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Wix, Squarespace, and similar platforms are not free — they're subscription services with significant limitations that quietly cost small business owners thousands of dollars over time. Proper web hosting gives you more control, better performance, and lower long-term costs. Here's the honest comparison.
Wix costs $276/year. Squarespace costs $348/year. The Hostinger Business plan costs $48/year — and you actually own your website. Here's the real cost comparison that Wix and Squarespace don't want you to see.
When Wix says free, they mean you can build a website without paying — but what you get is a site plastered with Wix branding, hosted on a Wix subdomain (yourbusiness.wixsite.com, not yourbusiness.com), with no ability to accept payments, no removal of ads, and severely limited storage and bandwidth.
Nobody runs a serious business on the free tier. The moment you want to look professional — your own domain, no ads, the ability to sell online — you're on a paid plan. And that's where the real costs begin.
| What you need | Wix Business | Squarespace Basic | Hostinger Business |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $23/month | $29/month | $3.99/month |
| Annual cost | $276/year | $348/year | ~$48/year |
| Free domain | Year 1 only | Year 1 only | Year 1 free |
| Storage | 50GB | Unlimited | 200GB NVMe |
| Business email | Paid add-on | Paid add-on | Free included |
| You own your site | No | No | Yes |
| Export your content | Very limited | Partial | Full control |
| Page load speed | Slow (2-4s avg) | Medium (1.5-2s) | Fast (0.8s avg) |
| SEO control | Limited | Limited | Full |
| 5-year total cost | $1,380+ | $1,740+ | ~$240 |
Here's the thing most Wix and Squarespace users don't think about until it's too late: you don't own your website.
You own your content — the words and images you put on the site. But the website itself, the design, the structure, the templates — it all belongs to Wix or Squarespace. And critically, it only works on their platform. If you want to move to a different host, you can't take your website with you. You have to rebuild from scratch.
This is the definition of vendor lock-in. Your entire online presence is held hostage by a subscription service. Miss a payment, get your account suspended for any reason, or decide their price increases aren't worth it — and your website disappears.
Wix in particular has a well-documented speed problem. Despite improvements in recent years, Wix sites consistently load slower than WordPress sites on quality hosting. In independent testing, Wix averages 2-4 seconds to load — compared to under 1 second for a WordPress site on Hostinger.
That difference matters enormously. Google uses page speed as a ranking factor — a slow Wix site will consistently rank lower than a fast WordPress site on equivalent content. And 53% of visitors leave if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load.
You could be losing half your potential customers before they even read a word about your business — because your "free" website builder is slow.
Search engine optimisation on website builders is constrained by the platform. Wix and Squarespace give you some SEO controls but nowhere near the full flexibility of WordPress. You can't modify your site's technical structure, can't fully control how Google crawls your pages, and are dependent on the platform's developers to implement SEO improvements.
On WordPress with Hostinger, you have complete control. Install a plugin like Yoast SEO, and you have granular control over every technical SEO element on every page. Combined with Hostinger's fast servers, you have a genuine competitive advantage in search rankings.
Neither Wix nor Squarespace includes professional business email in their standard plans. Want hello@yourbusiness.com instead of hello@gmail.com? That's a paid add-on — typically $6-10/month extra through Google Workspace or similar.
Hostinger includes unlimited professional email accounts free with every Business plan. No add-ons, no extra subscriptions, no additional cost.
In the spirit of honesty — website builders aren't wrong for everyone. There are specific situations where Wix or Squarespace is genuinely the right choice:
If you're currently on Wix or Squarespace and want to make the switch, here's how to do it without losing your content:
From Wix or Squarespace, export all your text content and download all your images. Save everything locally before you do anything else.
Get the Business plan. If you have a domain with your current provider, you can transfer it to Hostinger or just point it to your new host.
One click in Hostinger's hPanel. Choose a lightweight theme like Astra or Kadence — both are free and fast.
Copy your content across to WordPress. This takes a few hours but it's a one-time job — and the result is a faster, better-ranked website you actually own.
Update your domain's nameservers to point to Hostinger. Your site goes live on your existing domain with no interruption.
Once everything is live and working on Hostinger, cancel Wix or Squarespace. Start saving immediately.
Free website builders are an excellent marketing proposition and a mediocre long-term business decision. The free tier is a trap, the paid tiers are expensive, the speed is poor, the SEO is limited, and you never truly own what you build.
For a small business that wants a professional online presence, proper hosting with WordPress gives you more control, better performance, higher Google rankings, and dramatically lower costs over time. The setup takes slightly longer the first time — but you only do it once, and you own everything afterwards.
That's the real cost of free.
Hostinger Business — $3.99/month. Free domain, free SSL, free email, one-click WordPress, 30-day money-back guarantee. Own your website properly.
Get started with Hostinger →