Squarespace, Wix, or WordPress for a Private Practice: What Each Costs You by Year Three

You’ve probably narrowed it to three. Squarespace, because a colleague’s site looks good. Wix, because the ads are everywhere. WordPress, because someone said it’s what serious sites use and then didn’t explain what that meant.

Then you looked at the pricing pages, found they cost roughly the same, and went looking for a comparison article. Squarespace vs WordPress is the search most private practice owners end up running, usually with Wix somewhere in the mix. What came back told you about drag-and-drop editors and template libraries.

Here’s what it missed. You aren’t choosing an editor. You’re choosing who holds your site for the next several years, and what it costs to change your mind.

Why year one is the wrong number to compare

All three builders give you a domain free for the first year. Squarespace on annual plans, Wix on all paid plans, WordPress.com on Personal and up. In year two it renews at whatever the registrar charges, out of your pocket. So each of those three costs more in year two than its pricing page says. Our hosting row doesn’t move, because it never included a domain.

Year one also hides the monthly-billing penalty. Squarespace Basic is $25 a month billed monthly against $228 for the year, which is $19. WordPress.com Personal is $9 monthly against $48 annually. Wix’s plans page shows only yearly subscriptions paid in full and says other billing periods exist without printing them, so the month-to-month number turns up further into the purchase. Pay monthly on any of these and you hand back most of what this comparison is arguing about.

Then there’s a problem I hit while costing this out, worth telling you rather than burying in a footnote.

That observation isn’t in the table. Every WordPress.com figure here uses the stable catalogue rate instead. Take the lesson rather than the number, though. If you can’t get the same answer twice in one day about what year two costs, that’s information about the purchase. Year three is the fairer question, and it’s when a practice starts wondering whether the site is working, which is when switching costs turn real.

Squarespace vs WordPress vs Wix: what each costs, year one to year three

Here’s the arithmetic, in US dollars, on annual billing where the vendor offers it. Domain renewal in years two and three is a flat $20 on every row. That’s a round working figure, not a quoted rate. First-year .com prices run lower, Wix publishes $13.35, and renewals usually cost more than the first year, so treat $20 as a placeholder applied evenly.

Read this before the table. These rows are not the same product. The builder rows include the software that makes the site, the templates and the vendor’s support. Ours is hosting for a site that already exists. So this compares what each route costs to keep, not to start, and section 6 has our build price.

Look at the middle of that chart. Squarespace Basic over three years is $724. Hosting a WordPress site you already own with us is $720. Four dollars apart.

I’d love to tell you our route is cheaper. It isn’t. It’s the same price for a narrower product, because Squarespace is also selling you the builder and someone to email when it breaks.

So if you were waiting for the cost comparison to decide this, it won’t. Any article telling you WordPress is “the cheap option” or Squarespace “the expensive one” was comparing tiers that don’t do the same job.

The tier you can actually use is not the one advertised

This is where published comparison tables quietly mislead.

Wix leads with Light at $17 a month. But its own HIPAA documentation says PHI protection “is available with Business, Plus, Elite, Business Elite and Enterprise plans.” On the lineup Wix sells today that means Business at $39. So a therapist who bills insurance electronically and wants a form that can hold anything sensitive is looking at $468 a year, not $204.

Squarespace is blunter, and I give them credit for it. Their documentation states that form blocks “can’t be used as part of a HIPAA compliant solution,” and points people to Acuity Scheduling with a signed Business Associate Addendum. That’s an honest answer that costs them sales. Acuity puts those HIPAA features on Premium or Powerhouse, so that route carries a second subscription on top of the Squarespace one.

Self-hosted WordPress has no plan gate, which is not the same as being compliant. Nobody decides what your tier is allowed to do, and that’s a real advantage. But WordPress is software, not a compliance product. Anything in the stack that touches protected health information needs safeguards and a contract behind it: the host, the forms, the backups, the email, the analytics.

Don’t read “no gate” as “already fine.” Read it as nobody will stop you, which also means nobody will do it for you. Before a form goes on the site, ask your host directly whether they will sign a BAA and get the answer in writing. Plenty of hosts won’t, and a host that has no HIPAA documentation at all is telling you something.

