Websites

Wix, Squarespace or WordPress: the prices, your own domain, selling online, and leaving

All three let you build a site yourself and pay for it monthly or yearly. The differences that last show up when you want your own domain, a shop, or to move the site somewhere else.

By Oscar CobbeCurrent as at 30 October 20265 minute read14 sources

Four ways to run a site

Wix and Squarespace are website builders with the hosting included: Wix says a Wix site has to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers, and Squarespace says all its plans include its managed cloud hosting. WordPress.com is hosted WordPress: its own FAQ says the hosting, security, backups and updates are managed for you, and that every plan, the free one included, comes with hosting.

Self-hosted WordPress is the same open-source software, licensed under the GPL and downloaded free from WordPress.org, which you install on hosting you pay for and manage yourself. What hosting includes covers what that buys and what to ask.

Published prices, October 2026

As each page showed them on 29 October 2026. Wix and Squarespace price by location, and both showed US dollars when read for this article: Wix says prices and currency vary by location and that the final price is shown on the purchase page, and Squarespace says a customer in another country is offered a different currency and a different amount. For an Irish account, the price to go by is the one shown before you pay. WordPress.com's page has a euro view, and its prices are given in euro.

Platform	Plans, price a month	Billing as shown
Wix	Free, $0; Light, $17; Core, $29; Business, $39; Business Elite, $159	US dollars, for yearly subscriptions paid in full at purchase, before tax
Squarespace	Basic, $19; Core, $29; Plus, $49; Advanced, $99	US dollars, paid annually; paying monthly, $25, $39, $65 and $139
WordPress.com	Free; Personal, €4; Premium, €8; Business, €25; Commerce, €45	Euro, billed every 12 months, excluding taxes
WordPress, self-hosted	The software is free	Hosting and the domain are paid for separately, to providers you choose

Your own domain

Wix's help centre says connecting a domain needs a paid plan, and each of its paid plans lists a free domain for the first year. Squarespace includes a year of free domain registration with plans bought for an annual term, on domains in its cheapest price tier, after which the domain renews at Squarespace's standard rate plus taxes. WordPress.com includes a free custom domain for the first year with annual and multi-year paid plans and not with monthly ones, and its free plan uses a wordpress.com address with no custom domain.

With self-hosted WordPress the domain is registered on its own, with whichever registrar you choose. On every route, register it in the business's name: our .ie domain guide explains who can hold a .ie and what proof the registry asks for.

Selling online

What each publishes about taking payments and running a shop:

1Wix: Core, Business and Business Elite include accepting payments and eCommerce, at basic, standard and advanced levels. Light and the free plan list neither.
2Squarespace: every plan lists selling products and services. In the US-dollar view, Basic adds a 2% transaction fee on online sales of products, services and donations, and Core, Plus and Advanced charge none.
3WordPress.com: Premium adds payment buttons for PayPal and Stripe. Business can run WooCommerce with no WordPress.com transaction fee on WooCommerce payments, and Commerce adds built-in store extensions.
4Self-hosted WordPress: WooCommerce is a free plugin, and the hosting, any paid extensions and the payment provider's fees are the running costs.

What you can take with you

This is where the four differ most. From each one's own export documentation:

1Wix: the site has to stay on Wix's servers, so it cannot move to another host. Wix says it is not possible to back a site up outside Wix or to export blog posts to other platforms. CMS collections export as CSV files, and a store's product list exports as a CSV file.
2Squarespace: exports an .xml file in WordPress's format holding layout pages, one blog with its posts, text and image blocks and gallery pages. Store pages, product blocks, other page types, style settings and custom CSS do not export, and a trial site cannot be exported.
3WordPress.com: exports posts, pages, comments, categories and tags as an XML file that links to the media files, and the media library can be downloaded on its own. The export leaves out the theme, design changes and plugins; on the Business and Commerce plans a full backup can be downloaded.
4Self-hosted WordPress: the site is its files and its database, both of which you can copy, and WordPress's documentation says you need both to fully restore a typical site. Its export tool also writes posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and users to an XML file.

Decide on leaving before you build

A site built on Wix stays on Wix, and a Squarespace export leaves the shop behind. If the business may want to move the site later, compare this list before the prices.

Which fits which business

A site built for you is the other route, priced by the job: what a website costs in Ireland puts published Irish prices side by side, and the website cost calculator adds up ours line by line. For a site you build yourself, from what each platform publishes:

1Wix, where you want to build and edit the site yourself and keep it on Wix, with payments and scheduling from Core up.
2Squarespace, where you want to sell from the first plan, accepting the 2% transaction fee on Basic and an export that leaves the shop behind.
3WordPress.com, where you want WordPress without running a server, with plugins on the paid plans and a standard WordPress export.
4Self-hosted WordPress, where you want to hold the software and the files yourself, and will pay for hosting and keep WordPress and its plugins updated.

Sources

Free, and no account needed

Price a site built for you

Choose the pages and the extras and see what the site costs to build and to run each year, from the prices on our Websites page. No email needed.

Run the free check

A site built for you, and handed over

Websites: a landing page or a full site that loads fast on a phone and gets every enquiry to you, with the code and the domain handed over to you, in your name. From €750 for a landing page and €1,500 for up to six pages.

See the Websites page

Who wrote this

Oscar Cobbe · Founder, FourWinds Digital

Writes and maintains the legal explainers on this site, and does the compliance work behind them. Every date and article number here is checked against the legislation itself before it is published, and each article shows the date it was last checked.

More about how we work →