Squarespace vs WordPress: Easier Myth Debunked

Everyone says Squarespace is the easy option for non-technical business owners. You have probably heard this from a friend, from a podcast ad, or from a designer who lost interest in WordPress around 2018. The argument went like this: WordPress is for techies, Squarespace is for normal people, pick the easy one.

That argument made sense for about a decade. It does not make sense now.

I had a call with a business owner yesterday morning who was halfway through building a Squarespace site for her shop in Killarney. She wanted to know if WordPress was really as scary as everyone said. I told her the truth: the comparison she had been told to make is three years out of date. AI website builders have collapsed the difficulty curve. The 60-second build that Squarespace marketed for years is now a WordPress reality. And the trade-offs that came with picking Squarespace, the lock-in, the transaction fees, the missing features, never went away.

Let me take this myth apart piece by piece.

The Myth That Built Squarespace

Squarespace built a billion-dollar business on a single insight: WordPress was too hard for most people. They were right at the time. WordPress demanded theme choices, plugin research, hosting decisions, and a dashboard that looked like a spaceship to a first-time owner. Squarespace gave you a curated experience. Pick a template, drop in your text, hit publish. Done.

For years that trade was real. You traded flexibility and ownership for ease. If you were not technical, the maths worked.

Then two things changed at once. First, Permira took Squarespace private for around 7.2 billion dollars in October 2024 ^[1]. That tells you Squarespace is no longer a scrappy startup. It is a private-equity-owned platform with all the pressure that brings to extract more revenue per customer. Second, AI website builders arrived and made WordPress just as easy to launch as Squarespace ever was. Faster, in fact.

The myth survived because most owners do not revisit a decision once they have heard the conventional wisdom. They hear "Squarespace is easier" and they stop asking. So let me give you four reasons to start asking again.

Myth 1: "Squarespace Is Easier Than WordPress"

This was true. It is not true now.

When you build a WordPress site through an AI builder, the process looks like this. You describe your business in a sentence or two. The AI writes the copy, picks a layout, builds the navigation, and gives you a finished, professional site in under a minute. No template selection. No theme research. No dashboard learning curve at the start. You walk into a site that already looks finished, and you edit from there.

That is not just as easy as Squarespace. It is easier. Squarespace still asks you to pick a template up front, which is a decision that paralyses non-designers. AI tools skip that step.

The difference matters because the "easier" argument was never really about the dashboard. It was about the empty page. WordPress used to dump you in front of an empty install with a stock theme and no idea what to do next. AI builders solved that. The empty-page problem is gone.

What you get with WordPress, even after AI builds it for you, is the rest of WordPress. Around 42% of all websites in the world run on WordPress as of April 2026, according to W3Techs ^[2]. That is not because it is the prettiest. It is because it is the most flexible, the most extensible, and the only platform that does not lock you in. I wrote about the same shift in The €5,000 Agency Website Is Dying, and AI Is What Killed It. The pattern is identical here.

Cost of launching: roughly the same. Capability afterwards: an order of magnitude higher with WordPress.

Myth 2: "Squarespace Is Cheaper for Small Businesses"

Look at the sticker price and Squarespace looks reasonable. Their pricing as of this year is Basic at 16 dollars a month, Core at 23, Plus at 39, and Advanced at 99, all when billed annually ^[3].

That is the sticker price. It is not what you actually pay.

Here is what most business owners miss. Squarespace charges a 3% transaction fee on the Core (formerly Business) plan, applied on top of standard payment processor fees ^[4]. That is on every physical product, digital download, service booking, and donation processed through your site. Sell €30,000 of services through your Squarespace booking widget over a year and Squarespace takes around €900 of that, on top of Stripe's standard 2.9% plus 30 cent. You only stop paying that fee when you upgrade to Plus at €39 a month or higher.

Now do the maths against Web60. Sixty euro a year. No transaction fees. SSL, backups, security, analytics, support, all included. That is roughly five euro a month, total. To get a Squarespace plan that does not skim 3% off your sales, you are paying eight times that in subscription alone, before transaction fees on the cheaper plans.

The gift shop owner I mentioned earlier? Once we ran her projected sales through both pricing models, the conversation ended itself.

The sticker price is the trick. The total cost of ownership is the truth. You can see how that maths shapes up against an all-inclusive €60-a-year hosting plan with security and backups bundled in. The numbers stop being close once you put them on paper.

Myth 3: "Squarespace Means I Don't Have to Worry About Technical Stuff"

Squarespace is good at hiding complexity. They are not good at giving you tools to manage real business risk.

Try this. Find the staging environment in Squarespace. There isn't one. The only option is "Preview" mode in the editor, which is fine for tweaking copy on a quiet page but useless if you need to test a major redesign while your live shop keeps taking orders. Squarespace's own developer documentation suggests a CLI tool for local development as the workaround, which you can imagine going down well with a non-technical café owner.

Now find the backup. You cannot. Squarespace does not give customers downloadable, restorable backups of their site in any meaningful sense. If something breaks, your option is to ring support and hope.

Compare that to a properly managed WordPress host. Web60 takes a backup every night, automatically, with one-click restore. We take pre-update snapshots before plugin or core updates. We give you a one-click staging environment to break things safely. That is what "managed" actually means. The difference, in plain English, is this. If the worst case scenario is losing a single day of work, you can run a business on it. If the worst case scenario is "we don't know, ring us in the morning", you cannot.

A backup is only as good as its last run, of course. If you make 200 changes between the nightly backup and a 10pm crash, you lose those 200 changes. That is the deal with any backup system. The alternative, no real backup at all, is what Squarespace customers actually live with.

