WordPress vs Shopify vs Squarespace

Short answer: if you sell a handful of things, use Shopify. If you have a few pages and want to edit them yourself, use Squarespace or Wix. If you have a few pages and don’t edit much, a static site is the cheapest and the least work. WordPress earns its place when you need something custom, and it’s the one that asks the most of you afterward.

I sell WordPress and static-site work, so I have a stake here. Some of what follows will tell you not to hire me. That’s on purpose, because for plenty of businesses the hosted builder is the right call and paying a developer for it would be a waste.

The one question that decides it

Who is going to touch this site, and how often?

The sticker price is the small number. The big one is time: who clicks “update,” who checks that the backup actually exists, who gets the call when the contact form quietly stops sending. On a hosted builder the company does most of that. On WordPress it’s you, or a person you pay. On a static site there’s almost nothing to maintain, but changing the content means asking someone, unless you set up an editor.

After that, two quick ones. Do you take payments online? And how often does the content change: monthly, or every day?

The options, one at a time

Prices are from each company’s own pages, checked October 29, 2026. They change, so check before you buy.

Shopify. Basic is $39 a month billed monthly or $29 billed yearly (Shopify pricing, checked October 29, 2026). Standard online cards through Shopify Payments start at 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic; premium cards cost more, and international cards add 1%. If you use an outside payment processor instead, Shopify adds its own 2% on Basic. Shopify hosts it, so updates and security are theirs. It breaks down when you need something odd: unusual pricing rules, a membership layer, a design that fights the templates. I didn’t verify what you can export besides products, so look at that before you commit.

Squarespace. Basic is $25 a month billed monthly or $19 billed yearly, Core is $39 or $29, and Plus is $65 or $49 (Squarespace pricing, checked October 29, 2026). Basic adds a 2% fee on store sales and the higher plans don’t. It’s the easiest tool here for someone who wants to edit their own pages and never think about servers. It gets cramped once the store or the logic gets complicated.

Wix. Wix shows yearly prices, paid in full up front: Light $17 a month, Core $29, Business $39, as the page displays them (Wix plans, checked October 29, 2026). Store features start at Core. Wix Payments charges 2.9% plus 30 cents on US cards, 3.7% plus 30 cents on American Express, and $15 per chargeback on Wix Payments, not PayPal (Wix Help Center, checked October 29, 2026). Wix is flexible to build in and, in my experience, the easiest of these to end up with a slow, tangled site.

Webflow. Strong designer tooling, aimed at people who want precise control without writing code. Webflow’s pricing page lists the Basic site plan at $15 a month billed yearly or $25 monthly, and Premium at $25 yearly or $39 monthly. A store takes an ecommerce plan: Standard is $29 yearly or $42 monthly with a 2% transaction fee on top, and Plus is $74 yearly or $84 monthly with none (Webflow pricing, checked October 29, 2026). It sits in the middle: more control than Squarespace, more to learn, and you’re still renting.

WordPress, self-hosted, with WooCommerce. The software costs nothing. Everything around it does. Shared hosting is cheap to start and not cheap to keep: SiteGround’s StartUp plan is $2.99 a month at signup, prepaid for 12 months, and renews at $17.99 (SiteGround, checked October 29, 2026). Bluehost’s Starter is $3.99 a month on a 36-month term and renews at $9.99 (Bluehost, checked October 29, 2026). Managed WordPress hosting starts around $30 to $35 a month at Kinsta, billed yearly or monthly (Kinsta, checked October 29, 2026). WooPayments charges 2.9% plus 30 cents on US cards and $15 per dispute (WooCommerce, checked October 29, 2026). Updates, backups and security are on you or whoever you hire. Where it shines: anything custom, and owning every file. Where it hurts: updates that break things.

A static site. Plain files served from a CDN, no database, no login page to attack. Cloudflare’s docs say requests to static assets are free and unlimited on Workers, unless you turn on Workers Caching (Cloudflare, checked October 29, 2026), and Netlify’s paid plans start at $9 a month (Netlify, checked October 29, 2026). GitHub Pages is free, but GitHub’s own terms say it isn’t meant to run your online business or e-commerce, so I’d pick one of the others for a company site (GitHub docs, checked October 29, 2026). Hosting is close to free. The cost is the build, and the fact that a normal person can’t log in and change a paragraph unless someone sets that up. A shop with real inventory doesn’t belong here.

