A lot of UK small business owners start on Wix or Squarespace, and it’s an entirely rational choice. Both platforms are fast to set up, require no technical knowledge, and look polished straight out of the box. For a brand-new business that just needs something live, they work.
But something shifts around year two or three. The monthly costs have crept up. You’re hitting walls on customisation. Your SEO performance is frustrating. And somewhere in the back of your mind is a nagging question: should I have built this on WordPress?
In 2026, that question has a clearer answer than ever — but it comes with an important caveat about what kind of WordPress we’re actually talking about.
The real cost of Wix and Squarespace in 2026
Both platforms have quietly increased their pricing over the past few years. Wix’s Core plan — the minimum you need for a professional business site without Wix branding — now runs at around £29 per month. Squarespace’s Business plan sits at a similar level. Neither figure sounds alarming on its own, but it adds up to £350+ per year for a platform that owns your site, not you.
That ownership question is the one most people miss. If you build your business website on Wix, you cannot export it. The design, the layout, the structure — it’s locked to Wix’s infrastructure. If you decide to move, or if Wix changes its pricing or discontinues a feature you rely on, you’re rebuilding from scratch. That’s a meaningful risk for any business that depends on its website.
Squarespace does allow content exports, but only in limited formats. Neither platform gives you a clean, portable website you can take anywhere.
Where WordPress genuinely pulls ahead
WordPress powers around 43% of all websites globally. It’s not that dominant because it’s fashionable — it’s dominant because it gives businesses real ownership and real flexibility.
The SEO advantage is concrete. With WordPress, you have full control over technical SEO elements that Wix only partially supports: custom URL structures, schema markup, robots.txt, .htaccess files, and granular redirect management. Plugins like Rank Math or Yoast give you professional-grade optimisation tools. For a business relying on organic search, that level of control matters — especially with Google’s AI Overviews changing how visibility works in 2026.
Beyond SEO, WordPress scales in ways the hosted builders simply don’t. WooCommerce handles everything from simple product pages to complex multi-currency stores. Custom post types, membership areas, booking systems, directory functionality — all achievable without platform-level restrictions or expensive app add-ons.
And critically: your site is yours. The files live on a server you control. You can move hosts, take your data, rebuild or redesign without starting from zero.
The part nobody mentions: WordPress is more work
Here’s the honest part. WordPress doesn’t manage itself. That’s precisely why so many small business owners choose Wix — they don’t want to think about plugin updates, security patches, PHP versions, or daily backups. They want to focus on running their business.
Left unmanaged, a WordPress site accumulates risk. Outdated plugins are the most common entry point for attacks. Performance degrades as themes and plugins pile up. Backups get forgotten until the moment they’re desperately needed.
This is the real comparison in 2026. It’s not Wix versus WordPress — it’s Wix versus managed WordPress. And that’s a very different conversation.
What fully managed WordPress actually means day to day
A fully managed WordPress setup means someone else handles the technical running of your site, so you get the benefits of WordPress without carrying the burden of maintaining it.
In practice, that typically includes:
- Core, plugin, and theme updates — applied regularly, tested before going live, not left to accumulate
- Daily backups stored off-site, restorable quickly if something goes wrong
- Security monitoring — active scanning for vulnerabilities, malware, and unusual login activity
- Uptime monitoring — so if your site goes down at 2am on a Sunday, it’s flagged and addressed before your Monday morning customers find a blank page
- Performance maintenance — caching, database optimisation, and image handling kept in shape over time
- A person to contact when something unexpected happens
That last point is underrated. Wix and Squarespace offer support, but it’s platform support — they’ll help you with their system, not with your business website as a whole. A managed WordPress service is accountable for your site specifically.
Hidden Cost of an Unmanaged WordPress Website
When does switching actually make sense?
Not every business needs to move. If you’re a sole trader with a five-page brochure site and Wix is working fine, there’s no urgent case for change. But there are clear signals that a managed WordPress setup would serve you better:
You’re paying £30+ per month on Wix or Squarespace and not seeing the SEO results you’d expect. That budget, redirected to a managed WordPress plan, often delivers more — better performance, better SEO control, and full site ownership.
You’ve hit a wall on customisation. Booking systems, integrations, custom functionality — if you’re stretching the platform to do something it wasn’t built for, you’re already outgrowing it.
Your site is central to your business. If customers book through it, enquire through it, or judge your credibility by it, the risk of vendor lock-in or platform instability is simply too high to ignore.
You’re thinking about the long term. A WordPress site built and maintained properly is an asset that grows with your business. A Wix site is a subscription that can be disrupted by decisions made in San Francisco.
The migration question
Moving from Wix or Squarespace to WordPress is rarely as painful as people expect, particularly if it’s handled by someone who does it regularly. Content migrates. URLs can be preserved to protect your existing rankings. Design is rebuilt to match or improve on what you had. The process typically takes two to four weeks for a standard small business site.
What takes longer is ranking recovery if redirects aren’t set up properly — which is exactly why migration should be handled by someone who understands both WordPress and SEO, not just one or the other.
The bottom line for UK small businesses in 2026
Wix and Squarespace are not bad products. But they were designed around a specific trade-off: simplicity now, limitations later. For a business at the start, that trade-off makes sense. For a business that’s grown and depends on its website, it starts to cost more than you think — in money, in lost SEO opportunity, and in platform risk.
Managed WordPress removes the reason most people avoid WordPress in the first place. You get the ownership, the SEO control, and the scalability of WordPress, without the ongoing technical maintenance that makes self-managed WordPress unappealing.
If you’re reconsidering your current platform, it’s worth getting a straight answer on what the switch would involve for your specific site — rather than assuming it’s more complicated than it is.