Wix vs WordPress vs Squarespace: which suits a Canadian business?

Wix vs WordPress vs Squarespace is usually the first fork in the road for a Canadian small business that needs a website. Here is the short answer. Squarespace suits a simple, good-looking site you will run yourself. Wix suits a do-it-yourself site that needs bookings or a few products without extra subscriptions. WordPress suits a business that expects the site to grow, wants full control and ownership, and has someone (staff or a studio) to keep it maintained.

The rest of this post shows why, with current 2026 prices in Canadian dollars, what you actually own on each platform, and what each one costs over three years. We build on WordPress and custom code at Clear Pixel, so read our WordPress opinions with that in mind. We will also tell you plainly where Wix or Squarespace is the better call, because sometimes it is.

Wix vs WordPress vs Squarespace at a glance

Here is how the three line up on the questions we get asked most. "WordPress" here means self-hosted WordPress from WordPress.org, the version most businesses and studios use, not the hosted WordPress.com service (more on that difference below).

W3Techs reported on October 28, 2026 that WordPress runs 39.5 per cent of all websites, Wix 4.2 per cent and Squarespace 2.4 per cent. That matters less for your customers than for you: it is why WordPress developers, plugins and hosts are easy to find in Calgary or anywhere else.

What each one actually is

Wix is a hosted website builder: you drag elements onto a template and Wix runs the servers, security and updates. Its apps for bookings, stores, blogs and events are built in, which is most of its appeal for service businesses.

Squarespace is also hosted, with stricter templates. That strictness is a feature, because it is hard to make a Squarespace site look bad.

WordPress is open-source software you install on a web host, with themes for design and plugins for features. Nobody runs it for you unless you pay someone to. WordPress.com is the hosted version, run by Automattic, and works more like Wix; its Business plan lists at C$33 a month billed yearly. WordPress versus a fully custom-coded site is a separate decision, covered in WordPress or custom-coded.

What each platform costs in 2026 (in CAD)

Wix shows Canadian visitors prices in CAD, and Squarespace shows them in CA$. Both figures below are list prices per month on annual billing, before GST, checked on October 28, 2026.

Two things to watch. First, promotions. When we checked, Wix's plans page was running a "50% off select plans" offer, with Core showing at CAD 16.50 a month for the first term. Budget on the regular price, because that is what renews. Second, both include a free domain for the first year only. After that you pay the registrar's renewal price.

On Squarespace, card processing through Squarespace Payments starts at 2.9 per cent plus CA$0.30 per transaction on Basic and Core, falling to 2.5 per cent on Advanced. The 2 per cent online store fee on Basic is on top of that, which is why we would not sell anything on Basic.

WordPress costs are shaped differently

WordPress itself is free. You pay for hosting, a domain, any premium theme or plugin licences, and someone's time to build and maintain it. Hosting ranges from a few dollars a month on crowded shared servers to much more for managed hosting with backups and staging. Our hosting guide explains what you are paying for at each level.

That flexibility is also the trap. A WordPress site with a $4 host and no maintenance plan looks cheap until a plugin update breaks the contact form in May, your busiest month.

What you own, and what you can take with you

This is the section most comparisons skip, and the one that costs people the most later.

Your domain can live anywhere. On all three platforms you can register the domain with a separate registrar in your own name and connect it. We recommend exactly that. It means the platform never holds your address hostage, and switching later is a DNS change rather than a negotiation.

Your site is a different story.

• Wix: Wix's help centre says your site "needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers". There is no export of pages, design or blog posts. If you leave, you rebuild, then copy content across by hand or with scripts.
• Squarespace: You can export some content as a WordPress-format XML file: layout pages, one blog page with its posts, text and image blocks, and gallery pages. Store pages, index pages, product and video blocks, drafts, style settings and custom CSS do not export. Squarespace also warns that imported images can remain linked to Squarespace and break once you cancel, so download them yourself.
• WordPress: You can copy the files and the database and run the site on any host that supports WordPress. Most hosts will even do the move for you.

None of this makes Wix or Squarespace a bad choice. Plenty of businesses never leave. But if you are a Calgary renovation company planning to grow from five pages to fifty, the cost of leaving later should be part of the decision now. Leaving Wix means a rebuild plus a careful redirect map, the same bookkeeping we describe in our guide to redesigning without losing your Google rankings.

SEO control on each platform

Google ranks pages, not platforms, and a clear, fast page on any of the three can outrank a sloppy one on the others. The difference is how much control you have past the basics.

The 2025 Web Almanac found Wix sites had a median Lighthouse SEO score of 100, with WordPress around 92. Treat that as a sign that Wix gets the basics right by default (titles, meta descriptions, crawlable links), not that Wix sites rank better. Lighthouse checks hygiene. It does not check content, links or local relevance.

Where control starts to matter:

• URL structure. Wix fixes some patterns. Blog posts sit under a /post/ prefix by default and product pages under /product-page/. You can rename those prefixes in Wix's SEO settings, but regular pages stay one level deep (yoursite.com/drain-cleaning, not yoursite.com/services/drain-cleaning). WordPress lets you build any structure you want.
• Structured data. All three output some automatically. On WordPress you can add exactly the schema a service business needs, such as LocalBusiness with service areas, through a plugin or custom code.
• Scale. At 10 pages the differences are small. At 60 pages, with service pages for Airdrie, Cochrane and Okotoks and a working blog, WordPress's control over templates, internal links and redirects starts to pay off.

