We build on WordPress. You should read what follows knowing that, and you should also know that we will tell you to use Squarespace when Squarespace is the right answer, because the alternative is selling someone a system they cannot run.
Here is the whole decision in one paragraph. If your site is a small number of pages, the content rarely changes structurally, nobody internally wants to think about software, and you are willing to accept the platform’s limits as permanent, use Squarespace. If the site has to do something specific, integrate with something you already run, grow in ways you cannot currently predict, or belong to you outright, use WordPress and budget for its upkeep. Almost everything else is detail.
The case for Squarespace, made properly
Studios that sell WordPress tend to describe Squarespace as a toy. It is not. It is a managed product where somebody else is responsible for the parts that break, and for a large number of businesses that is exactly the right trade.
Nothing to patch. Nothing to back up. No plugin conflict at 2am. The hosting, the certificate, the updates and the security are the vendor’s problem, and they are competent at it. If your alternative is a WordPress site nobody will maintain, Squarespace will serve you better in year three by a wide margin.
The limits are real and you should treat them as permanent, because working around them is where the savings disappear. The templates constrain the design more than the demos suggest. Anything the platform does not do, it does not do. And your content lives inside a product you are renting.
The case for WordPress
Ownership is the substantive difference. The files and the database are yours, they can be moved to any host, and no vendor decision can strand them. For a business whose site is a working asset rather than a brochure, that matters more than any feature comparison.
The second difference is that it will do the specific thing. A booking flow that matches how you actually take bookings. A product record with your fields. An integration with the system your operations already depend on. WordPress runs a large share of the web precisely because the answer to “can it do this” is usually yes.
The cost of both of those is that the maintenance is now yours.
The part WordPress studios leave out
This is the section we would prefer not to write, and it is the reason this article is worth reading.
Patchstack recorded 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem in 2025. Ninety-one percent of them were in plugins. Nine percent were in themes. Six were in WordPress core itself.
Read that split carefully, because it is the whole risk profile. WordPress core is well maintained. The danger is the twenty-odd plugins bolted onto it, each written by a different party with a different level of care.
It gets worse in two specific ways. 46% of those vulnerabilities had no fix available from the developer at the point of public disclosure. And the weighted median time from disclosure to first exploitation attempt was five hours, with roughly half of high-impact vulnerabilities exploited within twenty-four.
Sucuri’s data says the same thing from the other end. Of 39,594 infected websites they cleaned, 39.1% were running an outdated content management system at the point of infection.
The uncomfortable sentence
In Sucuri’s report, the vulnerable plugin most often found on hacked sites was Elementor Pro.
Elementor is our default build tool. We are telling you that the thing we use is top of that list.
We keep using it, and the reasoning is worth stating rather than hiding. A plugin’s presence on that list is substantially a function of how many sites run it, and Elementor runs on an enormous number. It is well maintained and patched quickly. The sites that get compromised are overwhelmingly the ones running a version from two years ago.
Which is the actual finding in all of this. The platform is not the risk. The neglect is. An unmaintained WordPress site is a liability on a predictable schedule, and that schedule is measured in hours after a disclosure, not months.
What that means for the real cost
The comparison people run is build cost against subscription cost, and it is the wrong comparison. Run it over five years and include the upkeep.
Squarespace is a subscription. It goes up occasionally, it covers the maintenance, and the number is the number.
WordPress is a build cost, plus hosting, plus maintenance. We charge SGD 200 a year for hosting and from SGD 200 a month for maintenance, which covers core and plugin updates, backups, certificates and uptime monitoring. You can spend less. Spending nothing is the option that ends in the Sucuri statistic above, and cleaning a compromised site costs more than several years of maintaining it.
Compare those two totals honestly and Squarespace often wins for a simple brochure site. WordPress wins as soon as the site has to do work, and it wins decisively when the site is a source of revenue rather than a listing.
The question nobody asks until it is too late
Whichever you choose, ask this before you sign: if we want to leave in three years, what do we take with us?
On WordPress the answer should be everything, and if your studio cannot give you the files, the database and the domain registrar login on request, that is a warning about the studio rather than the platform. On a hosted product the answer is your content in an export file and none of the design, and that is a fair trade as long as you made it knowingly.
What we would tell you
Creatif Work has delivered over 100 projects across more than 70 clients since 2023. Most of them are WordPress. Some of them should not have been, and where a business genuinely had nobody to own the software, we have said so.
If you are deciding between the two, the question that settles it is not which platform is better. It is who is going to look after this in year two. Answer that honestly and the platform follows.
Our website work covers the build, infrastructure support covers the part this article is really about, and the bands for both are on our pricing page. If you would rather establish what the site needs to do before choosing anything, that is what the diagnostic is for. Email hi@creatif.work.
Sources: Patchstack, State of WordPress Security 2026. Sucuri, 2023 Hacked Website Report.