WordPress, Wix, Squarespace or Shopify — Which Is Actually Right for Your Business?

Every week someone asks me which platform they should use for their website. It might be a startup in Newbury weighing up their options, a trade business in Reading that’s outgrown their current site, or an established brand thinking about a proper ecommerce store.

My answer is always the same: it depends on what your business actually needs.

Almost every comparison you’ll find online has been written by someone getting paid to recommend a particular platform. The sites with the biggest Shopify affiliate deal put Shopify first. The ones chasing Wix commissions put Wix first. You can usually work out the ranking before you’ve read a word.

This guide is different. I’ve been designing and building websites for over 23 years, across all of these platforms and more. No affiliate links. No commissions. Just an honest breakdown of what each option is actually good at — and where it falls short.

Quick comparison — which platform suits which business?

WordPress

Best for: service businesses, blogs, anything where SEO matters, sites that will grow

WordPress powers around 43% of all websites on the internet — and for good reason. It’s the most flexible, most scalable, and most SEO-friendly platform available. If you’re serious about your website doing a proper job for your business over the long term, WordPress is almost always the right foundation.

The plugin library is enormous with over 59,000 free plugins mean you can add almost any functionality you can think of, from booking systems and contact forms to membership areas and complex content structures. And because you own your hosting and your data, you’re never beholden to a platform changing its pricing or discontinuing a feature.

The honest caveat: WordPress requires a little more technical involvement than Wix or Squarespace. Not necessarily from you — but from whoever builds and maintains your site. A well-built WordPress site with a good developer behind it will outperform any drag-and-drop builder on SEO, speed and flexibility. A poorly built one can be a headache. The platform is only as good as the person setting it up.

Typical cost: Hosting from around £10–£30/month. Theme and plugins vary. Most small business sites built professionally fall between £1,500–£5,000 depending on scope.

WooCommerce

Best for: online stores that want full control without being locked into Shopify

WooCommerce isn’t a separate platform — it’s WordPress with ecommerce added on. And for businesses that want to sell products online without handing control of their store to a third-party platform, it’s a genuinely powerful option.

The key advantage over Shopify is ownership. With WooCommerce, your store data, your customer records, your product listings — all of it sits on your own hosting. There are no transaction fees on top of payment processing, and you’re not dependent on an app ecosystem that can change pricing overnight.

It needs proper setup to work well — this isn’t a platform to cobble together yourself if ecommerce is a serious part of your business model. But for businesses that want the flexibility of WordPress and need to sell online, WooCommerce is often the smartest long-term choice.

Typical cost: Similar to WordPress, plus payment gateway fees (usually around 1.4–2.9% + 30p per transaction with Stripe or PayPal).

Wix

Best for: solo traders, local service businesses, anyone who needs to manage their site themselves

Wix has come a long way in recent years. The AI site builder is genuinely useful, the interface is intuitive, and for a straightforward local service business — a plumber, a personal trainer, a local retailer — it can produce a perfectly decent website without needing a developer.

The honest downsides are worth knowing before you commit. Wix has no native content export — if you ever want to move your site to WordPress or another platform, your design and content essentially needs to be rebuilt from scratch. Your blog posts, your pages, your layouts: they stay with Wix. For a business that’s just getting started and keeping costs low, that’s an acceptable trade-off. For a business that’s serious about its online presence long-term, it’s a significant limitation.

Wix also has around 600 apps in its marketplace, compared to over 59,000 WordPress plugins — so if you need specific or complex functionality down the line, you may hit a ceiling.

Typical cost: From around £17–£32/month for a business plan. No hosting costs on top.

Squarespace

Best for: creatives, photographers, restaurants, hospitality businesses, visually led brands

If you need your website to look polished and beautiful with minimal effort, Squarespace is hard to beat. The templates are genuinely the best-designed of any platform — clean, considered, and far more distinctive than anything Wix offers out of the box.

It’s particularly well suited to businesses where visual presentation is central to what they sell: restaurants, hotels, photographers, interior designers, jewellers, boutique retailers. The built-in tools for galleries, menus and portfolio pages are excellent, and the whole platform has a quality feel that cheaper builders can’t quite match.

The limitations show when you need anything complex. Squarespace has only around 31–45 extensions, compared to WordPress’s tens of thousands of plugins. It’s not the platform for a business with specific integration needs, a large ecommerce catalogue, or serious SEO ambitions. And like Wix, moving away from it later requires rebuilding — though Squarespace does at least allow some content export in WordPress format, which Wix doesn’t.

Typical cost: From around £13–£35/month depending on plan.

Shopify

Best for: product-based ecommerce businesses with serious sales ambitions

If your primary business is selling physical products online, Shopify is purpose-built for that job and it does it better than anyone else. Inventory management, shipping integrations, payment processing, VAT handling, abandoned cart recovery — it’s all there, and it works. The platform powers millions of online stores and the ecommerce infrastructure is genuinely excellent.

The cost reality is worth understanding before you commit. The headline plan price looks reasonable, but a typical Shopify store also needs a premium theme (£150–£350 one-off), a selection of essential apps (often £50–£200/month on top of the subscription), and transaction fees if you’re not using Shopify Payments. Year 1 costs for a properly set-up store are often significantly higher than the £39/month Basic plan suggests.

For service businesses — consultants, designers, tradespeople, agencies — Shopify is overkill. You’re paying for ecommerce infrastructure you don’t need.

Typical cost: From £39/month, but budget realistically for £80–£200/month once apps and themes are factored in.

Bespoke websites

Best for: serious brands, businesses with specific requirements, anyone where a template would always feel like a compromise

Most platform comparisons stop at the options above. But for some businesses, the right answer is none of them — or at least, not off the shelf.

A bespoke website is built specifically around your business: your brand, your user journeys, your conversion goals, and any functionality that a standard plugin or template can’t quite handle. There’s no fighting the platform’s limitations, no template that almost-but-not-quite fits your brand, and no dependency on a third-party app that might double in price next year.

It costs more upfront. But a well-built bespoke site typically lasts longer, performs better in search, loads faster, and doesn’t need a full rebuild every time a platform changes its terms or pricing model. For businesses where the website is a primary sales tool and not just a digital brochure, the investment usually pays for itself.

It’s also the right conversation to have if your brand is strong enough that a template would always hold it back.

Typical cost: From around £3,000 for a straightforward bespoke site, through to £10,000+ for complex functionality or ecommerce.

So which should you choose?

Here’s the short version:

Choose WordPress if you’re a service business, care about SEO, and want a site that will grow with you. It’s the right long-term foundation for most businesses.

Choose WooCommerce if you need to sell online and want full control of your store without Shopify’s escalating costs.

Choose Wix if you’re a solo trader or small local business on a tight budget who needs to manage everything yourself and doesn’t need complex functionality.

Choose Squarespace if your business is visually led – hospitality, photography, creative services, and presentation matters more than functionality.

Choose Shopify if selling products online is your primary business model and you want the most complete ecommerce platform available.

Consider bespoke if your brand is serious, your requirements are specific, or you’ve outgrown what any platform can offer.

Not sure which is right for you?

I’m happy to talk it through — no hard sell, just an honest conversation about what would work best for your business. Based in Thatcham, working with businesses across Berkshire, Reading, Newbury and the UK.

Get in touch for a free conversation →

Or if you’d like to see what a well-built website looks like in practice, take a look at some of the sites I’ve built for clients.