Which is best for a small business: Squarespace, WordPress or Wix?
For most small businesses in Thailand the answer comes down to one question: will the site ever need to do more than show who you are and how to reach you? If not, a hosted builder is enough. If yes, start on WordPress and avoid a rebuild later.
- A café or small restaurant with a menu, photos, opening hours and a map: Squarespace or Wix both work. Squarespace templates look polished with little effort; Wix gives you more freedom to rearrange.
- A clinic with several treatments, doctors' profiles, Thai and English pages and a consented enquiry form under PDPA: WordPress. The page count and language needs grow fast.
- A consultant or freelancer who needs a portfolio and a contact form: Squarespace, unless you plan to blog seriously for search traffic, in which case WordPress.
- A small shop selling to Thai customers who expect PromptPay, cash on delivery and Thai couriers: WordPress with WooCommerce, or Shopify. Check local payment options carefully before choosing either builder.
The rest of this page shows the reasoning. For a deeper two-way look, read our page on Wix against WordPress for SEO and cost.
The three platforms scored
A scorecard, not a verdict on quality: each tool is good at different things. "Strong" and "Limited" here are relative to the other two, judged on what a small Thai business needs.
| Factor | Squarespace | Wix | WordPress |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price structure | Yearly or monthly plan | Yearly or monthly plan, plus paid apps | Hosting, domain, build, upkeep |
| Thai text | Test template fonts with Thai | Test fonts and spacing with Thai | Any Thai web font, tuned per language |
| Thai and English pages | Weglot integration or duplicated pages | Built-in multilingual feature | Full control of language URLs |
| SEO basics | Good | Good | Strong, with full control |
| Design | Polished templates, less freedom | Flexible drag and drop | Anything a developer can build |
| Selling in Thailand | Check local payment options | Check local payment options | WooCommerce with Thai gateways and COD |
| Upkeep | Handled by Squarespace | Handled by Wix | Updates and backups needed |
| Ownership | Stays on Squarespace | Stays on Wix | Portable to any host |
Squarespace: strengths and limits in Thailand
Squarespace is the tidiest of the three. Its templates are designed as a set, so fonts, spacing and image sizes already work together, and it is hard to make a site look amateur. Hosting, security, SSL and updates are included in the plan, listed on the Squarespace pricing page at the time of writing.
Where Thai owners run into trouble
- Thai typography. The template fonts are built around Latin script. You can type Thai, but test a few long Thai paragraphs on a phone during the trial to check that tone marks are not clipped and line breaks look natural.
- Two languages. Running a full Thai and English site is less straightforward than on the other two. Squarespace's help centre points current sites to its Weglot integration, a separate translation service with its own plan, or to duplicating pages by hand, which gets messy as the site grows.
- Payments. Squarespace commerce works through a short list of payment processors. Confirm which ones accept a Thai business account, and whether PromptPay or cash on delivery is possible, before you build a shop on it.
Best fit: a consultant, photographer, boutique hotel or café that wants a beautiful, small, mostly English site with minimal upkeep.
Wix: strengths and limits in Thailand
Wix trades some of Squarespace's polish for freedom. You can drag almost anything anywhere, and its App Market adds bookings, events, restaurant menus and more. It also has a built-in multilingual feature, which makes a Thai and English site more practical than on Squarespace. Plans and prices are on the Wix premium plans page.
The limits to watch
- Freedom cuts both ways. Because nothing is locked, it is easy to end up with a layout that looks fine on a laptop and crowded on a phone. Check the mobile view of every page.
- Apps add up. Several useful features are paid apps on top of the plan, so the real monthly cost can be higher than the headline.
- Leaving is a rebuild. Design and apps stay on Wix. Owners who outgrow it follow our guide on how to migrate from Wix to WordPress, which is a rebuild with redirects rather than an export.
Best fit: a small service business, a tutor or a restaurant that wants to change the site often without help, and may need a simple booking tool.
WordPress: strengths and limits
WordPress is not a builder you sign up for. It is free, open-source software from WordPress.org that runs on hosting you choose, with a theme that sets the design. That makes it the most flexible of the three and the one that needs the most care.
Strengths
- Thai and English versions with their own addresses, titles and hreflang, so each language can rank for its own searches.
- Any Thai web font, with spacing set separately for Thai and English text.
- WooCommerce for selling, with Thai payment gateways, PromptPay, cash on delivery and couriers such as Thailand Post, KEX Express (formerly Kerry Express) or Flash Express.
- A site you can move to another host or developer at any time.
Limits
- Someone must update the core, theme and plugins and keep backups. A neglected WordPress site is a security risk.
- Quality depends on the build. A cheap theme loaded with plugins is slow and fragile.
- Most small businesses pay a developer to set it up rather than doing it themselves.
Local hosting, fonts and plugin choices are covered in our WordPress Thailand guide.
WordPress vs Squarespace head to head
These two sit at opposite ends. Squarespace decides most things for you, so you get a good-looking site quickly and never think about servers. WordPress decides almost nothing for you, so you can build exactly what the business needs, but somebody has to make those decisions and look after the result.
Squarespace wins when the site is small, mostly in one language, and the owner values calm over control. WordPress wins when you need Thai and English as equal versions, a blog that grows over years, custom forms or booking flows, or a shop with local payment methods. It also wins on ownership: you can take a WordPress site anywhere.
On cost, Squarespace is a steady subscription with no build fee if you design it yourself. WordPress usually means a one-time build plus yearly hosting and upkeep. Over three years the totals can land closer than people expect, so do the sums for your own case. If a design-first alternative is on your list too, our page on WordPress vs Webflow covers that choice, and shop owners should read WordPress or Shopify before picking any of the three for selling.
When should a small business hire instead?
Sometimes none of the three, used on your own, is the right answer. Hiring a developer makes sense when:
- the site needs Thai and English pages that both look right and both rank;
- you handle personal data through forms and want PDPA cookie consent and a privacy notice set up properly;
- you have tried a builder, spent several weekends on it, and still are not happy with how it looks on a phone;
- the site is part of how you win customers, not just a digital business card.
Our Starter package covers up to 5 pages with a custom design on WordPress, mobile-first, with contact, WhatsApp and LINE buttons, on-page SEO and PDPA cookie consent, from THB 10,000 as an indicative one-time price. A typical project takes about 15 days. You can read how we approach website design for small business, or check how much a WordPress website costs and what changes the quote. If you would rather try it yourself first, our guide on how to build a website step by step is a sensible place to start.
Further reading
Sources
- Squarespace: Pricing
- Wix: Premium plans
- WordPress.org: Download WordPress
- Squarespace Help Center: Creating a multilingual site with Weglot
- Squarespace Help Center: Manually creating a multilingual site
Builds and ranks the websites: the systems behind the 17 client sites whose Search Console numbers we publish. This guide was written by the Website Development Bangkok team. More about us