THE SHORT VERSION
Squarespace if you want simple and self-serve, WordPress if you want flexibility and serious SEO headroom, and neither if your website is genuinely business-critical.
The honest comparison
| Squarespace | WordPress | |
|---|---|---|
| Ease for non-technical owners | Excellent | Good, with setup |
| Design flexibility | Within its templates | Unlimited |
| SEO headroom | Adequate | Excellent |
| Speed potential | Fixed, you get what you get | Engineerable to 90+ scores |
| Ecommerce | Light retail | WooCommerce, full-fat |
| Ongoing upkeep | Included | Needs maintenance |
| Ownership & portability | You rent the platform | You own everything |
| Realistic cost | £17–£35/month + your time | Build cost + hosting |
When Squarespace is genuinely the right call
A portfolio, a one-page presence, a side project, an events page, anywhere the website supports the business but doesn’t drive it. If that’s you, save your money: pick a template, spend a weekend on it, done. We’d rather say that here than take £2,000 off you for something you could DIY.
When WordPress earns its keep
The moment search visibility matters, WordPress pulls ahead. Location pages, service pages, schema markup, proper page speed, the machinery of a site built to rank locally needs control Squarespace doesn’t hand over. Same for ecommerce beyond a dozen simple products, where WooCommerce (or Shopify, a different article’s worth of comparison) does full-fat retail.
When the answer is neither
Booking systems, customer portals, quoting tools, anything with logic, that’s app territory, and stretching a CMS into software is how businesses end up with a plugin stack held together by hope. And for stores where revenue is the whole point, we increasingly build on Shopify instead, reliability is a feature.
The bit nobody mentions: upkeep
Squarespace includes updates in the subscription. WordPress doesn’t, an unmaintained WordPress site is the most-hacked thing on the internet. Budget a modest monthly plan for proper maintenance or don’t choose WordPress. That sentence has saved several of our readers a very bad Tuesday.
Our actual recommendation process
- Website supports the business? Squarespace, DIY, keep your money.
- Website drives enquiries? WordPress, built properly, maintained.
- Website *is* the business? Whatever the engineering demands, and a conversation first.
Unsure which you are? Ask us, the first conversation with our web design team in Manchester is free and we’ll tell you if the answer is “don’t hire us”. It happens more than you’d think.