The myth here is that Squarespace's hosted environment removes technical worry. It removes technical visibility, which is not the same thing.

Myth 4: "I Can Always Move If I Outgrow It"

This is the one that traps people.

Squarespace's own help documentation is unusually honest about export. Here is what they tell you, in their own words ^[5]. Export only includes layout pages, one blog page with posts and comments, text and image blocks, and gallery pages from version 7.0 only. Cannot export: album pages, cover pages, index pages, info pages, calendar pages, portfolio pages, store pages, and you cannot export more than one blog. Squarespace itself adds that images may not migrate reliably, only reference links transfer, which break the moment your Squarespace subscription deactivates.

Read that again. If you have built an online shop on Squarespace, your store pages do not export. If you have built a portfolio site, your portfolio pages do not export. If you have multiple blogs, only one comes with you.

This is not an accident of engineering. This is platform lock-in by design. A platform that wanted you to be able to leave would not have a help page that long.

Now compare. WordPress is open source. Your content lives in a database you control, which you can export, restore, and migrate to any host on the planet. Web60 includes free migration in the other direction, taking your existing site off whatever platform it is on and onto our infrastructure at no charge.

The "I can always move later" story is something Squarespace customers tell themselves to feel better about the decision. By the time most owners realise they have outgrown the platform, the cost of moving is high enough that they stay where they are. That is exactly the position Squarespace wants them in. The same dynamic plays out on other closed builders, which I covered in Wix vs WordPress: The 2026 Performance Reality Check.

A Word About the Ecosystem

One more thing the myth obscures. Squarespace's official extension marketplace lists somewhere in the region of 50 third-party extensions ^[6]. WordPress.org lists more than 59,000 free plugins, and the commercial plugin market on top of that adds thousands more.

That ratio is roughly a thousand to one. It matters because every business eventually wants to do something the platform did not anticipate. A booking widget for a hairdresser. A specific shipping integration for a drop-shipper. A custom event calendar for a community space. With Squarespace, the answer is usually "no, or pay a developer to hack it together". With WordPress, there is almost always a plugin that already does it.

I should know. I once recommended Squarespace to a salon owner who wanted a "really simple" site. Eighteen months later they were paying a Squarespace developer hourly to bolt on functionality that would have been a free plugin on WordPress. I have not made that recommendation again.

Where Squarespace Genuinely Still Wins

This is the part of the article where most comparisons get dishonest. They claim the favoured platform wins on every dimension. That is not true and would not be useful if it were.

Here is the honest concession. If you are a hobbyist photographer or a personal artist with a single-page online portfolio, no shop, no booking, no real business operations, Squarespace's templates are genuinely beautiful and the build experience is friction-free. You will not need to migrate. You will not hit the transaction fee. You will not care about the plugin ecosystem. For that exact use case, Squarespace is fine.

But that is not a small business. That is a personal site. Once you cross the line into "this website is part of how I make a living", the trade-offs flip.

The Honest Comparison

What you actually pay attention to	Squarespace (Core plan)	Web60
Annual cost (subscription only)	~€275	€60
Transaction fees on sales	3% (on top of payment processor)	None
Native staging environment	No	Yes
Automated nightly backups	No	Yes
Plugin / extension ecosystem	~50 extensions	59,000+
Data export	Limited (no store, portfolio, multi-blog)	Full WordPress export
Time to launch with AI build	Template-based, manual edit	Under 60 seconds

The shape of the table matters. If a column has more "no"s, that is the platform that solved its own marketing problem before it solved your business problem.

Conclusion

The "Squarespace is easier" argument made sense in 2015. It survived through inertia, through good marketing, and through the fact that most business owners decide once and never revisit.

In 2026, AI builders have removed the only real reason to pick Squarespace over WordPress. What is left is the trade-off no one mentions in the ads. You pay more, you give up your data, you lose the plugin ecosystem, and you sign a contract that gets harder to leave the longer you stay.

If you are starting a new business website this month, the question is not "which platform is easier". They are equally easy now. The question is which platform you can still walk away from in two years if your business changes shape. That answer has not changed in fifteen years. WordPress wins.

Where you take that thought next is up to you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Squarespace really cheaper than Web60?

No. The €60 per year price for Web60 already includes hosting, SSL, backups, security, and support. Squarespace's lower-tier plans look cheap on the homepage but charge a 3% transaction fee on every sale processed through the site, on top of standard payment processor fees. Once you factor in transaction fees, the equivalent Squarespace plan costs several multiples of Web60.

Can I move my Squarespace site to WordPress later?

Partially. Squarespace's own export documentation confirms that store pages, portfolio pages, calendar pages, info pages and additional blogs do not export. Images may not transfer reliably either. If you outgrow Squarespace, expect to rebuild key sections of your site from scratch.

Do I need to be technical to use WordPress now?

No. AI website builders, including the one Web60 uses, take a sentence or two about your business and produce a finished WordPress site in under a minute. You do not need to choose a theme, write copy, or learn the dashboard before going live.

What happens to my Squarespace site if I cancel?

It comes down. Squarespace sites are tied to the subscription. If you cancel, the site goes offline. Migration tools you might use to move content typically rely on links pointing back to the live Squarespace site, which is why images stop working when the subscription ends.

Does Squarespace offer staging environments?

No. Squarespace's preview mode lets you see in-progress edits in the editor, but there is no separate staging copy of your site that can be tested before deployment. Web60 includes one-click staging on every plan.

Why is WordPress still the largest CMS?

Because it is open source, you own your content, and the plugin ecosystem can do almost anything. As of April 2026, WordPress powers around 42% of all websites tracked by W3Techs, more than any other CMS by a wide margin.