If you're weighing up WordPress vs Squarespace for a new website, or someone has told you that moving off Squarespace will sort your rankings out, then the chances are you just want to know which one is better for SEO. Generally speaking, WordPress gives you more control and more room to grow, but Squarespace covers the basics well on its own and tends to load faster out of the box, so it's a closer call than a lot of people make out.
I build websites on WordPress as well as doing SEO on them, and I've gone into it in more depth in my post on whether WordPress is good for SEO. Everything I say about Squarespace comes from its own Help Centre and I've linked each page as I go. I'll give you my verdict first and then go through the two feature by feature.
Is WordPress or Squarespace Better for SEO?
If you want to grow a site through search I'd go with WordPress, as once it's set up properly you get full control over schema, redirects and URL structure. Squarespace handles the SEO basics without any setup though, and for a small business site that's often all you need.
Bear in mind that neither platform is going to rank your site for you. Google doesn't give any CMS a ranking advantage, and what moves rankings is the same whichever one you're on, things like how useful your content is, how well it matches what people are searching for, how your site is structured and whether other trusted sites link to it. So a Squarespace site that's well looked after and has genuinely helpful content will generally outrank a neglected WordPress site.
Where WordPress does pull ahead is the room it gives you once those basics are covered. It's also far more widely used, with W3Techs putting WordPress on 58.7% of websites with a known CMS, against 3.6% for Squarespace, so whatever you want to add later there's a good chance a plugin or a developer has already done it.
WordPress vs Squarespace: Feature by Feature for SEO
Most of the differences come down to how the two are built. Squarespace is a hosted website builder that makes a lot of the decisions for you, whereas WordPress hands you the controls and expects you, or a plugin, to use them.
Schema and Structured Data
Schema, also called structured data, is a standardised bit of code on a page that tells search engines exactly what the content is, whether that's a product, an event or a local business, so the page has a better chance of showing up as a rich result in Google.
Squarespace does some of this for you, and according to Squarespace's help page on how it optimises sites for search it automatically generates structured data for blog posts, events, local businesses, organisations, products and the website itself. You can't edit or remove any of it, but as a starting point there's nothing to set up. Where it gets trickier is if you want to go further, say adding FAQ schema to a service page, as you'd need to write the code yourself and add it through Squarespace's code injection feature. That's only available on certain plans and Squarespace says its support team can't help with custom code added that way.
WordPress core doesn't add any schema at all, so you'll need an SEO plugin for it. Once that's set up you get proper schema settings with fields for each type, and a plugin such as Rank Math lets you set schema defaults across the site and then adjust them post by post, which is far more flexible than pasting code into a box. I've compared the main plugins in my WordPress SEO post, and if schema is where your site needs work it's something I look at as part of my technical SEO services.
Redirects
A 301 redirect sends visitors and search engines from an old URL to a new one and tells Google the page has moved for good, so you'll need them whenever you rename a page or restructure a section of your site.
Squarespace does have this built in with its URL mappings tool, where you add each redirect on its own line in the format /old-url -> /new-url 301 and don't need a plugin. Squarespace says the field has a limit of 400 KB, which is usually around 2,500 redirect lines, and the only pattern matching it supports is a [name] variable for collection items such as blog posts. So you can move a whole blog to a new folder in one line, but anything more complicated has to be written out line by line. For most small sites that's plenty, and it's really only a large store or a site that's been restructured a few times that would feel the squeeze.
WordPress doesn't have a redirect manager in core, so once again it's a job for a plugin. Rank Math includes one in its free version, whereas Yoast and All in One SEO keep theirs for a paid plan, which I've covered in my plugin comparison.
URL Structure and Control
Part of every blog and product URL on Squarespace is fixed. According to Squarespace's guide to URL slugs, blog post URLs always begin with the blog page's slug and on version 7.1 product URLs always include /p/ before the product slug. You can change the post or product part and rename the blog or store page itself, but the structure around them stays put. I wouldn't worry about a fixed prefix holding a page back in the rankings, although it does mean you can't shape your URLs around the way your business is organised.
Controlling what gets indexed is a similar story. Squarespace has a Hide page from search results toggle that adds a noindex tag to a page and takes it out of the sitemap, but you won't find it on homepages or on individual collection items such as blog posts and products.
On WordPress you pick your structure under Settings, Permalinks, and WordPress.org's permalink documentation covers the ready-made options as well as custom structures built from tags such as %postname% and %category%. You can rename your category and tag bases too, although you can't remove them altogether, and once you've got an SEO plugin in you can noindex any individual post or page, which comes in handy for things like thank you pages.
