Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress: Why Grand Strand Firms Should Own It

Wix and Squarespace make building a website look easy, and for some people it is. Pick a template, drag in your photos, pay the monthly fee, and you’re live by dinner. But for a business on the Grand Strand, whether that’s a restaurant on Ocean Boulevard, a contractor in Conway or a law office in Surfside, the real question isn’t how fast you can launch. It’s what happens two, five or ten years from now, when you want to move, redesign, sell the business or simply stop paying a platform you’ve outgrown.

That’s where the trouble starts. Below are real, published incidents and the platforms’ own documented limits, each with a link to the source, so you can judge for yourself. Then we’ll explain what owning your website actually means and how we build sites you can take anywhere.

What we’ve seen go wrong

The 2024 Squarespace Domains hijackings

In June 2023, Squarespace bought the assets of Google Domains and began moving roughly 10 million domains onto its own platform, according to Krebs on Security. A lot of those owners hadn’t set up their new Squarespace accounts yet. Between July 9 and July 12, 2024, attackers took over a number of those domains, at least a dozen by Krebs’s count, and changed their DNS settings. Some visitors to the hijacked sites were sent to phishing pages. The organizations named in coverage were mostly cryptocurrency companies, including Compound Finance, Celer Network, Pendle Finance and Unstoppable Domains.

Independent researchers argued that the migration left a gap. The Register and SecurityWeek reported their findings: email addresses from the old Google Domains accounts were pre-linked to the moved domains, and email verification wasn’t required for password-based sign-ups. In their view, that let an attacker register first with the right address and get control of the domain. With that access, the researchers said, an attacker could change DNS, transfer the domain or add new managers.

Squarespace sees it differently. According to Krebs’s later update, the company’s own post-mortem blamed “a weakness related to OAuth logins,” said it was fixed within hours, and disputed the researchers’ explanation. We’re not going to settle that argument here. The point for a business owner is simpler: millions of domains whose owners had picked Google years earlier were moved to a company they never chose, and a handful of those owners lost control of their address for a while. Your domain is your address on the internet. If it’s controlled by someone else, you’re exposed to decisions you’ll never get a vote on.

Wix: your site can’t leave Wix

Wix is upfront about this, and we give them credit for it. Its help center says a Wix site has to be hosted and run on Wix’s servers and that its platform doesn’t support external hosting. You can point a domain you bought elsewhere at your Wix site, but the site itself can’t be packed up and moved to another host. Wix also says the content you create belongs to you. That’s true, but it’s not the same as owning a working website you can take to another host or developer.

Wix: you can’t switch templates

Want a fresh look in a few years? According to Wix’s own help article, it isn’t possible to switch to a different template for a site you’ve already created. The fix Wix suggests is starting a new site with the new template, which in practice means rebuilding.

Wix: stop paying and your domain gets disconnected

If your Wix Premium plan expires, Wix says your site goes back to a free Wix URL, any connected custom domain is disconnected and Wix ads appear on the site. To reconnect your domain after that, Wix says you have to buy a new plan. Your website stays usable only as long as you keep paying that platform.

Squarespace: the export leaves a lot behind

Squarespace does offer an export, and it produces a WordPress-format file. But its own export documentation lists what doesn’t come along: store pages, portfolio, album, index and calendar pages, product, audio and video blocks, page-specific headers and footers, drafts, and your style settings and custom CSS. Only one blog can be exported, and images may not transfer with the standard WordPress importer. Squarespace also warns that if a site has expired, you may need to reactivate it to export, and some content may already be gone.

Squarespace: templates are a starting point, not a choice

On current Squarespace (version 7.1), the company says you can’t change templates at all; the template you pick is only a starting point. Older 7.0 sites can switch, but sidebars, background images and page headers and footers reset when you do.

Squarespace: a cut of your sales

Selling online? Squarespace’s fee schedule lists a 3% transaction fee on commerce sales for its Business plan, and up to 9% on some digital products depending on the plan. That’s charged on top of normal card-processing fees. Higher-priced plans lower or remove it, so either way you’re paying the platform more as you sell more.

Lock-in and ownership at a glance

	Wix	Squarespace	WordPress or custom by Axiom
Move the site to another host	No, Wix-hosted only	Partial export; many page types and all styling left behind	Yes, any host
Change the design later	No template switching; rebuild	No template switching on 7.1	Redesign on the same content
If you stop paying the platform	Free Wix URL, domain disconnected, ads	Expired site may need reactivation to export	No platform to pay; you own the files
Platform cut of online sales	Check your plan’s terms	Up to 3% on commerce (Business plan)	None from us
Who controls the code	The platform	The platform	You; 100% of the code on custom builds

What “owning your site” really means

Lots of companies will tell you that you “own” your website. Here’s what we think that should mean in practice:

• Your domain is registered in your name, at a registrar you chose, with a login only you control. Not in your web designer’s account and not bundled into a site builder. Turn on two-factor authentication. The 2024 hijackings are a good reminder of why.
• Your hosting account is in your name. If your developer disappears tomorrow, you still have the keys and the billing relationship.
• Your code and content can be exported and moved. WordPress is open-source software under the GPL, so any host can run it and any qualified developer can work on it. A custom build should come with the full source code.
• You have a recent backup you could actually restore somewhere other than where the site lives.

We wrote a deeper guide on this: who really owns your website, domain, hosting and code. And if you’re interviewing designers, read the web designer red flags to watch for. Holding your domain hostage is near the top of the list.

When a builder is fine

We’d be doing you a disservice if we said Wix and Squarespace are never the right call. In our experience, a builder makes sense for:

• A hobby site, personal portfolio or wedding page
• A one-page placeholder while you test a new idea
• A short-term event or seasonal pop-up that won’t need to live for years

If that’s you, go for it. Just register your domain separately, at a registrar you control, so you can point it somewhere else later.

But if the website brings in leads, bookings or sales, and it’s part of how your business makes money, we think renting it is a risk you don’t need to take. The cheaper monthly bill often turns into a full rebuild down the road, and you’ll have spent years building SEO and content on a platform you can’t take with you.

How Axiom does it differently

We’ve been building websites for more than 18 years and have delivered more than 1,000 projects. Here’s how we handle the ownership question for Grand Strand businesses:

• WordPress, WooCommerce or fully custom. We build on WordPress and WooCommerce when you want an editable, widely supported platform, and fully custom when your site needs to do things no template can.
• You own it. Your domain and hosting stay in your name. With our fully custom builds, you own 100% of the code.
• Fixed quotes before work starts. No surprise invoices. Our web tiers start at $2K, $5K and $9K, and you’ll know exactly which one fits before we begin.
• Local and reachable. We’re at 5213 N Kings Hwy in Myrtle Beach. When something needs attention, you can call us at (843) 839-4113 instead of opening a support ticket.

Ready to own your website?

If you’re on Wix or Squarespace now and starting to feel boxed in, or you’re about to build your first real business site and want to get it right the first time, let’s talk. We’ll look at what you have, tell you plainly what it would take to move or rebuild, and give you a fixed quote.

See our packages on the web development page, or contact us today. You can also call (843) 839-4113 or email frahm@axiomdesigngroup.com.