The pitch is irresistible. For roughly the cost of a Netflix subscription, you get a professional-looking website, hosting, security, and updates — all in one tidy monthly bill. No developer needed. No technical knowledge required. Just pick a template, drop in your photos, and you're live by Sunday.
That pitch isn't wrong, exactly. It's just incomplete.
What Squarespace and Wix don't put on the pricing page is the part that ends up costing small business owners the most: everything you can't take with you when you decide to leave.
I've migrated dozens of small businesses off these platforms. Almost every time, the conversation starts the same way — "I just need to move my site somewhere faster" or "I want my own developer" or "my fees keep going up." And almost every time, the owner is shocked to discover how little of their website they actually own.
Let's break down the real cost. Not the sticker price — the full cost.
The Monthly Fee Is the Cheapest Part
Start with the obvious. Squarespace's "Core" plan (renamed from "Business" in early 2026) is $23/month when billed annually, and that's the plan most small businesses end up on once they realize the cheaper Basic tier doesn't include basic things like accepting payments or removing platform branding from emails.
Wix's "Core" plan runs $29/month annual, and most businesses get pushed to "Business" at $39/month for higher ecommerce limits and standard transaction features. That's $468/year, or $2,340 over five years, just for the privilege of being on their platform.
And that's before you add anything useful.
The Add-Ons They Don't Highlight
The base subscription is rarely what you actually pay. Here's what most small business sites end up needing on top:
- A custom domain — usually included for the first year, then $20-25/year after that. Fine, that's the same anywhere.
- Premium templates or third-party apps — Wix's app marketplace is full of features that sound included but aren't. Booking, advanced forms, customer reviews, abandoned cart recovery — many run $5-20/month each.
- Email hosting — neither platform includes professional email by default. You're paying Google Workspace or a third-party for that.
- Stock photography — both platforms offer libraries, but the good photos are usually behind premium tiers.
- SEO tools — basic SEO is included, but real keyword tracking, schema generators, and audit tools? Extra.
By the time you've built out a site that actually does what your business needs, your $23/month plan is closer to $60-100/month in real cost. Over five years, that's $3,600-$6,000.
The Performance Tax
I've talked at length about why slow sites cost you customers. Squarespace and Wix sites are structurally slow because of how the platforms are built.
Both platforms generate code on the fly to support every possible layout and feature their template system allows. Even if your page is simple, the platform loads its entire framework just in case. A homepage that should be 80KB of clean HTML ends up being 2-4MB of JavaScript and CSS bloat before a single image loads.
This shows up in two ways that directly hurt your business:
1. Mobile Page Speed
Run a typical Squarespace or Wix site through Google PageSpeed Insights on mobile and you'll often see scores in the 30s and 40s. That's not a minor issue — that's a structural problem you can't fix without leaving the platform. Their own engineers can't make these sites fast because the architecture itself is the bottleneck.
And mobile speed isn't just a vanity metric. 53% of mobile visitors leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. If your Wix site loads in 6 seconds on a cell connection — and most do — you're losing customers before they ever see your homepage.
2. SEO Performance
Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. If your site has poor LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), poor INP (Interaction to Next Paint), or layout shift, Google ranks your competitor above you — even if your content is better.
This isn't theoretical. I've seen Squarespace sites lose first-page rankings the moment a faster competitor enters the market, even when the Squarespace site had better content and more backlinks. Speed is now table stakes for visibility.
The Lock-In Problem
Here's where it gets uncomfortable. When you eventually decide to leave — and most businesses eventually do — you find out how much of your website you don't actually own.
You Can't Export Your Design
Squarespace lets you export your content as a WordPress-compatible XML file. That's it. The design — the layout, the styling, the visual identity you've been building for years — stays on Squarespace. If you want to recreate it elsewhere, you start from scratch.
Wix is worse. Until very recently, Wix offered no export at all. Now there's limited blog export, but the visual site itself is non-transferable. The hours you spent dragging blocks and tweaking pixel alignment? Gone the day you cancel.
You Can't Easily Move Your Forms or Bookings
Every form submission, every booking, every customer interaction handled by the platform's built-in tools — that data lives in their database, not yours. You can export submissions while your account is active. The moment you cancel, that history is gone forever.
