WordPress vs Squarespace: which one and why

WordPress comes as two products: WordPress.org, the open-source software you install on a server of your own, and WordPress.com, a hosted service that takes care of hosting, security, backups and updates, according to its pricing page.

Squarespace has no installable version. In this comparison, plain «WordPress» means WordPress.org on your own hosting.

The size of each one reflects that difference. According to W3Techs, as of 2 October 2026 WordPress runs 40.2% of all websites and holds a 58.7% share of the content management systems it tracks; Squarespace runs 2.4% of websites, with a 3.6% share.

The official WordPress.org directory lists over 74,000 free plugins, modules that add functions such as forms or a shop. Squarespace starts from its own blocks and adds third-party tools through its Extensions, which it presents as the equivalent of plugins.

Squarespace’s four plans, in US dollars:

• Basic: $228 a year ($19 a month), or $25 month to month. No code injection.
• Core: $348 a year ($29 a month), or $39 month to month.
• Plus: $588 a year ($49 a month), or $65 month to month.
• Advanced: $1,188 a year ($99 a month), or $139 month to month.

The three-year cost is more than the fee. On Squarespace the fee covers almost everything; on WordPress, hosting comes with paid plugins and the hours of whoever maintains the site, even when they never arrive as an invoice.

Core Web Vitals are the three metrics Google uses to measure real experience: main content loading (LCP), visual stability (CLS) and reaction to a tap (INP).

On responsiveness, Squarespace tops the 2025 Web Almanac list, with 96% of sites rated good on INP. The same chapter places Squarespace among the more tightly managed environments that improved their Core Web Vitals most from 2024 to 2025, at +8% year over year.

For WordPress, the Web Almanac attributes the variation mostly to the theme, the plugins and the page builders, rather than to the core software.

The lab test qualifies the result. On the median Lighthouse performance score on mobile, which simulates loading on a slow device, Squarespace is among the lowest-scoring systems, between 30 and 32 alongside 1C-Bitrix and PrestaShop, according to the same Web Almanac. Real-visitor data weighs more in a decision.

Structured data is a block of code, invisible to visitors, that tells search engines and AI assistants what each page is: a company, a product, an article and its author.

On WordPress, structured data is generated by the theme or a plugin, and it can be changed because the code is accessible. On Squarespace, whatever Squarespace does not generate itself has to be added by hand through code injection or the advanced code block, and neither is in the Basic plan.

The limit shows when the site has to describe many products, prices or authors in a way that lets an AI model pick it as a source.

robots.txt is the text file in which a site tells each crawler what it may download. Squarespace’s list includes GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and CCBot, among others, according to its Help Center, last updated on 8 January 2026. The checkbox applies the whole list.

Squarespace itself warns about the cost of ticking it: “If AI crawlers exclude your site, it might negatively impact your site traffic.”

On either option, what needs checking is whether AI crawlers can actually read the site, not just what the settings say.

The ceiling matters when the strategy is to answer many specific questions, each on its own page.

An example with little data, but a clear one: on a site specialising in rigid inflatable boats that implements DoGeo’s plan on its own, comparison pages, one brand against another or «differences between», account for 53.4% of page-level impressions in Google’s generative AI features, according to its Search Console. That is under a thousand impressions, so it works as an example and not as a statistic.

Publishing at that pace usually means automating part of the writing with an AI agent, and then it matters that the site accepts content without pasting it into the editor by hand.

Two sites built this way, those of Kulturo and HeyTalent, both DoGeo clients, show how they behave on speed. According to the real-user Chrome data shown in PageSpeed Insights, in the 28 days to 17 September 2026 the kulturo.tech home page on mobile passed Core Web Vitals with an LCP of 1.4 s and a CLS of 0, and the English home page of heytalent.app did so with an LCP of 2.2 s and a CLS of 0.

On cost, when Kulturo moved from Webflow to code, hosting went from about $50 a month to $20 a month on Vercel, according to the DoGeo team. Those $20 are the team plan, which hosts several projects at once, and they cover hosting only, not development.

The usual fear is losing traffic in the switch. When Kulturo moved from Webflow to code, with every URL redirected by 301, its Google clicks in the following three weeks were 69.2% higher than in the three weeks before, according to Search Console. Those weeks coincide with a record in Kulturo’s impressions in Google’s AI answers: the figure shows that no traffic was lost, not that migrating made it rise. Kulturo came from Webflow, not from WordPress or Squarespace.

The downsides of a coded site, worth weighing before choosing one:

• Every design change goes through someone who codes: there is no visual editor.
• Security and updates depend on whoever maintains it.
• The first expense is development, higher than opening a Squarespace account.

Before changing anything, it helps to check how the brand appears in ChatGPT’s answers today: if the site already shows up where it matters, the tool weighs less than the content.