2026 Website Platforms, Pricing and Migration Advice
Somewhere in your inbox right now is an email that says your Squarespace bill just went up, maybe by a lot. And somewhere in your head is a voice telling you to cancel everything today and switch. Pause. Let's discuss the move and where you should move to.
Squarespace raised their prices and everyone’s losing their minds.
Stop right there. Before you smash that cancel button and go running toward whatever platform your cousin's friend swears by, sit down for one second.
Every year or two, some website platform jacks up its prices, and half the internet has the exact same reaction: panic, then a mass scramble to whatever's currently trendy. It's happened with Wix. It's happened with Webflow. It'll happen again with whatever we're all using in five years. Right now, it's Squarespace's turn.
I've had four people message me this week ready to abandon their entire website over it. Four people with the same energy every of. "I'm switching to WordPress, this is ridiculous."
Ridiculous? Yeah, it’s total BS. A crisis? No.
Here's what happened. Squarespace rolled out new pricing tiers and some plans jumped by a ton. People opened the new invoice, felt betrayed, and did what humans do when they feel cheated: they panicked and started Googling "best website builder" the second the email hit their inbox.
Is Squarepace’s new pricing worth it?
Look, I get it. Nobody enjoys opening an email that says your $23 per mont suddenly doubled in cost. But the real question here isn't really about Squarespace specifically. It's the same question no matter which platform does this to you, and one of them eventually will: what does switching actually cost, and is that cost worth paying just to escape a price hike?
WARNING
Switching platforms is not free, and it is not a Tuesday afternoon project, regardless of who's sending the bad news email this year..
Picture it. You've decided you're done. You're standing at the edge of the Squarespace ship, and in your head this is very dramatic, very "women and children first," very orchestra-still-playing. You jump. You're now doggy-paddling toward a WordPress life raft you've never tested, one you assumed would be sitting there fully inflated with a mini bar and a hunky captain named Greg. Instead, it's got a slow leak, someone stole the oars, and there's a guy already on board whispering "you'll need a plugin for that".
That guy is WordPress hosting fees. Say hi.
What switching platforms actually costs you
So before you jump ship over a price increase, ask yourself the real question: what does switching cost you that has nothing to do with the monthly bill?
Migrating a website isn't just moving files. It's redirects. It's rebuilding pages that don't translate cleanly to a new builder. It's the blog posts you spent two years ranking for on Google, losing their position because a migration went sideways.
I'm writing a whole post on exactly how that happens, because it deserves its own space and not a rushed paragraph here. For now, just know this. A bad migration can tank months of search traffic. That's not a small thing, and I don't give a crap how confident your web designer sounds about it.
I’m honestly not on team Squarespace. I’m on team, save yourself sanity. And when you think about it, the platforms aren't that different in price anymore. Everyone raised their rates. You're not escaping to some promised land of cheap, competent, SEO-friendly hosting. You're trading one bill for a different bill, and possibly a much bigger headache.
Current pricing for every platform people keep asking me about
Let's look at the current pricing.
| Platform | Cheapest blog-ready plan (billed annually) | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| Squarespace | Basic, $16/mo | Design polish, hosting handled for you,no schema, some SEO limitations |
| WordPress.com | Personal, $4/mo (Premium, $8/mo for payment buttons) | Hosted for you, but Business at $25/mo is where custom themes and real plugin access start |
| WordPress.org | Free software | You supply hosting yourself, generally $3–$10/mo for basic shared hosting, $20–$50/mo for managed hosting |
| Webflow | Basic, $15/mo (Premium, $25/mo) | Clean technical SEO, built for people comfortable with tech |
| Showit | Basic plus blog, $24/mo | Full design freedom, popular with creatives, but SEO and accessibility settings that will give you nightmares |
| Wix | Light, $17/mo (Core, $29/mo for ecommerce) | Fast launch but unethical and watch for renewal and payment surcharge fees |
| Ghost | Starter, $18/mo | Built for newsletters first, blog second but solid SEO |
Notice something? None of these are cheap anymore. Squarespace's jump stings the most percentage-wise, but Wix's Business Elite plan runs $159 a month and Webflow just raised its Premium tier too. Nobody is winning the race to the bottom. Everybody raised the price of admission.
One more thing about that table. Don't look at whatever plan is cheapest in a "best platform" ranking and assume it covers what you need. It usually doesn't. The entry tier rarely includes payment buttons, custom themes, or the email marketing tools you're used to. Check what your actual setup requires, then price that tier, not the one at the top of somebody's listicle.
So which one's right for a solopreneur trying to blog and rank in search? Depends what "right" means to you, and that's a real question, not a cop-out.
So which website platform is best for small business and solopreneurs?
