“Which platform should I use” is rarely a technical question. It usually arrives about a week after someone has decided they need a new website, and what they actually want to know is which of these choices they are going to regret in three years’ time.
Most comparisons available online do not answer that. A good number are written by someone with a referral fee attached to one of the answers. The rest compare feature lists, which tells you less than you would think, because every platform here can produce a good small business website. That has been true for years. The features are rarely the constraint.
What decides it is everything after launch. Who edits the site when you want a price changed on a Friday afternoon. What it costs to keep alive once the build invoice is paid. What happens when the person who made it stops answering the phone. And the one people rarely think about at the start: how easily you could change platform, or change who looks after it, if you needed to.
This guide compares WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow and Shopify across seven things that actually matter after your site goes live, with current UK prices, a look at what each one takes to move away from, and a fifth option that has arrived in the last couple of years and tends to get left off the list.
Where I am coming from
I build mostly on WordPress. That is a preference I have arrived at over the years rather than a neutral position, and you should know it before you read my view on anything below.
It is not a default, though. What someone ends up with depends on what they are trying to do, who is going to look after it, and what they can sensibly spend. I have talked people out of a WordPress build more than once, usually because they needed something decent inside a week, and had no real plans to change it much afterwards, which is not where WordPress earns its keep.
So there are places in this piece where WordPress is not the answer, and I have tried to be specific about them rather than vague. If any of it reads as grudging, that is worth knowing too.
What you are actually choosing between
Underneath the feature comparison sits a simpler decision: how dependent you are prepared to be, and on whom.
Every website sits somewhere on that spectrum.
At one end is a bespoke system built by a single agency or freelancer. Quick to sell, comfortable to own while the relationship is good, and entirely dependent on that one company or individual still being there, and still wanting the work.
A garden centre once came to me with a website nobody could edit. The agency that built the system had dissolved. There was no one to call, no documentation, and no way to change a price without paying someone to reverse-engineer another firm’s code first. The site worked perfectly well, which was the strange part. It simply could not be changed by anybody, and every month it sat there it became more expensive to move.
The same trade happens in a much milder form with any hosted platform. Squarespace, Wix and Shopify all ask you to depend on one company for the software, the hosting, the updates and the support. The difference is that those companies are large, well funded and unlikely to vanish. They are also properly documented, they run partner programmes, and there are plenty of capable people who make a living building on them. If your Squarespace designer stops replying, finding another one is not difficult. That is a reasonable trade, and for a lot of businesses it is the right one.
Open source moves the dependency again rather than removing it. WordPress is not a company you rely on. The code is public, the documentation is public, and the number of people who can read both runs to hundreds of thousands. So when something goes wrong, or when you simply want to work with someone else, the person you hand it to can see the whole thing, rather than only the parts other platforms choose to expose.
That is the real distinction, and it is the one feature lists never show you. Every option here makes you dependent on something. What differs is how easy it is to change your mind, and how much of that decision stays yours.
The five options, briefly
Short descriptions first, so the comparison later has something to hang on. The arguments come after.
If you are choosing primarily in order to sell, the comparison that matters more is WooCommerce against Shopify, and that is a longer argument than this piece can hold.
The comparison
| Measure | WordPress | Squarespace | Wix | Webflow | Shopify |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Typical cost to run | ~£29/mo (worked example below) | £12–£29/mo | £9–£25/mo | $15–$25/mo site plan, plus seats | £19–£49/mo |
| Who can run it day to day | Owner, with training and a maintained setup | Owner, comfortably | Owner, very comfortably | Designer, usually | Owner, comfortably |
| Ecosystem and hiring pool | Very large | Large | Large | Smaller, specialised | Very large for commerce |
| Search and AI ceiling | No practical ceiling | High, some structural limits | High, some structural limits | High | High for product pages |
| Selling products | Capable via WooCommerce | Adequate for a small range | Adequate for a small range | Limited | Purpose-built |
| What it costs to leave | Low | Moderate to high | Very high | High | Moderate |
| What breaks as you grow | Maintenance load rises | You reach a hard edge | You reach a hard edge sooner | Cost and specialist dependency | Non-shop content gets awkward |
Five website platforms compared across seven measures. Prices and figures checked August 2026.
The four things that actually decide it
What it costs to run
The subscription is the number people compare, and it is the least useful one.
Hosted platforms bundle everything into a monthly fee, which is predictable and easy to budget. On annual billing, Squarespace runs from £12 a month for a simple site to £29 for its mid commerce tier. Wix runs from £9 to £25 across the same ground. Shopify starts at £19 and steps up to £49 once you need more than one staff account and lower transaction fees. Webflow is priced in US dollars, at $15 a month for a static site and $25 once you need its content system, and additional editor seats are charged on top, which is the line most people miss.
