’t want the complexities of deeply styling your website; perfect for business websites.
Squarespace also comes equipped with helpful guides and tutorials for getting started, which is always a boon for a small business owner trying to build a sleek and professional web image. Squarespace is best for business types that place focus on the look of websites.
WordPress is great when it comes to the aspect of designing your site. First of all, WordPress is open-source, which is why you can change nearly all the aspects of your site. WordPress currently has thousands of free and paid themes, but if you have coding skills, you can design the website from scratch.
Furthermore, there are well-known page builders such as Elementor and WPBakery that have functionalities of a drag-and-drop mechanism, meaning you will be able to have the best of both; a simplified as well as an enhanced interface.
No matter if you have a blog or online shop, or represent a big company and have a website, WordPress helps to create a website as you need. Also, you can seamlessly implement third-party instruments and design features by applying the plugin service for nearly any function, from the top animations to the non-standard forms, WordPress is ideal specifically for business websites that need the ability to dictate design and features.
Therefore, if you wish to get the perfect website for your business, you can get in touch with wordpress website developers who will you create a website for your business. Now the answer to ‘Is Squarespace better than WordPress?’ is very clear.
Wix has a feature for e-commerce where you are easily able to create an online store with the platform. You can be able to add products, create payment solutions and gateways, manage orders, and check on stock. Therefore, Wix’s e-commerce features are quite appropriate for small businesses or first-time e-sellers.
However, there are some weak points; Wix’s e-commerce features are not as developed as the same ones on other platforms. Some of the features it lacks and which are available in other platforms include; The basic version of Wix may not support multiple currencies, there are limited options in invoicing taxes, and you cannot integrate Wix with third parties.
Wix is suitable for a small e-commerce store with the basic requirements.
Squarespace also offers a feature for e-business, built for having stunning product pages and simple check-out solutions. So, Squarespace’s e-commerce tools will be most valuable to small and mid-sized businesses that need a simple store design and a focus on stunning imagery.
For physical and digital products, it has an inbuilt stock management system and works with PayPal and Stripe for payments. However, like Wix, Squarespace’s e-commerce tools may be insufficient for really big and complicated stores. Squarespace is great for owners who simply want a beautiful storefront that is easy to manage.
There are many squarespace website builders who help businesses boost their sales online by creating a perfect business website for them.
WordPress, especially using the WooCommerce plugin is way more powerful in e-commerce than the other two. WooCommerce enables you to create an internet-based store with all the versatile features like product variations and choices, shipping and payment options, and stock management. When your store expands, there are additional features, added through the extensions of WooCommerce.
WooCommerce can easily connect to third-party applications, extend with more sophisticated marketing features, and handle complex stock. It also supports multi-vendor stores and subscription models, and many other things on the WordPress platform.
Overall, the proof for or against using either is fairly mixed; however, if your goal is to scale your e-commerce store or need additional functionality, WordPress is the way to go. WordPress with WooCommerce is recommended for growing or large businesses as they always need some additional features and functionality.
The most basic items that are needed for SEO are available in Wix including meta tags, URL management, and sitemaps. Yet it has less comprehensive SEO organizing than Squarespace and WordPress have.
However, when it comes to advanced aspects of SEO or when a business wants to rank for some competitive keywords, Wix may not be enough. Wix does provide some SEO features, but the ones that you get are not very complex.
One of the key features of Squarespace in terms of SEO as compared to Wix is that not only can you change meta descriptions and URL slugs, header tags, and alt tags of images. Squarespace equally makes automatic code that is clean and optimized for the search engine.
Squarespace does have fairly good SEO built in however, it is not quite as comprehensive or customizable as WordPress, particularly for companies with highly specialized industries. Squarespace comes with good native SEO, as well as some level of customization.
The most powerful SEO features are available with the help of WordPress if it is used in correlation with plugins, such as Yoast SEO or RankMath. These plugins offer on-page SEO advice, assist in content optimization, and allow finer control of metadata, XML-sitemaps as well as schema implementation.
WordPress also provides opportunities for technical SEO tuning, which can become useful for businesses to outcompete rivals in terms of SEO. WordPress is the most developed platform in the sphere of SEO and internet marketing.
This makes it clear that in terms of SEO, which is the most important sauce in content marketing, the battle between Wix vs WordPress vs Squarespace is won by WordPress.
Wix has a free subscription with some constraints like being surrounded with Wix ads and no custom domain. For basic, these plans cost $14/month while the business plan and the e-commerce plan offered cost $23/month to $39/month respectively.
The pricing is appropriate for small companies that require a straightforward site and do not wish to pay significant amounts of money at the beginning. Since Wix is very affordable, many wix website developers help businesses by creating websites for them on Wix’s platform.
Squarespace pricing available currently starts at $16 per month for a personal site and $54 for higher-tier e-commerce. Although costing just a tad more than Wix, Squarespace comes with hosting, design tools, and SSL certificates making it perfect for a one-stop website creation experience.
WordPress is an open source software and is available free of cost but to install WordPress and host the site one has to spend some money. Various hosting plans are possible: shared hosting – from $3 per month, basic web hosting – from $10 to $25, and even more per month, for managed WordPress hosting.
Although WordPress has a wider range of various types of tariffs, it can turn out to be relatively costly if you are going to need certain extra options and services.
With this, we come to the end of our debate of ‘Wix vs WordPress vs Squarespace, which is a better website builder for business? here are a few key takeaways:
Choose Wix if you don’t have much technical stuff in building a website or if you are a small businessman. Wix is for businesses that require simplicity with fundamental of e-commerce or portfolio facilities.
Select Squarespace for a clean and sleek design if you are a designer, or just want a gorgeous-looking website. Squarespace is preferable for artists, craftsmen, entrepreneurs, or people who focus more on their site’s appearance.
Select WordPress if you want full control, more specific shops, or if e-commerce has to be expandable. WordPress is ideal for any business with growth potential and one needs full authority to manage every detail of the site from its appearance to functionality.
Appventurez is a Product development company that provides professional services to businesses. After reading this article, it is clear that creating a website is a very tedious and difficult task. Therefore, to make things easier for you, Appventurez can help build your website without any hassle. Our team of expert developers makes sure that your business’s website is made as per your expectations and business requirements. So without any further adieu, get in touch with us.
Elevate your journey and empower your choices with our insightful guidance.
VP - Backend Technology at Appventurez
Auresh Saxena joined Appventurez as VP of Technology (Backend) with 14+ years of experience as a Backend Developer. He has deep technical expertise in React, Node js, Gatsby, Python, PHP jQuery, Quality Assurance, and AWS.
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