Blogging and Content Workflow
This is where I think the gap shows most over time. The way you publish affects how much you publish, and for a lot of small businesses the blog is where new search traffic comes from.
Squarespace's page limits guide says there's no limit on the number of blog posts you can add, although it caps a site at 1,000 pages and recommends not going over 400, as sites with that much content may load slowly, especially on mobile. If you're posting once a month or so you're never going to get near that.
WordPress started life as a blogging platform and you can tell once your content library starts to grow. Categories, tags and archive pages all come as standard, and the bulk edit screen lets you add categories and tags to lots of posts at once, which saves a lot of clicking when you come to tidy things up a year or two in. If I were planning a blog on WordPress I'd try to make sure each category lines up with a service, so every post has a natural page to link up to.
Site Speed
Squarespace is the clear winner on speed, at least on average. Search Engine Journal's write-up of November 2025 data from the HTTP Archive Core Web Vitals Technology Report found that 70.39% of Squarespace sites passed Core Web Vitals on mobile, compared with 46.28% of WordPress sites. Those figures change month to month as the data refreshes, so it's best to treat them as a snapshot.
Every Squarespace site runs on the same managed hosting with a controlled set of templates, so speed is fairly predictable. How quick a WordPress site is comes down to the host, the theme and every plugin you add, so a well-built one can be really quick while one on cheap shared hosting with a heavy theme and thirty plugins generally won't be.
It's worth keeping speed in proportion though, as Google still puts relevance first, which I go into in my WordPress SEO post. If you want to see how your own site is doing I like to start with the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console, as it's based on real visitors.
Sitemaps and Meta Control
Squarespace's SEO help page says it creates and updates a sitemap automatically, generates meta tags for you and gives you a field for each page's SEO description. WordPress has generated a basic XML sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml since version 5.5, but there's no meta description field in core, so for full control over titles and descriptions you'll need an SEO plugin. Once that's in, WordPress gives you more options, although out of the box I'd say Squarespace is a step ahead and this is the one area where the two are genuinely close.
Which Is Right for You?
Squarespace is likely to suit you if you need a small, mostly static site with a handful of pages, you'll only add a blog post now and again and you'd rather not think about hosting, updates or security. You get fast pages and sensible defaults without having to touch anything, and for a lot of local businesses that's a really good setup.
WordPress is more likely to suit you if you're planning to publish regularly, your site's going to grow past a few dozen pages or you want fine control over the technical side. It does need looking after though, so it works best when someone, either in-house or external, is keeping on top of updates, hosting and plugins.
If you're on Squarespace and someone has told you to move to WordPress to fix your rankings, I'd be careful, as moving platform on its own rarely fixes them. Google's guidance on site moves says that with any significant change you may see rankings fluctuate while Google recrawls and reindexes your site, that it can take a few weeks or more for a medium-sized site, and that changes such as a new CMS, domain or layout should be made one at a time. So a move brings some short-term risk, and whatever was holding the site back usually comes along with it. Before you rebuild anything I'd get an SEO audit done first, so you know what the actual problem is.
If you do decide to move, my SEO migration checklist walks through how to do it without losing rankings, or my SEO migration service can take it off your hands. And if you're already on WordPress or heading that way, there's more on how I help on my WordPress SEO consultant page, so drop me a message and we can have a chat about your site.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Use WordPress Over Squarespace?
WordPress gives you a lot more control over the technical side of SEO. With the right plugin you can add any type of schema, manage your own redirects and set your URL structure however you like, and there's a huge plugin library for anything you want to add later. It suits sites that plan to publish regularly or need that finer control.
Is Squarespace Good for SEO?
Yes, for a lot of small business sites it is. Squarespace generates a sitemap, meta tags and some structured data automatically, and its sites tend to pass Core Web Vitals more often than WordPress sites do. Where you'll start to notice its limits is as a site grows, mainly around custom schema, fixed URL prefixes and the number of redirects.
Is Squarespace Still Good in 2026?
Yes, for the kind of site it's built for, which is a small business site with a modest number of pages that you'd rather not maintain yourself, as the hosting and updates are all handled for you. It's less suited to content-heavy sites, and Squarespace itself recommends keeping a site under 400 pages.
Is WordPress Better for SEO?
WordPress has the higher technical SEO ceiling as it gives you control over schema, redirects and URLs, but whether it's better for you depends on your site and who's looking after it. Google doesn't favour one platform over another, and your content, how well it matches search intent and your backlinks matter far more than which CMS you're on.
