Why Irish Businesses Are Ditching Wix and Squarespace for WordPress in 2026

Here is a scenario we see play out regularly on our calls. A hair salon owner in Cork, three years into her Squarespace plan, wants to add online booking, sell products, and integrate with her point-of-sale system. Squarespace can handle one of those. Maybe two, with workarounds. All three? Not without monthly app fees that are starting to rival her rent.

She calls us. She asks about moving to WordPress. Then she discovers that moving means rebuilding. Three years of pages, product photos, and carefully written descriptions, and Squarespace will not let her take most of it with her.

We see this pattern across Irish businesses of every size and sector. The platform that felt perfect on day one starts showing its edges the moment a business tries to grow. This is not an isolated frustration. It is the reason a growing number of local firms are making the same decision: leave the walled garden, move to WordPress, and take control of their online presence for good.

The Bill That Keeps Growing

Here is something Wix and Squarespace do not emphasise on their pricing pages. The number you see when you sign up is not the number you will pay next year.

Wix's Core plan, the entry point for any business that needs eCommerce, costs $29 per month billed annually ^[1]. That is roughly €320 per year before you add anything. Need a booking app? That is another $10 to $30 per month. Want to remove bandwidth limits or unlock advanced analytics? Upgrade. Your free domain? That renews at roughly $21 after the first year ^[2].

A typical independent retailer on Wix is paying somewhere between €400 and €600 per year by year two. Some pay considerably more. And that is before transaction fees.

Squarespace follows a similar path. Their Core plan runs $23 per month billed annually ^[3]. The free Google Workspace email included in year one? That renews at approximately €6 per month per user. The custom domain? Renewal costs between €20 and €70 depending on the extension ^[4].

The pattern is predictable. Introductory pricing gets you through the door. Feature gating keeps you reaching for your wallet. The true cost of cheap hosting is never the sticker price.

The contrast is stark. Web60's all-inclusive managed WordPress hosting covers design, hosting, SSL, backups, security, and analytics for €60 per year. No renewal surprises. No feature gating. No per-app charges. The price on day one is the price on day 365.

You know what happens when that Squarespace renewal hits and the bill has tripled? The business owner starts searching for alternatives. By that point, they discover the next problem.

You Built It, But You Do Not Own It

This is the part that genuinely frustrates me. I speak to business owners every week who do not realise they cannot take their website with them when they leave.

Wix is explicit about this in their own support documentation: you cannot export your Wix site to another platform ^[5]. Your design, your pages, your navigation, your site structure, none of it comes with you. You can export your contacts and product data as CSV files, but the website itself? Start from scratch.

Squarespace is marginally better. You can export content as an XML file, which WordPress can import ^[6]. But your images may not migrate properly because they are hosted on Squarespace's servers. Your design is gone. Anything built with Squarespace's proprietary features stays behind.

Think about what that means in practice. A business owner spends three years building pages, writing content, uploading product photos, refining layouts. They decide to leave. And they discover that everything they built belongs to the platform, not to them.

WordPress is fundamentally different. It is open-source software. Your content, your themes, your plugins, your database, all of it is yours. You can move it to any hosting provider, at any time, without rebuilding. That is not a technical detail. That is the difference between renting and owning.

Our Cork salon owner? Moving from Squarespace to WordPress meant rebuilding her site from the ground up. If she had started on WordPress, she could have switched hosts in an afternoon and kept everything intact.

The SEO Ceiling Nobody Talks About

Wix and Squarespace have improved their SEO tools over the years. That is fair. But there is a ceiling, and businesses hit it faster than they expect.

WordPress has over 59,000 free plugins ^[7], including dedicated SEO tools that give you granular control over schema markup, XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, and structured data. The WordPress plugin ecosystem is not slowing down either. According to the WordPress Plugins Team, new submissions exceeded 500 per week by early 2026 ^[8], with over 5,400 plugins approved in 2025 alone.

On Wix or Squarespace, your SEO options are whatever the platform decides to offer. You cannot install a plugin to add custom schema. You cannot optimise your server response times. You cannot implement advanced caching strategies that genuinely move the needle on Core Web Vitals.

For a business that depends on being found on Google, that ceiling matters. Core Web Vitals are a confirmed ranking signal, and the hosting infrastructure underneath your site directly affects those scores. A properly optimised WordPress site on enterprise hosting, running Nginx, Redis, and FastCGI caching, will outperform a builder platform in page load times. That performance gap translates directly into search visibility.

When a potential customer searches for a local service and your competitor's WordPress site loads in under two seconds while your Squarespace page is still rendering, the search engine has already made its choice. So has the customer.

What Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress Actually Deliver

Feature	Wix	Squarespace	WordPress on Web60
Annual cost (year 2+)	€400 to €600+	€250 to €400+	€60, everything included
Site export and portability	Cannot export site design or structure	Partial XML export, images may break	Fully portable, you own everything
Plugin ecosystem	Around 500 apps, many paid monthly	Roughly 30 native integrations	59,000+ free plugins
SEO customisation	Basic built-in tools	Moderate built-in tools	Full control via plugins and server config
Hosting infrastructure	Shared platform, no control	Shared platform, no control	Enterprise-grade Nginx, Redis, FastCGI

Every row in that table reflects a gap that widens as a business grows. The annual cost difference alone means a business on Web60 could run for a decade at the price of two years on Wix. The plugin count is not vanity either: those 59,000 plugins are the reason WordPress powers roughly 43% of all websites globally, according to W3Techs ^[9], while Wix sits at around 4% and Squarespace at roughly 2%.