One caveat before you budget around any of this. HIPAA doesn’t automatically apply to every therapist. Under 45 CFR 160.103, a provider is a covered entity only if they transmit health information electronically for a covered transaction, and electronic insurance billing is the usual trigger. A fully private-pay practice may sit outside that. Ask your own compliance advisor, not a web designer, and see what actually has to change on a HIPAA-compliant therapy website and the contact form fixes worth making first.

Whether or not the rule reaches you, someone typing “I’ve been in crisis since my mother died” into your contact form has handed you something that deserves care. Plenty of practices buy the secure form anyway. That’s defensible, as long as it’s deliberate.

What it costs to leave

Almost nobody writes this section, so here it is.

Wix does not let you leave with the site. Not for a fee, not on a higher plan, not at all. Their documentation is unusually direct: “Since Wix is a SaaS solution, your site must run on Wix’s servers… the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting since it uses Wix’s proprietary technology.” They’re also clear that your content belongs to you, which is true and worth saying. You keep your words and images. You cannot keep the site.

So the cost of leaving Wix is the cost of building it again. On our rates an equivalent five-page build is $3,500. Whatever you’d pay someone else, that’s the exit fee, and it appears on no pricing page.

Squarespace lets you export, with a longer list of exceptions than inclusions. You get an .xml file aimed at WordPress, carrying layout pages, one blog page with its posts, text and image blocks, and gallery pages. Left behind, in their own words: every other page type, page-specific headers, footers and sidebars, any blog beyond the first, dropdowns, audio, video and product blocks, drafts, style settings, and custom CSS.

Read that last pair again. Style settings and custom CSS do not export. The look of your site is the thing you paid for, and it isn’t in the box.

A sharper trap sits in the same document. Import into a self-hosted WordPress site with the standard importer and Squarespace warns that WordPress “may only pull reference links for the images, meaning when you deactivate your Squarespace site, the image links also deactivate.” Cancel the subscription and the pictures go dark on the new site. Their own workaround is to route through WordPress.com first, or download every image by hand.

A WordPress site moves whole, in two pieces. The built-in export handles content: posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, taxonomies and users, into any other WordPress install. That file holds no theme, plugins or design, so it isn’t the whole story alone.

WordPress.com deserves the same scrutiny. Its standard export “only includes your written content and references to your images,” not your theme, customisations, plugins or image files. Same reference-link trap as Squarespace. The difference is a second route Squarespace doesn’t have: a migration plugin that moves the entire site, including plugins, themes and users, to another WordPress host, free up to 2 GB. So WordPress.com sits between Wix and a site you host yourself, closer to the latter.

The rest is a server move. WordPress’s migration handbook puts it plainly: moving to a new server on the same domain, “you can copy the files and database over, exactly as you would a traditional install.” Together those two methods move every component compared here, though licensed themes, plugin keys, email and DNS still need handling separately. Many hosts run the migration free to win the business, but ask rather than assume. The software is GPL and costs nothing, which is why the only WordPress line in the table is hosting.

None of this is hidden or scandalous. All three publish it. Nobody reads migration documentation before buying, because on the day you sign up you aren’t planning to leave. There’s a longer version of this in our piece on whether you actually own your therapy website, which goes through the contracts clause by clause.

Where DIY genuinely wins

Now the part where I talk you out of hiring anyone, including us.

If you’re not licensed yet, build it yourself. You don’t know what your practice will be. Any site you commission now describes a therapist who doesn’t exist yet, and you’ll pay again to change it.

If you’re testing whether an idea has legs, build it yourself. A specialty page, a workshop, a group you’re not sure will fill. A drag-and-drop builder is a genuinely good tool for answering “does anyone want this,” and $17 a month is a cheap experiment.

If you need it live next week, build it yourself. Our builds run four to six weeks. If your timeline is shorter, no agency is the answer, and don’t let one talk you into it.

If your caseload is full, don’t buy anything. This one gets missed. A website is a client acquisition tool. If you aren’t acquiring, you’re buying a brochure.

The “who this is not for” list on our website design page gets quoted back to us more than anything else there. Reasonable people put the line in different places, though. Someone in a saturated metro with a narrow specialty might need a real site on day one. If you can’t yet name the thing your site would say that a directory profile can’t, you’re early.

