Expect BestWordPress vs Squarespace is usually argued on features, which is the least useful way to settle it. Both will produce a perfectly good website for a small business. What separates them is who carries the maintenance, and how much freedom you are buying with it.
What Squarespace actually gives you
Everything handled. Hosting, security, updates, backups and the templates themselves are Squarespace's problem, not yours. For a business owner with no technical help and no appetite for acquiring any, that is worth a great deal.
The templates are genuinely well designed, which matters more than it sounds. A competent Squarespace site looks better than an average WordPress one built by somebody learning as they go.
The cost is flexibility. You work inside somebody else's design system, and when you need something it does not do, the answer is usually that you cannot. Commerce is fine for a handful of products and creaks well before a serious catalogue.
The other cost is portability. Everything lives inside Squarespace, exports are limited, and moving elsewhere later means rebuilding the design rather than transferring it. You are renting a very well-run property.
What WordPress actually gives you
Ownership and reach. Roughly two in five websites run on it, there is a plugin for almost everything, and you can move the whole site to a different host on a Tuesday afternoon because the files and the database are yours.
That freedom has a price, and the price is maintenance. Core, themes and plugins all need updating, and an unmaintained WordPress site is a security problem waiting to happen. It also punishes plugin sprawl harder than any other platform: twenty plugins each doing a small job will make the site slow and fragile. Almost every neglected WordPress site we are called into has the same story: a plugin was installed to solve something small, nobody removed it, and four years later there are thirty of them and no one dares touch any.
The WordPress vs Squarespace question that actually decides it
Who is going to look after this in two years?
If the honest answer is nobody, Squarespace removes an entire category of risk. You will never have a site taken offline by a plugin update because there are no plugins and no updates.
If the answer is an agency on a maintenance plan, or somebody in-house who genuinely enjoys it, the constraint disappears and WordPress becomes the stronger option on flexibility alone.
Where each one clearly wins
Squarespace wins for photographers, restaurants, studios, consultants and anyone selling on aesthetics with a small, stable set of pages. It also wins when the site needs to exist by Friday.
WordPress wins for content-heavy sites, anything needing memberships, bookings, complex forms or an integration with a system you already run, and any business that expects the site to do real work rather than sit there looking presentable.
It also wins on cost at scale. A Squarespace commerce plan costs the same every month whether you sell four products or four hundred, while WordPress hosting barely moves. For a growing catalogue the arithmetic eventually flips.
The thing neither decision fixes
Platform choice matters far less than most comparison articles imply. A well-maintained Squarespace site beats a neglected WordPress one every time, and both lose to a competitor who actually updates their content.
Choose the one that fits how you will genuinely run it, then spend your energy on the site itself.
A quick way to decide
Answer three questions honestly. Will anybody be responsible for updating the software, either in-house or on a paid plan? Does the site need to do something specific, such as bookings, memberships or an integration? And would rebuilding from scratch in three years be a serious problem?
Two or more yes answers point at WordPress. Two or more no answers point at Squarespace. It really is that blunt, and the businesses that agonise over the decision usually end up fine either way because they picked on the strength of their own situation rather than on a feature table.
Our web design service starts with that conversation, and we build on both, so we have no reason to push you either way.