Squarespace alternatives for small businesses

The best Squarespace alternative for most small businesses is self-hosted WordPress, and the second best is staying on Squarespace. Everything else worth considering is a narrower tool that beats both of them at one specific job: Shopify if selling is the point, Ghost if publishing is the point, Framer or Carrd if the whole site is one or two pages, and a hand-built static site if speed and ownership matter more than editing convenience.

I have moved sites off Squarespace, moved sites onto it, and talked more than a few people out of doing either. Below is what each option actually costs, who it fits, the drawback nobody puts in the comparison chart, and the part that decides whether a migration goes well or badly: what comes out of Squarespace when you press export.

One note on numbers. Platform pricing changes several times a year, so treat every monthly figure here as an approximate annual-billing rate to sanity-check against the vendor’s current page, not a quote.

Should you actually leave Squarespace?

Probably not, and this is the section that will save some readers a few thousand dollars.

Leaving is justified when you have hit a capability wall. You need more than one blog. You need a real membership or course system. You are selling enough that platform limits and transaction fees cost more than a move would. You need multilingual content, a searchable directory, staff logins with different permissions, or data that has to talk to another system. You need to own the code because a funder, a board, or a compliance requirement says so.

Leaving is not justified because the site looks dated. That is a design problem, and a designer can rework the template you already have in days for a fraction of a migration. It is also not justified because someone told you Squarespace is bad for search. It is not. Google reads finished HTML and has no opinion about which tool produced it. When a Squarespace site does not rank, the cause is almost always thin content and weak local signals, which is a different fix entirely and one worth reading about before you spend money on a platform change.

The honest version: if Squarespace is doing the job, keep it and spend the money on content, photography, or local SEO instead. A new platform with the same three thin pages will perform exactly the same.

What are the real alternatives to Squarespace?

Self-hosted WordPress

WordPress software is free. You rent hosting, install it, and own everything. It runs a very large share of the web, which means there is a plugin, a developer, and a Stack Overflow answer for almost anything you want to do.

Real cost. Hosting $10 to $50 a month. A built site from a studio typically $1,800 to $9,000 depending on scope. Maintenance $75 to $600 a month, or your own time.

Who it fits. Nonprofits, schools, clinics, and service businesses that publish regularly, need forms and integrations, and want their content genuinely portable.

The drawback. It is the only option on this list that can be neglected into a security incident. Plugins are doors. An abandoned WordPress site is a liability in a way an abandoned Squarespace site is not.

Managed WordPress hosting

Same WordPress, but the host handles updates, backups, staging, and security. Kinsta, WP Engine, Flywheel, and Rocket.net all sell versions of this.

Real cost. Roughly $20 to $35 a month at entry level, climbing fast with traffic.

Who it fits. Organizations that want WordPress capability without WordPress babysitting and have no one technical on staff.

The drawback. You pay two to five times shared hosting rates, and some hosts restrict which plugins you can install. It also does not cover design or content changes, only the plumbing.

Wix

The closest direct substitute for Squarespace. Drag-and-drop editor, all-in-one hosting, a large app market, and an editor that is more forgiving than Squarespace’s if you like moving things by hand.

Real cost. Roughly $17 to $36 a month for most small business plans, more for the top tier.

Who it fits. Owner-operators who will edit the site themselves and want the widest set of built-in tools for booking, scheduling, and simple stores.

The drawback. Portability is worse than Squarespace, and Squarespace is already bad. There is no meaningful full-site export. If you leave Wix, you are rebuilding from a copy-paste of your own text. Our Wix versus Squarespace comparison goes deeper on where each one wins.

Webflow

A visual builder that produces genuinely professional HTML and CSS, with a real content structure underneath. It is the tool designers move to when Squarespace’s design ceiling starts to bother them.

Real cost. Site plans roughly $14 to $39 a month, plus workspace seats if more than one person builds. E-commerce plans cost more.

Who it fits. Brand-forward companies with a designer involved, and marketing teams that ship landing pages often.

The drawback. The learning curve is real. If you hand a Webflow site to an office manager who has never used a CMS, they will be afraid to touch it. Costs also stack in a way that surprises people. We compare it against WordPress in more detail in WordPress vs Webflow.