If you are on any of these and want to rank in the map pack, the platform is rarely the bottleneck. Your Google Business Profile, reviews and service pages matter more. Our local SEO service works on all three.

Speed: Wix's quiet advantage

This is where the data surprises people. In the 2025 Web Almanac, 74 per cent of Wix sites passed all three Core Web Vitals on mobile, up from 55 per cent the year before. WordPress sat at 45 per cent. The median mobile Lighthouse performance score was 64 for Wix and 41 for WordPress.

The report does not give Squarespace an overall pass rate, but Squarespace sites did well on two of the three metrics individually: 89 per cent passed layout stability (CLS) and 96 per cent passed responsiveness (INP).

Wix controls the whole stack, so it tunes hosting, image delivery and code for every site at once. WordPress speed depends on the theme, plugins and host chosen for each site, and the average one carries weight it does not need. A lean WordPress build on decent hosting passes comfortably, but only if someone builds it that way on purpose. Our Core Web Vitals guide explains what the three metrics measure.

Online stores and bookings

For most service businesses, bookings matter more than a store. This is where Wix has its clearest edge.

Bookings

Wix includes scheduling and services from its Core plan at CAD 33 a month. A massage therapist or a dog groomer can take online bookings and payments without paying for a second product.

Squarespace handles booking through Acuity Scheduling, billed separately. Starter is CA$22 a month on annual billing for one bookable calendar. Standard is CA$36 a month for up to six calendars, adding text reminders, packages and memberships. Acuity works with any website, so you can keep it if you ever leave Squarespace.

On WordPress, you either install a booking plugin or embed an outside scheduler. Either way you choose the tool, which is more work and more freedom.

Say you run a physiotherapy clinic in Kensington with four practitioners. On Wix, scheduling is part of the site plan (check the staff limits on the plan you choose). On Squarespace you would need Acuity Standard for four calendars, CA$36 a month on top of the site. That is CA$1,296 across three years before you have built a single page.

Selling products

Wix can take payments from Core upward. Squarespace lets every plan sell, but the 2 per cent transaction fee on Basic makes Core the real starting point. On WordPress, selling usually means a store plugin such as WooCommerce, plus a payment processor and someone to keep it all updated.

All three are fine for a few dozen products sold alongside services: gift cards for a salon, branded merchandise for a brewery, deposits for a contractor. If the online store is your main business, compare dedicated commerce platforms as well.

Who maintains it

On Wix and Squarespace, the company handles hosting, security patches, platform updates and SSL certificates. Your job is content: keeping hours, services, prices and photos current. If you have no budget for upkeep and nobody technical on staff, that is worth a lot.

On WordPress, someone has to update WordPress core, the theme and every plugin, check that nothing broke, and keep backups. Skipping it is how small business sites get hacked. You can do it yourself if you are comfortable, ask your host (some managed hosts handle core updates), or pay for it. Our maintenance plan is $130 CAD a month, and our post on the maintenance habits that keep a site fast and secure lists what that work involves.

There is a flip side. On Wix and Squarespace, you also accept their changes. When a platform redesigns its editor, changes a plan or retires a feature, you adapt on their timeline. On WordPress, nothing changes until someone decides it should.

The real three-year cost

Monthly prices hide the total. Here is what the subscriptions add up to over three years at list price on annual billing, before tax.

The DIY bars are short because they leave out the biggest cost: your time. In our experience, a decent five-page site on Wix or Squarespace takes an owner several evenings and weekends, plus writing the copy and finding photos. Hire a designer to build it and you add their fee.

The last bar is a different product: a professionally built and maintained WordPress site. Our builds start at $2,000 CAD fixed-price, and three years of maintenance at $130 a month adds $4,680, for $6,680 before hosting and domain. Our pricing page and our breakdown of what a website costs in Canada cover build budgets in detail.

Illustrative example. Say you run a two-truck plumbing company in Airdrie and need eight pages, a quote form and click-to-call. Squarespace Core costs about CA$1,152 over three years and a few of your weekends. A studio-built WordPress site costs $6,680 or more, and someone else writes the service pages, sets up the SEO foundations and keeps it patched. In your first year, with more time than work, DIY often wins. Once search is sending you three or four jobs a day, your weekends are worth more than the difference.

Which one should you pick?

Pick Wix if

You want to build and run the site yourself, you need bookings or simple payments without a second subscription, and you are content to stay on Wix (or accept that leaving means a rebuild). Solo practitioners and trades that book estimates online fit well here.

Pick Squarespace if

Looks matter most, the site is mostly pages, a gallery and a contact form, and you will edit it yourself. Photographers, architects, restaurants and consultants with a short service list are often well served by Squarespace. If that is you, save your money and build it there.

Pick WordPress if

You expect the site to grow past 20 or 30 pages, you want full control over URLs, structured data and integrations, you want to own every file, and you have a plan for maintenance. Most established Calgary service businesses we work with land here, because the site is a lead source they will keep investing in for years.

Whichever you choose, register the domain in your own name, separately from the platform. If money is tight and you are just starting, a Squarespace or Wix site plus a well-kept Google Business Profile will carry you a long way. Decide based on where the business will be in three years, not on which builder has the nicest template this week.