WordPress splits the same costs apart. Managed hosting worth putting a business site on runs somewhere around £20 to £30 a month, and theme and plugin licences add roughly £100 a year. Call it £350 a year, or about £29 a month, before anybody’s time.
Cheaper hosting exists, at a few pounds a month, and it is not a con. It is shared space on a busy server, with slower response under load, thinner backup provision and support that may or may not be helpful. For a personal blog that is a perfectly sensible trade. For a site taking bookings or payments, it is the wrong two hundred pounds to save.
Which puts WordPress at or slightly above the hosted platforms rather than below them, and that is the honest position. The software is free. Running it is not.
Here is the concession that matters, though, and it is a bigger one than most WordPress people will make.
The best WordPress site comfortably beats the best Squarespace site. The worst WordPress site is far worse than the worst Squarespace site, and there is no floor under it at all. A hosted platform limits how much damage a poor build can do, because security, updates and hosting are handled for you regardless of who put the site together.
So if you cannot reliably tell a good developer from a bad one, and most people cannot, because it is not your job, a hosted platform protects you from a decision you are not equipped to make. That is a real reason to choose one and I would not argue with anybody who did.
Who runs it after launch
WordPress hands you a system. Squarespace hands you a website. That single difference decides more of these conversations than everything else combined.
A WordPress site needs an owner. Core updates, plugin updates, backups that have actually been tested, uptime, and somebody to call at nine on a Friday evening when the checkout stops working. That work does not go away because nobody is doing it. It just accumulates quietly until it becomes expensive.
Either that is you, or you pay someone. Hosted platforms fold it into the subscription, which is a genuine part of what you are paying for and worth counting when you compare prices.
The honest test is not whether you could learn to do it. It is whether you will still be doing it in eighteen months, when the business is busy and the website is working fine and nothing seems urgent. Most people know the answer to that about themselves.
Ecosystem, and who else can work on it
The usual version of this comparison counts plugins and apps. Tens of thousands against a few hundred. It is true and it is not very interesting, because no small business needs tens of thousands of anything.
The version that matters is how many people can work on your website apart from the person who built it.
This is the argument I have the most obvious self-interest in avoiding, so here it is plainly. If you have a WordPress site and you want to stop working with me, you can hand it to a great many other people and they will be able to pick it up. The code is open, the conventions are widely known, and the supply of capable people is deep in almost every town in the country.
Squarespace, Wix and Shopify all have real partner networks, so finding somebody else is not the hard part. Handing over often is.
On a hosted platform, the account is the website. The site, the subscription and often the domain all sit inside one login, and if the person who built it opened that account in their own name, which plenty do, moving it means a formal transfer through the vendor that the other side has to accept. You are asking for your website rather than simply taking it.
Webflow adds a price to the same problem. Access is sold by the seat, at around $39 a month for a full one, so who is allowed to touch the site is a billing decision as well as a practical one.
WordPress keeps those things apart. The hosting account is in your name, the domain is in your name, and the people who work on the site are user accounts you create and delete yourself. Changing supplier takes a couple of minutes and nobody’s permission.
A supplier who is genuinely comfortable being replaced is telling you something useful. One who is not is telling you something too.
The search and AI ceiling
Somebody will tell you that you cannot rank on Squarespace. It is usually somebody who builds WordPress sites for a living.
For a site of this size, the platform is very rarely the limiting factor. All five produce fast, crawlable pages with editable titles, descriptions and headings. What decides whether you get found is what the site says, who links to it, and whether it answers the questions people are actually asking. That is true on every platform here.
Where the platform does start to bite is further out, and it bites in specific ways: fine control over structured data, redirect handling at scale, URL architecture as the site grows past a few dozen pages, and access to server-level performance work. WordPress gives you all of that. The hosted platforms give you some of it, and where they stop, they stop.
For most businesses reading this, that ceiling sits comfortably above where you are operating. It is a reason to choose WordPress if you can already see yourself hitting it. It is not a reason to avoid Squarespace because somebody told you it was bad for SEO.
What it costs to leave
This is the section I would read first, because it is the one nobody thinks about at the start and everybody thinks about eventually.
The asymmetry here is larger than most people expect.
WordPress
The database and the files. Standard formats, portable to any host, and your content, structure, URLs and settings come with you intact. Moving is a project rather than a rebuild.
Squarespace
One export format: an XML file built for importing into WordPress. Squarespace is upfront that not everything comes, because so much of the platform relies on its own JavaScript and CSS. Store and product pages do not export. Neither do album, index, calendar or portfolio pages, audio and video blocks, drafts, or any of your styling and custom CSS. If you run more than one blog, only one of them comes.
There is a detail in Squarespace’s own guidance worth reading twice. The XML carries links to your images rather than the images themselves, so importing into a self-hosted WordPress site can pull references only. Cancel your Squarespace subscription afterwards and those links stop working. Your images vanish from a site you have already moved to.