Shopify

Not a website builder with a store attached. A store platform with a website attached. If products and orders are the business, this is the correct answer and it is not close.

Real cost. Around $39 a month at entry, roughly $105 for the mid tier, and near $399 for advanced. Add transaction fees if you use an outside payment processor, plus paid apps that quietly add $50 to $200 a month.

Who it fits. Anyone processing real order volume, shipping physical goods, or needing inventory, discounts, abandoned cart recovery, and tax handling that works.

The drawback. Content pages and blogging are weak. Shopify’s blog is an afterthought. If your business is 80% content and 20% commerce, Shopify is the wrong shape. We built Zolasina’s sustainable clothing store around exactly this trade-off, and WordPress vs Shopify covers the decision in full.

Ghost

A publishing platform built for writers and paid newsletters. Fast, clean, with memberships and email built in rather than bolted on.

Real cost. Ghost(Pro) hosting starts around $9 to $11 a month for a small list and scales with subscribers. Self-hosting is free plus a server.

Who it fits. Consultants, coaches, and organizations whose website is essentially a publication with a paid tier.

The drawback. It is not a general-purpose site builder. Service pages, staff directories, and complex marketing sites fight the tool. Most small businesses need less Ghost and more landing page.

Framer

A design-first builder that grew out of a prototyping tool. Excellent motion, excellent typography, genuinely fast output, and an AI-assisted start.

Real cost. A free tier on a Framer subdomain, then roughly $5 to $30 a month per site for custom domains and higher traffic.

Who it fits. Startups, agencies, and product companies that want a striking marketing site and have someone with design instincts driving.

The drawback. It is young. Content modeling is thinner than WordPress or Webflow, and the export story is limited. Excellent for a site you expect to redesign in two years anyway.

Carrd

One page. That is the product. It costs almost nothing and it does the one thing extremely well.

Real cost. Free for basic sites, and the paid tiers are billed yearly in the $9 to $49 per year range rather than monthly.

Who it fits. A brand new contractor who needs a phone number, a service list, and a form online this week. A single-location shop. A landing page for one event.

The drawback. You will outgrow it. There is no blog, no real CMS, and no room to add pages as the business grows. But for $19 a year while you figure out whether the business works, that is the right trade. If this is where you are, spend the money on your Google Business Profile before you spend it on us.

A custom static build

A site built with a framework like Astro, Eleventy, or Next.js and published as plain files. No database, no plugins to patch, and page loads that are hard to beat.

Real cost. $9,000 to $25,000 to build a real one. Hosting is often free or under $20 a month. Maintenance is minimal because there is no software to exploit.

Who it fits. Organizations where speed, uptime, and a small security surface genuinely matter, and where content changes are infrequent or handled through a headless editor.

The drawback. You need a developer for structural changes. It is the most expensive option on this list up front, and for a ten-page brochure site the visitor cannot tell the difference. Our pricing page lists where this sits relative to everything else.

How do the alternatives compare?

Platform	Monthly cost	Ease for a non-technical editor	Design ceiling	SEO control	E-commerce	Content portability
Squarespace	~$16-$50	High	Medium	Good	Basic to decent	Poor
WordPress (self-hosted)	$10-$50 hosting + $75-$600 care	Medium	Very high	Excellent	Strong via WooCommerce	Excellent
Managed WordPress	~$20-$35+	Medium	Very high	Excellent	Strong	Excellent
Wix	~$17-$36	Highest	Medium	Good	Decent	Worst on this list
Webflow	~$14-$39+ seats	Low to medium	Very high	Excellent	Adequate	Good, code exports
Shopify	~$39-$399 + apps	High	Medium to high	Good	Best available	Good for products, poor for pages
Ghost	~$9-$11+	High for posts	Medium	Very good	Memberships only	Excellent, open source
Framer	Free to ~$30	Medium	Very high	Good	Minimal	Limited
Carrd	~$9-$49 per year	Highest	Low	Basic	None meaningful	None needed
Custom static	$0-$20 hosting	Depends on the editor built	Unlimited	Total	Via a separate store	Total, you own the files

How do you actually migrate off Squarespace?

This is where migrations go wrong, so read it before you commit.

