Wix vs Squarespace, Which Is Better for Your Website and Blogging?

Compare Wix and Squarespace to find the best platform for building your website and growing your blog.

Sep 6, 2024

Bhanu Teja P

Founder @ feather.so

Table of Contents

Wix vs Squarespace, Which Is Better for Your Website and Blogging?

blog_related_media

blog_topic

blog_related_activities

blog_niche

blog_related_tips

unique_blog_element

You’ve set up a website for your small business and are now ready to start blogging. Business blogging can help you connect with customers, improve SEO, and establish authority in your niche. But when you open your blogging platform, you feel lost. Where do you start? How should you structure your posts? What should you write about? If you’re a small business owner, you’re not alone. This article will compare Wix and Squarespace to help you decide which platform is best for business blogging.

Feather's Notion to blog can help you organize your thoughts and get started. This tool lets you import your Notion notes directly into Wix or Squarespace, giving you a structured and efficient way to launch your business blog.

Wix vs. Squarespace at a Glance

Wix and Squarespace are website-building tools that let users create and customize websites without coding. They offer the following features to help you design your site and add the features you want:

Intuitive interfaces

Customizable templates

Robust app markets

Wix is known for its flexibility and creative control, while Squarespace stands out for its designer templates and blogging features.

Design: How Do Wix and Squarespace Compare?

Wix and Squarespace each offer attractive templates to help you build your site. But the overall design experience and flexibility differ significantly between the two. With Wix, you can indeed start from scratch.

Flexibility and Customization

The platform gives you a blank canvas to build a site that meets your specifications. You can also pick from hundreds of templates to help you get started. Once you’ve chosen a template, you can edit the site’s structure by moving around the layout’s sections and creating new ones. From there, it’s easy to customize the design of individual elements to your liking.

Structured Design and Visual Appeal

With Squarespace, you can access a library of quality templates to help you get started. However, the design process is more structured and organized. You can’t change the overall layout of a Squarespace template, but you can customize the style of individual sections to help achieve your desired look. Because of this, Squarespace is a favorite among creatives who care about visual appeal.

While both platforms can help you build an attractive website, Wix gives you more design flexibility and creative control.

What Is Wix?

Wix is a cloud-based website builder that includes web hosting and design services. Its user-friendly drag-and-drop tools and over 500+ ready-made templates help you build your website without having specialist skills or hiring a web developer.

Wix accelerates web development and gives you the creative freedom to build your desired website. It is an ideal website builder for small and medium e-commerce businesses. It has over 200 million registered users worldwide and is available in 17 languages (Wix).

According to Enlyft, Wix’s most extensive customer base is in the US (57%), followed by the UK (6%) and Canada (6%). Is Wix the best eCommerce platform? Wix ecommerce is an ecommerce website builder that lets you:

Create a custom online store

Sell products

Scale your business to the next level

It’s also an excellent ecommerce platform for small and medium businesses that’s easy to use, customize, and relatively affordable. However, whether it’s your best ecommerce platform will depend primarily on your specific business needs.

What Is Squarespace?

Squarespace is a versatile and adaptable website builder that helps users craft professional-looking websites without writing a single line of code. Its powerful site-building tools and features have made it one of the top choices for web design enthusiasts.

The User-Friendly Web Builder

The beauty of Squarespace lies in its simplicity—even if you're not tech-savvy, this platform will transform your ideas into stunning web pages. It's like having an experienced architect who takes care of all technicalities while letting you focus on decorating your new house. With millions trusting their online presence to Squarespace, it has undoubtedly left its mark on the World Wide Web.

What sets it apart from other site builders? The answer lies within its commitment to provide easy-to-use yet highly effective tools suitable for beginners trying their hand at DIY projects or professionals looking to speed up their workflow. This service combines essential elements needed for modern websites, offering comprehensive solutions:

Content management

Social media integration

Email marketing campaigns

Combining these features provides a complete solution rather than just individual components. As of the end of 2023, Squarespace had 4.6 million unique subscriptions.