Wix
There is no export, and Wix says so plainly. Its help centre explains that because Wix is a software-as-a-service platform, a site has to run on Wix’s own servers, and its architecture does not support hosting it anywhere else. The same page notes that the content you build belongs to you. Both things are true at once, which is precisely the point. Your data comes out as CSVs for products, contacts and orders. The website itself cannot leave. Any custom functionality built with Wix’s developer tools stays behind too, so that spend does not survive the move either.
Webflow
Export needs a paid Workspace plan, not a Site plan, so paying Webflow to host your site does not include the right to take its code. What comes out is HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images. What stays behind is the CMS content, the ecommerce, user accounts, localised pages, forms and site search. Collections export separately as CSV. What you end up with looks like your website but does not work like it.
Shopify
The best of the five on data, and it does not pretend otherwise. Products, customers, inventory and orders all come out as CSV, documented properly, with no surprises waiting in the file. The catch is everything a spreadsheet cannot hold. Your theme and its customisations, every app you have configured and the way those apps talk to each other all stay behind. You leave with a record of what you sold and none of the shop that sold it.
Which brings out the distinction worth carrying away from all of this.
Changing who works on your website is straightforward on any platform here. Squarespace, Shopify and Wix all have deep partner networks, and handing your Shopify store to a different Shopify developer is an ordinary Tuesday.
Changing the platform is the part that differs, and it differs enormously. On a hosted platform, your software, your hosting and your support all come from one company, permanently. Leave and you rebuild.
WordPress keeps those apart. The software is one decision, the host is another, and the person who looks after it is a third. You can change any one of them without touching the other two.
That is not an argument that WordPress is better. It is an argument about how many of these decisions stay open after launch, and it is worth knowing the answer before you sign anything.
The option nobody lists
You can now describe a website to an AI tool and get a working one back in about twenty minutes. Tools like Lovable, v0 and Bolt do this well enough that the output is often genuinely impressive, and they are improving quickly.
They are worth taking seriously, for the right job.
Worth using one for:
Where it comes apart:
That last one deserves the detail. GitClear, which analyses code changes at scale, tracked 623 million of them between 2023 and 2026 as AI authorship rose sharply. Duplicated code blocks were up 81%, copy-and-paste within a single change up 41%, and constructs that hide errors rather than handle them up 47%, while the signals associated with tidying code up afterwards fell away. Their own summary of the pattern is that vibe-coded projects ship quickly and then hit a wall at around three months, when the debt starts costing more than the speed saved.
None of that is an argument against AI writing code. I use these tools daily. It is an argument about who is reading the output, because the failure modes cluster in exactly the places you would least want them: forms, payments and anything holding customer data.
The trap is not the build. It is the point a few months in when you need to change something, the person who generated it has moved on, and there is no documentation because nobody ever wrote any.
There is a version of this that works much better, and it is not the one getting the attention. The AI tools built into Squarespace, Wix and Shopify generate a site inside a supported platform. Whatever comes out still has a content editor, still gets security updates, still has a support line. For a non-technical owner who wants to use AI to get a site up quickly, that is a considerably safer bet than a standalone generator, and it barely gets discussed.
One last thing, because people are surprised by it. If you have a vibe-coded site and you want it turned into something you can edit yourself, with a proper content system behind it and a maintenance path in front of it, rebuilding is usually cheaper than inheriting. Understanding somebody else’s generated code well enough to safely extend it often takes longer than building it properly from the start. That is worth knowing before you spend three months on something you will pay to replace.
Which one is you
The solo practitioner
Consultant, coach, therapist, designer. You need to look established, and you are never going to maintain a website.
The trades business
Builder, electrician, garage, salon. You need to be findable, credible and contactable, cheaply.
The growing service business
Several staff, real enquiry volume, and plans that will change more than once.
The design-led brand
The website is a marketing asset in its own right, and you have a designer involved.
The retailer
Products are the point of the website rather than something bolted on the side.
The limits of this
Prices move, and the ones here were checked in August 2026. If you are reading this much later, treat them as indicative and check before you budget. Webflow publishes in US dollars, so what you actually pay moves with the exchange rate. Wix and Squarespace both run introductory offers that do not survive the first renewal.
This is a UK view throughout. Pricing, payment processing rates and support hours all differ elsewhere.
I have not built production sites on all five platforms in the last twelve months. My WordPress view is current and hands-on. My Webflow and Wix views draw more on migrations, audits and client conversations than on recent builds, which is a real limitation and worth saying.
And the obvious one. I make my living building websites, mostly on WordPress, so I have a commercial interest in one of the five answers here. I have been specific about the places WordPress is the wrong choice rather than leaving them vague. You should still read the whole thing knowing where I sit.