Let’s get into the details of each so you can make an informed decision, because this is all about being smart with your time and money and friends don’t let friends make poor website decisions.
Where Squarepace still fits
If you want a platform you can update yourself without learning a dashboard the size of an airport terminal, and you're running a service business with a blog that supports it rather than a publishing empire, Squarespace can absolutely work for that. The SEO limitations people love to panic-post about, thinner schema control for example, matter less than the content you put on the page for a lot of small sites.
That's not me telling you to stay. It's me telling you the platform was rarely the actual bottleneck for people in that specific setup. Whether it's still the right call for you after this price hike is a math problem, not a loyalty test.
WordPress.com and WordPress.org are different offers
WordPress earns its reputation for a reason, but earning a reputation isn't the same thing as being effortless, and "WordPress" is doing two jobs that people mix up constantly. WordPress.org is the free, self-hosted software.
Free doesn't mean cost-free. You're buying hosting yourself, generally $3 to $10 a month for basic shared hosting, more like $20 to $50 a month if you want managed hosting that helps you avoid plugin issues and security vulnerabilities.
WordPress.com is the version they host for you, and the plan tiers matter more than people realize. Stay on Personal and you can't add payment buttons or take a Stripe payment at all. That needs Premium. Want custom themes, more plugin access, or built-in email marketing? That's Business, $25 a month on annual billing.
I honestly love Wordpress for its flexibility and SEO friendliness, but here's the part WordPress fans leave out. You're now the one responsible for updating plugins before they break your site, picking a theme whose developer hasn't abandoned it, and dealing with security patches that come with running the most-targeted CMS on the internet.
That guy in the raft, whispering about needing a plugin for that? He wasn't lying. He just didn't mention he'd be living with you indefinitely. WordPress hands you the most control of anything on this list. It also hands you the most responsibility. That's not automatically the right trade for a solopreneur running a service business, not a publishing operation.
You get around the responsibility more with Wordpress.org but at a cost, and frankly, I have felt it too high and always self-hosted my Wordpress installs to deal with less gatekeeping.
Webflow, if you want technical control
Webflow is genuinely solid for SEO out of the box: clean code, proper heading control, no fighting the platform over a duplicate title tag. The tradeoff is that it's built for people who don't mind adjusting padding and margins to make a small change, not people who want to write a post and hit publish.
Showit, since everyone recommends it in the same breath as Squarespace
Showit is popular for a reason. It hands creative service providers, photographers, coaches, real design freedom, more than Squarespace or Wix will let you touch, without needing to know code. The catch is that nothing about the platform stops you from making an SEO mistake and there are loooots of SEO and accessibility issues.
Most Showit sites get built by duplicating a page that already exists, and that duplicates the page's SEO title, description, and settings right along with it. It's an easy way to end up with three pages fighting each other in search, or a page accidentally set to no-index that you meant to have live the whole time. Showit doesn't warn you when that happens. You have to know to check it yourself. That doesn't make it a bad platform. It makes it a platform where the design freedom and the SEO risk are the same feature.
Wix, and why I'm telling you where I stand
Wix is fine if you're selling products and want ecommerce baked in from day one, but budget for more than the plan price on this one. The free domain only lasts a year, then renews at a hidden price hike.
Email isn't included on any plan, Google Workspace runs another $6 a month per person. Payment processing carries the usual card fees, plus an extra 1.5 percent if a customer's card was issued in another country, plus another 1 percent if a currency conversion happens.
Sell memberships or event tickets and there's a separate transaction fee for that too, sitting off the main pricing page entirely, where you won't see it until the invoice shows up. None of this is illegal or even unusual for the industry. It's just a lot more than the sticker price, and Wix isn't in a hurry to walk you through all of it upfront.
I'll also say one more thing plainly here. Wix is an Israeli company headquartered in Tel Aviv, and that is not neutral information to me. I support a free Palestine, and it factors into what I personally recommend and use. I'm not telling you what to do with that. I'm telling you so you're making an informed choice.
Ghost, if your blog is really a newsletter
Ghost is worth a look only if your business is genuinely the newsletter, not a blog that happens to have an email list attached. I really love Ghost and host one of my blogs on it (but its much cheaper to self-host through something like Magic Pages)
Do the math before you jump
None of these is "the SEO one." That's not how rankings work, and if someone told you a platform alone will rank you, they're selling you something.
Here's the edge I'll leave you with. If you jump ship right now because of a price hike, without a plan, without checking what you'll lose in the move, you're not solving the problem. You're panicking with a credit card.
Check your real numbers before you touch anything. Compare total cost, not the sticker price. And if you're seriously weighing a migration, wait for my next post before you change a single setting. I'll walk you through exactly what a migration does to your SEO, and how to not become one of the horror stories.
That guy in the raft, the one whispering about plugins, isn't going
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