For service businesses that have been collecting leads for years, this can mean losing the entire customer history that built your business.
You Can't Take Your SEO With You
This one stings. When you migrate off a platform, your URLs change. Your sitemap changes. Your internal link structure changes. Google has to re-crawl and re-evaluate everything.
A well-planned migration with proper 301 redirects can preserve most of your rankings — but Squarespace and Wix make this harder than it needs to be. URL patterns are inconsistent. Some pages have unmovable IDs in their URLs. Redirect configuration is limited.
I've seen businesses lose 40-60% of their organic traffic in the first three months after a poorly executed migration. That traffic eventually comes back, but the gap is real money lost.
The "Customization Wall"
Every Squarespace and Wix project I've worked on has hit the same point — the moment the owner wants something the platform doesn't natively support.
It's never a crazy request. It's things like:
- "Can we change how the contact form behaves after submission?"
- "Can we add a custom integration with our CRM?"
- "Can we make this gallery do this specific thing instead?"
- "Can we change how mobile menus animate?"
And the answer is almost always: kind of, with caveats, after paying for a third-party app, and only if you don't mind it breaking the next time the platform updates.
On a custom-built site, these are 30-minute changes. On Squarespace or Wix, they're either impossible, expensive, or fragile.
What the Five-Year Math Actually Looks Like
Let's put real numbers next to it. A typical small business website over five years:
Squarespace Core Plan + Add-Ons
- Base plan: $23/month × 60 months = $1,380
- Premium apps (avg 2-3): ~$20/month × 60 = $1,200
- Domain renewals: $25/year × 4 = $100
- Email hosting (Google Workspace): $7/month × 60 = $420
- Migration cost when you eventually leave: $1,500-3,000
Five-year total: $4,600-6,100 — and you walk away with nothing transferable.
Custom-Built Site on Free Hosting
- One-time build: $1,500-3,500 (depending on scope)
- Hosting: $0 (Netlify, Cloudflare Pages — both free for static sites)
- Domain renewals: $25/year × 5 = $125
- Email hosting: same $420
- Optional maintenance: $30-60/month if you want it (most sites don't need it)
Five-year total: $2,050-4,050 — and you own the code, the design, and the content forever.
The custom site is usually cheaper and faster and portable. The only thing the platform builders give you is the comforting feeling that someone else is responsible.
When Squarespace or Wix Actually Make Sense
I'm not anti-platform. There are situations where Squarespace or Wix is genuinely the right call:
- You're testing an idea and don't know if the business will exist in six months. A $23/month commitment is fine for that.
- You need to be live in 48 hours and don't have budget for custom work.
- You'll never want to customize anything beyond what the template allows.
- You don't depend on SEO traffic — your customers find you through referrals, social, or word of mouth.
If any of those fit, the platform is fine. The trap is when your business outgrows that fit and you're now stuck on rails you didn't realize you were on.
How to Tell If You've Outgrown Your Platform
A few signs the platform is now costing you more than it's saving you:
- Your mobile PageSpeed score is under 50 and you can't fix it.
- You're paying for three or more add-on apps to do things a custom site would include natively.
- Your competitors rank above you for searches you should be winning.
- You've hit the customization wall more than twice in the last year.
- Your monthly fee has gone up more than once and you have no way to negotiate.
If three or more of those are true, the platform isn't saving you money anymore. It's just collecting a subscription.
My Take
Squarespace and Wix aren't bad products. They're brilliantly designed for the audience they target — people who need a website fast, don't have a budget, and don't need it to do anything unusual.
But for a small business that depends on its website to bring in customers — a service business, a retail shop, a consultancy — the platform model quietly transfers value out of your business and into theirs. You pay every month for the rest of your business's life, and at the end of it, you own nothing.
A well-built custom site costs more upfront and less forever. It's faster. It ranks better. It does exactly what your business needs, not whatever the template allows. And the day you decide to move it, redesign it, or hand it off to someone else — it goes with you.
That's the part of the pricing comparison nobody puts on the homepage.
Currently on Squarespace or Wix and curious what the math looks like for your specific situation? Send me your site and I'll give you an honest read — what's costing you, what's worth keeping, and whether a move actually makes sense for your business.