WordPress Was Always the Answer, the Barrier Was Technical Skills

Here is the honest truth. Two years ago, I would have hesitated before recommending WordPress to a non-technical business owner. The software was powerful, but setting it up required either technical skills or money to pay someone who had them. That was the gap Wix and Squarespace filled. They made it easy to get a site live, even if the trade-off was ownership and flexibility.

That gap no longer exists.

AI has removed the technical barrier entirely. According to the WordPress community's own State of the Word 2025 address, AI is now deeply integrated into the WordPress ecosystem ^[10], from site building to content creation. WordPress, the platform that already powers 43% of the internet, is now as accessible as any drag-and-drop builder.

Web60 makes this real for Irish businesses. Describe your business, and AI builds a professional WordPress site in under 60 seconds. No coding. No design skills. No freelancer. No agency charging €3,000 to €5,000 for something you could describe better yourself, because nobody understands your business like the person who runs it.

I recommended Wix to a client two years ago because they needed something live in a day and had no technical confidence. Six months later they were paying over €50 a month in plan upgrades and app fees, and they rang me asking how to move to WordPress. That conversation taught me something. Ease of setup is temporary. The platform decision is long-term, and expensive to reverse.

The Honest Exception

I sell WordPress hosting for a living. So let me be straight about where the competition genuinely works.

If you are a photographer or artist building a simple portfolio site with no eCommerce, no booking system, no plans to add complex functionality, and no particular concern about search rankings, Squarespace is genuinely beautiful for that. The templates are polished. The design constraints mean you cannot make it look bad. For that specific use case, the simplicity is a feature, not a limitation.

But that describes a portfolio, not a business. The moment you need to sell products, take bookings, integrate with other tools, optimise for local search, or simply grow beyond what the platform anticipated, you hit the same walls every other business owner hits. And you make the same phone call.

For a business that wants to grow, that needs to be found on Google, that wants to own its content and control its costs, WordPress is not just the better choice. It is the only serious one.

Where This Leaves You

The market share numbers tell one story. WordPress at 43%, Wix at 4%, Squarespace at 2%. The wider market has already decided.

But the numbers that matter more are yours. What are you paying now? What will you be paying in two years when introductory rates expire and app fees stack up? Can you take your site with you if you decide to leave? Can you add the features your business needs without per-app surcharges?

If the answers make you uncomfortable, you already know what to do. The barrier that once kept business owners on Wix and Squarespace, that WordPress was too technical for a non-developer, is gone. AI removed it. And platforms like Web60 made sure the cost did not replace it: €60 per year, enterprise infrastructure, everything included.

The real question is whether you want to keep renting your online presence or start owning it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I move my Wix site to WordPress without losing everything?

Not cleanly. Wix does not allow you to export your site design, page layouts, or navigation structure. You can export contacts and product data as CSV files, but the site itself must be rebuilt. This is a fundamental limitation of Wix's closed platform architecture. Web60 offers a free migration service, but even with assistance, a Wix to WordPress move is effectively a fresh build rather than a transfer.

Is Squarespace easier to migrate from than Wix?

Somewhat. Squarespace offers an XML export that WordPress can import, which preserves some text content. However, images often break during migration because they are hosted on Squarespace's servers, and any proprietary features or design elements will not transfer. Expect a partial rebuild rather than a clean migration.

How much does Wix actually cost per year for a small business?

The entry-level business plan (Core) starts at $29 per month billed annually, roughly €320 per year. Add domain renewal after the free first year, any premium apps you need for booking, forms, or analytics, and most small businesses are paying between €400 and €600 annually by year two. Some pay considerably more depending on the apps they require.

Is WordPress harder to use than Wix or Squarespace?

It used to be. That was the main reason people chose website builders in the first place. In 2026, AI website builders have eliminated that gap entirely. With Web60, you describe your business and get a professional WordPress site in under 60 seconds. No technical skills required. You get the ease of Wix with the power, flexibility, and ownership of WordPress.

What does WordPress offer that Wix and Squarespace cannot match?

Full ownership of your site and content, portability to any hosting provider, access to over 59,000 free plugins, complete SEO control, and the ability to customise every aspect of your site without platform restrictions. WordPress powers roughly 43% of the internet for a reason: it scales from a one-page business site to an enterprise platform without forcing you to switch.

Why are Irish businesses specifically making this switch in 2026?

Two factors have converged. First, AI has removed the technical skills barrier that kept non-technical business owners on simpler platforms. Second, Google's increasing emphasis on Core Web Vitals means site performance directly affects search rankings, and the hosting infrastructure underneath matters more than ever. Irish businesses that depend on local search visibility cannot afford the SEO ceiling that platform builders impose.

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