What exports cleanly. Squarespace produces a single WordPress-format XML file. It contains your basic pages, text blocks, image blocks, gallery pages, and embed blocks, plus exactly one blog page. If you run two blogs, the second one is not in the file. Products export separately as a CSV with a limited set of fields.

What does not export. Your design, in full. Your custom CSS. Index pages and album pages. Event pages. Member areas, courses, and digital products. Every form on the site, and every form submission you have ever received. Acuity scheduling. Audio, video, and product blocks. The URL mappings and redirects you configured inside Squarespace. In many cases your per-page SEO titles and descriptions. Images frequently come across as links pointing back at Squarespace-hosted files, which stop resolving the day you cancel.

Plan accordingly. The export is a starting point for your text, not a copy of your website.

Preserve the URLs. Before you change anything, crawl your own site and save a spreadsheet of every URL, page title, meta description, and H1. Screaming Frog’s free tier handles up to 500 URLs and is enough for most small sites. Pull the same list from Google Search Console so you know which pages actually earn traffic.

Then rebuild with that spreadsheet open. Keep paths identical wherever you can. Squarespace blog posts sit under a collection path, so /blog/post-name/ is usually easy to reproduce. Where a path has to change, write a one-to-one 301 redirect from old to new. Never point everything at the homepage. That is the single most common way a migration destroys six years of rankings, and our guide to moving a website without losing rankings walks the full sequence.

Handle the domain and the images. If the domain is registered through Squarespace, transfer it out or point DNS, and know that a domain is locked for 60 days after registration or a prior transfer. Download every image before you cancel, because there is no bulk image download and the export file only references them. Do not cancel the Squarespace subscription until the new site is live, DNS has propagated, and you have spot-checked your top twenty URLs.

After launch. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console, watch the coverage and page indexing reports for four to eight weeks, and fix any 404s that show up. A clean migration still usually dips slightly for two to six weeks. A migration with broken URLs does not recover on its own. While you are at it, confirm you have admin access to the domain, the host, and the analytics accounts, because website ownership is the thing people discover they lack at the worst possible moment.

What does a Squarespace migration cost?

Doing it yourself costs nothing but time, and the time is real. A ten-page site with 40 blog posts is a solid weekend or two if you are comfortable with the tools, and considerably more if you are not. Building it yourself versus hiring someone is worth thinking through honestly before you start.

Hiring it out typically lands in the $2,500 to $12,000 range, the same band as a redesign. That surprises people who assume a lift-and-shift should be cheap. It is not, because almost none of the labor is design. It is content reconstruction, URL mapping, redirects, form rebuilds, and testing. If you are paying for all that anyway, get the new design too. Smaller scoped work, like a straight content move onto a template you have already chosen, is usually billed hourly at $95 to $150.

Ongoing costs after the move: hosting $10 to $50 a month, domain $12 to $25 a year, and a care plan at $75 to $600 a month if you land on WordPress and want someone else keeping it patched.

So which one should you pick?

Start here and stop at the first line that describes you.

If Squarespace does everything you need and you only dislike how it looks, do not migrate. Pay a designer to rework the template.

If the entire site is a phone number, a service list, and a contact form, and you are not sure the business will exist in a year, use Carrd and put the saved money into your Google Business Profile.

If products and orders are the business, use Shopify. If you sell a handful of items alongside a lot of content, use WooCommerce on WordPress instead.

If the site is essentially a publication with paid subscribers, use Ghost.

If you have a designer and design differentiation is genuinely part of how you compete, use Webflow or Framer.

If you are a nonprofit, school, clinic, home care agency, or service business that publishes news, hosts documents, runs forms, and needs staff to update pages without calling anyone, use WordPress. That covers most of the organizations we work with across the Twin Cities, and it is the recommendation more often than any other on this list.

If your site has to be extremely fast, handle sensitive information, or serve a lot of traffic on a small budget, and content changes are rare, use a custom static build.

If you got to the bottom and none of them jumped out, that means the platform is not your constraint. Your content is.

We build on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, WooCommerce, and fully custom, which means we have no reason to push you toward one. If you want a second opinion on whether a move is worth it, tell us what is not working and we will tell you straight, including when the answer is to stay put. Our nonprofit website work and full project list will show you what we actually build.