If you are weighing Wix, the platform it gets measured against most is Squarespace, and that matchup almost always gets answered as a feature checklist: templates, ecommerce, blogging, pricing tiers. That rarely settles anything, because both do most of the same things. So we looked at it from the other end, starting with the sites themselves. Stackra's corpus includes 96,029 US small business sites on Wix and 86,994 on Squarespace, each with a verified business type and three years of link-authority data. Here is what they show, and what it means if Wix is your platform.
They serve almost the same businesses
The first thing the data kills is the idea that one platform is "for" a particular kind of business. The mix of who builds on Wix and who builds on Squarespace is nearly identical. Both are led by restaurants, then retail, nonprofits, wellness, healthcare, and entertainment, in almost the same order.
| Business type | Wix | Squarespace |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurants | 19.4% | 22.2% |
| Retail | 11.2% | 9.9% |
| Nonprofit | 8.5% | 10.1% |
| Entertainment | 6.5% | 5.9% |
| Wellness & beauty | 6.3% | 6.9% |
| Healthcare | 6.3% | 6.0% |
Source: Stackra analysis of stackra_us_corpus, 96,029 Wix and 86,994 Squarespace US business sites, May 2026 crawl. Squarespace skews very slightly more toward restaurants and nonprofits, Wix very slightly more toward retail, but the difference is small.
So the real question is not which is for your industry
Because the audiences overlap this heavily, "which is better for a restaurant" or "which is better for a photographer" is mostly a marketing framing, not a data-backed distinction. Both platforms are chosen across the same set of small businesses. The differences worth deciding on are what actually happens to a site once it is live: how fast it is for real visitors, how much authority it earns, and what the platform does and does not do for you.
Performance: Wix passes Core Web Vitals more often
On real Chrome user data (CrUX field data, February 2026), Wix sites pass all Core Web Vitals at a higher rate than Squarespace sites: 79% vs 70%. Both sit above the global small-business baseline, so neither is a performance disaster, but Wix has the edge on real-user speed and stability.
| Platform | CWV pass rate |
|---|---|
| Wix | 79% |
| Squarespace | 70% |
Source: Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) field data, February 2026.
The Squarespace performance trap worth knowing
If you run a Squarespace site through Lighthouse and see a mobile score around 31, do not panic. That lab score is misleading for Squarespace specifically. Squarespace uses server-side rendering that Lighthouse's synthetic test penalizes heavily, but that real browsers handle fine. In the field, 70% of Squarespace sites pass Core Web Vitals, and its responsiveness score (INP) is actually the best of any major platform. When a Squarespace site does fail, the cause is almost always large images or custom code, not the platform itself.
A Lighthouse mobile score of 31 on Squarespace is not an emergency. Real-user data shows 70% of Squarespace sites pass all Core Web Vitals.
Authority: Squarespace sites are more linked, but both are sliding
This is the difference most comparisons never look at, because it needs data outside the platform. Using the Common Crawl web graph, we measured how many other websites link to Wix and Squarespace sites, and how that has moved over three years. The median Squarespace site carries about twice the referring domains of the median Wix site. But on both platforms, the typical site's link authority has been drifting down.
| Metric | Wix | Squarespace |
|---|---|---|
| Median referring domains, 2024 | 7 | 14 |
| Median referring domains, 2026 | 6 | 10 |
| Average authority percentile, 2024 | 86.5 | 89.5 |
| Average authority percentile, 2026 | 78.8 | 83.4 |
Source: Stackra analysis of the Common Crawl web graph joined to the Wix and Squarespace US cohorts, 2024 to 2026. Authority percentile is normalized for the size of the graph each year.
What that authority gap actually means
The honest read: Squarespace sites tend to have more links, but that reflects who picks Squarespace (more design-forward brands, creatives, and portfolio-driven businesses that get written about) more than anything the builder does under the hood. And the direction matters more than the gap. Both platforms lost roughly seven points of authority percentile in two years. A website builder builds the site. It does not build the audience, and it does not earn the links. That work sits with you no matter which logo is in the footer.
Tools and features: mostly a wash
Both platforms bundle an online store into their templates, so "can it do ecommerce" is a yes for both and not a useful tiebreaker. Site owners on both add third-party analytics at almost the same rate (about 50%), and third-party booking or chat tools stay rare on both (under 3%), because most owners lean on the native features instead. Feature-for-feature, this is close enough that it should not be the deciding factor.
So which should you pick?
The data does not crown a universal winner, because there is not one. Pick on fit and workflow, not on a growth promise neither platform can keep.
- •Lean Wix if you want the widest template and app selection, more layout freedom, and the better real-user performance profile out of the box.
- •Lean Squarespace if you want a tighter, more design-consistent editor and cleaner defaults, and you value how polished the templates look with less fiddling.
- •Do not pick either expecting it to move your search rankings or bring you traffic. On both platforms, the typical site's authority has been sliding, and the sites that grow are the ones doing the marketing work the builder cannot do for them.
How we got this data
The business-type mix and tool adoption come from Stackra's corpus of verified US small business websites, built from HTTP Archive's monthly crawl and automated technology detection. The link-authority figures come from the Common Crawl web graph, an independent source that measures who links to whom across the web, joined to the Wix and Squarespace cohorts by domain. Nothing here is a vendor's own marketing number.
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Frequently asked questions
Common questions about choosing between Wix and Squarespace.
Is Wix or Squarespace better for SEO?
Neither has a decisive SEO advantage from the platform itself. Wix passes Core Web Vitals slightly more often (79% vs 70% on real-user data), which is one ranking input. Squarespace sites tend to carry more referring domains, but that reflects the kind of business that picks Squarespace, not an SEO feature. On both platforms, the typical site's link authority has been declining over the past two years, so search results come down to your content and links, not the builder.
Is Wix or Squarespace better for a restaurant?
Both are extremely common for restaurants (restaurants are the single largest business type on each platform, about 19% of Wix sites and 22% of Squarespace sites). There is no data-backed edge for one over the other for restaurants specifically. Pick based on which editor and templates you prefer.
Do Wix or Squarespace sites rank well in Google?
They can, but the platform is not what decides it. In our data, both platforms host large numbers of well-ranked sites and large numbers of invisible ones. The typical site's link authority on both has slipped over two years, which means ranking comes from the work you do (content, links, local presence), not from the builder you chose.
Which is faster, Wix or Squarespace?
On real Chrome user data, Wix passes Core Web Vitals more often (79% vs 70%). Squarespace can look much worse in a Lighthouse lab test (mobile scores around 31) because of how its server-side rendering is measured, but real-user field data shows it performs far better than that lab score suggests.