Wix vs Squarespace: Detailed Side-By-Side Comparison

The Editor: Choosing Your Adventure

The editor is the most significant difference between Wix and Squarespace. Wix offers an unstructured editor, allowing users to place elements anywhere on the page. You can drag-and-drop elements with pixel-perfect precision. While this sounds empowering, it can lead to design consistency, especially for users who need design experience. For instance, what looks good on a desktop might not translate well to mobile.

Ease of Use and Design Consistency

Wix requires many manual adjustments, such as repositioning elements on different device views, which can lead to frustration. Squarespace, on the other hand, uses a structured editor called Fluid Engine. This system restricts placement within defined rows and columns, ensuring your site looks clean and uniform across devices.

Structured Editor: Pros and Cons

Although it limits some flexibility compared to Wix, Squarespace’s editor is more intuitive, resulting in fewer design mishaps. The structured approach minimizes errors, making Squarespace a smoother experience for beginners.

Winner: Squarespace's structured editor is more user-friendly and delivers cleaner results, especially for beginners.

Templates: Quality vs. Quantity

Wix boasts over 900 templates, an overwhelming number of options in terms of templates. However, quantity doesn’t always equate to quality. Many Wix templates are outdated, and the inconsistency in design can make it hard to find a modern, polished template without sifting through many that feel dated.

Wix doesn’t remove old templates, so there’s a wide gap between the best and worst options. In contrast, Squarespace offers around 160 templates, but their quality is consistently high. Squarespace’s templates are known for being:

Sleek

Modern

Professional

These qualities make Squarespace ideal for portfolios, e-commerce stores, and blogs. It’s also designed to be highly responsive across devices. If aesthetics and consistency are your priorities, Squarespace has the upper hand.

Winner: Squarespace, for the quality and consistency of its templates.

Template Customization: Make It Your Own

Both platforms allow for template customization, but Squarespace handles it more elegantly. You can apply a color palette across the entire site, making it easy to maintain brand consistency.

Ease of Use and Complexity

Squarespace’s customization tools are designed to simplify the process, ensuring that even complex customizations like color schemes are intuitive. Wix, while offering more freedom, can make customization feel overwhelming. With so many options, it's easy to make your site look inconsistent unless you’re skilled in design. Adjusting colors across the site isn’t as streamlined as in Squarespace, and simple tasks can sometimes become more complicated than necessary.

Winner: Squarespace, for its simplicity and focus on maintaining a cohesive brand look.

Features: It’s All About Quality

When it comes to features, Wix leads in volume. It offers:

More apps

Integrations

Out-of-the-box features

Wix supports a broader range of capabilities, including:

Multilingual sites

Live chat

Forums

Third-party fonts directly from its App Market

App Marketplace and Feature Comparison

Wix’s app marketplace is robust, with over 500 apps, compared to Squarespace’s more limited selection of around 30 extensions. However, Squarespace often delivers a higher-quality experience for the features it does offer. Take restaurant menus, donations, and podcast syndication, for example.

Squarespace outshines Wix with features that are easy to implement and highly effective. Squarespace’s donation system is superior, offering a complete set of tools tailored to non-profits, while Wix only provides an essential PayPal integration.

Squarespace is the only website builder that allows for podcast syndication, a necessary feature for anyone looking to distribute their podcasts across platforms like:

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Wix only offers a primary podcast player without syndication capabilities.

Winner: It depends. If you need a large variety of features, Wix is your choice. However, Squarespace excels in certain use cases, such as podcasts and donations.

Flexibility vs. Simplicity: What’s Your Preference?

Wix thrives on offering maximum flexibility to its users, making it a great tool if you need more niche features or want total control over your site’s layout. It can be powerful for advanced users or those who need specific integrations. Squarespace, on the other hand, focuses on simplicity and aesthetics.

While you won’t get as much flexibility, you will get a platform that’s easier to use, especially if you value a streamlined design process without making manual adjustments for different devices. Winner: Squarespace for ease of use, Wix for flexibility.