One more thing no platform can sell you. None of these makes you rank by being chosen. All three can rank, and visibility comes from what your pages say, how the site is structured, your Google Business Profile and who links to you. Implementation counts, so a slow or badly built site holds you back on any of them. What doesn’t hold up is the claim that one builder is inherently “better for SEO.” See what moves local search for a practice and how therapists get found on AI search.

What we charge, including hosting on its own

Our prices are published, so here they are next to everyone else’s.

A website build is $3,500 for five pages, plus $150 per additional page. The site is yours outright from the day it launches, including the WordPress installation, the design, the copy we wrote, the domain, and the logins. There’s nothing to buy out later. Managed plans, where we handle the site and the search work, start at $197 a month plus a $500 onboarding fee, and I’m naming that fee here because this post spent a section criticising Wix for leading with a number you can’t actually use.

And a new one that isn’t on the site yet. If you already have a WordPress site and all you need is somewhere solid for it to live, we now sell hosting on its own. It’s $20 a month, or $220 a year if you pay annually, which saves you a month. It isn’t listed anywhere yet, so reach out to talk about hosting.

That’s the $720 row, against $724 for Squarespace Basic. Be clear what that is and isn’t. Squarespace’s $724 includes the tool that builds the site. Ours doesn’t, because it assumes the site exists. If you need one built, that’s the $3,500 above, and no arithmetic here makes it disappear.

What the $720 buys that the $724 doesn’t is full-site portability. Squarespace lets you leave with your text and some images. It doesn’t let you leave with the site. You can pick ours up and take it anywhere, and we’ll help rather than making it difficult. That’s the whole argument, and it isn’t the invoice, because on the invoice it’s four dollars.

The question that actually decides it

Forget the feature grids. Ask yourself one thing.

If this platform disappointed you in eighteen months, what would it cost to move?

On Wix, the answer is a full rebuild. On Squarespace, it’s your text and some of your images, and a designer rebuilding everything else. On WordPress, it’s a file and database move, and many hosts will run it for you at no charge.

Weigh that against what DIY builders are genuinely better at, which is letting one person with no technical background put something decent online on a Sunday afternoon. That’s a real strength and the reason both companies are enormous. If you value it more than portability, buy it without guilt. You’ll have made the trade deliberately, which is more than most manage.

The mistake isn’t choosing Squarespace or Wix. It’s assuming the lowest advertised price tells you what the usable tier costs, or what leaving costs. Wix Light is genuinely the cheapest row here. It’s also the one you can never move.

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Frequently asked questions

Sources and method

Every price was read off the vendor’s own live page or public pricing API on 17 August 2026. Pricing pages change without notice, so the retrieval date matters as much as the figure.

Where the arithmetic comes from. Year one is the vendor’s annual rate on annual billing, with the included free domain valued at zero. Years two and three repeat that annual rate and add $20 for domain renewal. Wix figures are yearly subscriptions paid in full, per the disclaimer on their plans page. WordPress.com uses the flat annual rate from its public plans catalogue. The WordPress row we host is our $220 annual rate plus $20 domain in every year, since it includes no free domain, with the software at $0 under the GPL.

Left out on purpose. Wix’s month-to-month rates. Their plans page publishes only yearly-paid-in-full figures, and the monthly number sits behind a logged-in purchase flow we could not reach, so this post costs Wix on annual billing and says so rather than quoting a figure it cannot source. Squarespace Premium and Wix Enterprise, both quote-only. Any figure for what a rebuild costs on a platform other than ours, because we can only publish our own rate and guessing at someone else’s would be inventing a number. Domain renewal rates by registrar, which is why $20 is applied flat as a working figure rather than quoted.

What we could not verify. Whether Squarespace’s annual rate holds on renewal, since their documentation says only that annual plans carry a discount against monthly. Treat the Squarespace year two and three figures as the current rate carried forward, not a guaranteed one. The same caveat applies to every row here.

On our own hosting price. We are the source for what we charge, and it is $20 a month or $220 a year. It is not yet listed on our site, which is why the table above cites us directly rather than a URL. A page for it is in progress.

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