Which one, by business type

Restaurant or other brochure site. A few pages, a menu, hours, a phone number. A static site if the menu changes a few times a year and you’re fine emailing the change. Squarespace if you want to fix a price at 4 p.m. yourself. Skip WordPress. You’d be signing up to patch something that doesn’t need patching.

Local service business (plumber, dentist, accountant). Mostly the same answer. You need a fast site, a clear phone number and a form that works. Static or Squarespace. If you want a blog that earns search traffic over years, any of them works, and the writing matters far more than the platform.

A shop with a few products. Shopify, and don’t overthink it. Squarespace is fine for a very small catalog. This is the row where I most often talk people out of WooCommerce, because for a few products you’d be taking on updates and payment plumbing to save about $10 to $20 a month against Shopify’s yearly price on shared hosting (more against its monthly price, about even on managed hosting like Kinsta).

A shop with many products or odd requirements. Shopify still, until you hit something it can’t do. Custom pricing, wholesale tiers, odd integrations, a catalog that’s really a database: that’s where WordPress with WooCommerce, or something built for you, starts to earn the work. Moving a complicated store is expensive and risky, so decide before you’re deep in it.

Membership or content business. WordPress can do it. I’d still be cautious, because memberships on WordPress mean a stack of plugins that all have to cooperate. Look at hosted membership tools first. If you do go WordPress, budget for someone to watch it.

A custom app (booking logic, a portal, anything with accounts and rules). None of the above. This is software, not a website, and a builder will fight you the whole way.

The costs that don’t show on the pricing page

Hosting renewals. The signup price is a hook. SiteGround’s StartUp goes from $2.99 to $17.99 and Bluehost’s Starter from $3.99 (on a 36-month term) to $9.99 at renewal, per the pages above. Set a calendar reminder for before the introductory term ends, or you’ll pay the real price without having decided to.

Plugin security. Most WordPress holes are in plugins, not core. Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in 2025, up 42% from the year before, with 91% of them in plugins and 46% unpatched when they were disclosed (Patchstack, 2026 report, checked October 29, 2026). Patchstack sells security tools, so they have a reason to say it loudly. Even so, it matches what I saw in years on the hosting side. Every plugin you add is something that needs updating.

Transaction fees. The 2% on Shopify’s outside gateways, Squarespace’s Basic store plan and Webflow’s Standard ecommerce plan looks small. On $100,000 in sales it’s $2,000. Run your real numbers.

Your time. A site you maintain yourself costs the hour a month you won’t bill. A site someone else maintains costs money. Someone has to pay for it either way. If you hire it out, my own care plans start at $250 a month for updates, backups and monitoring.

Getting out. Before you commit to any hosted builder, check what you can export: pages, products, customers, orders. I didn’t verify the export rules for these platforms and they vary, so look before you build a business on one.

When to move

If the site is a brochure and you’re paying for managed hosting, premium plugins and a page builder, you’re probably paying for machinery it doesn’t need. If it’s a store that keeps breaking after updates, or a membership site straining at the seams, that’s a signal too. I wrote down who I’d tell to leave and who to stay on the move off WordPress page. If the site is broken right now, don’t migrate in a panic. Fix it first, decide second.

WordPress is still about 40% of the web (W3Techs, checked October 29, 2026). That’s a lot of sites, and no reason to put your next one on it by default.

Where I come in

I’m not the right call if you have a small shop and want to run it yourself. Go to Shopify, spend the weekend, and keep the money. I’m also not the right call for a five-page site you’ll edit weekly. Squarespace will serve you well.

I’m useful when the site is custom, when you have WordPress that’s fragile and you’d rather not be the one who fixes it, when a brochure site should stop costing monthly money, or when you want a website audit to find what’s slowing you down. A brochure site up to about ten pages starts at $2,500, and prices are on my Columbus page.

Email [email protected] with your address and what you sell. If a hosted builder is the answer, I’ll say so, and it costs you fifteen minutes.