WordPress vs Squarespace vs Custom: Which Should Your Business Use?

The most common question I’m asked, by some distance: “What should we build it on?” Here’s the honest, independent answer, I don’t resell any of these, so there’s no commission influencing this.

The short version

• Squarespace or Wix if you’ll build and run it entirely yourself, have a handful of pages, and value simplicity over everything.
• WordPress if you publish constantly, need a specific plugin, or already have someone who knows it.
• Shopify if selling products online is the main point.
• A custom static build if you want the fastest, cheapest-to-run, most durable option and you’re happy to have someone build it once, properly.

Now the reasoning.

Squarespace and Wix

Good at: getting something respectable live quickly, with no technical knowledge. Hosting, security and updates are handled. Templates look decent.

Bad at: speed, which is mediocre by design, and flexibility. You’ll hit a wall when you want something the template doesn’t do, and you can’t take the site with you. Ongoing costs are modest but permanent, and rise.

Choose it if: you’re a one-person business, you’ll maintain it yourself, and five to ten pages covers you.

WordPress

Good at: publishing. If you write regularly, WordPress is still excellent. The plugin ecosystem covers almost any requirement, and plenty of people know how to use it.

Bad at: staying fast and staying safe without attention. A typical small business WordPress site runs a theme plus fifteen plugins, each of which updates independently and occasionally breaks something. It needs genuine maintenance, budget for it or expect trouble.

Choose it if: you publish often, you need a plugin that only exists there, or your team already uses it happily.

The honest caveat: a great many WordPress sites are sold to businesses that publish twice a year. Those businesses are paying, in complexity and risk, for capability they never use.

Shopify

Good at: selling. Payments, tax, stock and checkout are solved problems, and the checkout converts better than almost anything you’d build yourself.

Bad at: being a content site. It’s a shop with pages attached, not the reverse. Transaction fees and app subscriptions add up.

Choose it if: products are the business. For most small retailers this is the right answer even though it’s the boring one.

Custom static builds

This is what I build most often, so treat my enthusiasm accordingly.

Good at: speed, cost of running, security and longevity. Pages are generated once and served as plain files, so they load in about a second, cost very little to host, and have essentially no attack surface. You own the code outright.

Bad at: being changed by someone who has never touched it. It needs building properly in the first place, and it needs an editor added if you want to update content yourself.

Choose it if: you want the site to be fast and cheap to run for years, and you’re comfortable having it built once by someone who knows what they’re doing.

What actually matters more than the platform

Honestly? All four can produce a good website, and all four can produce a bad one. What decides the outcome is:

1. Who writes the words. A fast site that doesn’t explain what you do will fail.
2. Whether it’s quick on a phone. More than half your visitors, and the ones who leave fastest.
3. Whether you can update it. A site nobody can change is a site that goes stale.
4. Whether you own it. Your domain, your content, your hosting account, in your name.

That last point is the one people regret ignoring. Check today whose name your domain is registered in. If the answer is “the person who built our site in 2018”, sort that out this week regardless of what else you do.

How I’d choose, in one line

Pick the simplest thing that does what you actually need, and make sure you can leave it. If you’re not sure which that is, the free website review includes a straight answer for your specific situation.