“Which website builder should I use?” For the site most contractors need, a handful of pages that say what you do, where, roughly what it costs and how to reach you, any of the three big names can do the job. The differences that matter show up later: what you pay in year three, who keeps the thing running, and what you can carry out the door if you ever leave.
Here is each of those, from the companies' own pages, checked in October 2026. Prices change, so check them again on the day you buy.
What each one costs
| Builder | Plans, per month billed yearly | Billed monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Wix | Light $17, Core $29, Business $39, Business Elite $159 | Not shown on the pages cited |
| Squarespace | Basic $19, Core $29, Plus $49, Advanced $99 | $25, $39, $65, $139 |
| WordPress.com | Personal $4, Premium $8, Business $25, Commerce $45 | $9, $18, $40, $70 |
A few terms sit behind those numbers:
Put three years side by side. Say a contractor picks each builder's lowest paid plan, billed yearly, at today's listed prices: Wix Light comes to $612 over 36 months, Squarespace Basic to $684, and WordPress.com Personal to $144, each before tax and before the domain renews after year one (on Wix, a .com would add $13.35 a year). None of those is the big cost of a website. Your time is.
Who keeps it running
Wix and Squarespace are hosted services: you rent the software and the servers together. Wix's help center says a Wix site must run on Wix's servers because its software-as-a-service design “does not support external hosting.” That is the trade: the company handles hosting and the software, and you live inside its editor and its rules.
WordPress.com is also hosted. Its pricing page says every plan includes hosting, with managed WordPress updates, malware detection and removal, and protection against attacks, and that real-time backups and one-click restores come with the Business, Commerce and Enterprise plans.
Self-hosted WordPress is the other road. WordPress itself is open source software under the GPL, free to run for any purpose, and WordPress.org says it is the platform of choice for over 43% of all sites across the web. But you, or someone you pay, run it: WordPress.com's own description of the difference is that on a self-hosted site you are responsible for your own hosting, security and maintenance. If the person who built it disappears, so does the person who updates it.
What you can take with you
This is where the three really differ, and it is the question almost nobody asks before signing up.
Whatever you pick, two habits protect you. Keep your own copy of every page's text and every job photo in a folder you control. And register the domain in your own name, with your own login, so that the address customers know stays yours. Who Owns Your Website? walks through checking that and getting it back if someone else holds it.
Why the platform matters less than the pages
A homeowner on her phone at night never sees which builder you used. She sees whether the first screen says what you do and where, whether there is any idea of price, whether your license and insurance are easy to find, and whether reaching you takes one tap. A plain site that answers those beats a beautiful one that does not, on any platform. The Website Pages a Contractor Needs lays out the short list, and Your Website Is a Brochure explains why the price question comes first.
So choose on the practical points:
- If you will build and edit it yourself and want templates and one company to call, Wix or Squarespace keep everything in one place. Accept that leaving later means rebuilding.
- If the lowest yearly bill matters most, WordPress.com's entry plans cost the least of the three at the listed prices.
- If you want to be able to move the whole site someday, WordPress, hosted on a plan with full backups or self-hosted, gives you the most to take with you, at the price of more upkeep.
- Before you pay, check that the plan lets you add custom code if you plan to add a booking, review or quote tool, and that it includes a custom domain.
Then, whichever you choose, connect it to Google Search Console so you can see what people searched before they found you: Search Console for Contractors shows how.
If price is the question your pages do not answer yet, NapkinPrice™ is one script tag pasted where you want its form to appear, and it puts an instant price range from your own rules on the site you already have, on any of these builders whose plan allows custom code.