Wix vs Squarespace for a small carpentry business: the two decisions you cannot undo
Almost every Wix versus Squarespace comparison a British carpenter reads is a fight about templates and monthly prices. It is the wrong fight. Both will produce a respectable joinery site over a wet weekend, both come with hosting and a certificate, and the price gap between them is smaller than one afternoon of your time.
The two things that actually separate them are the two you cannot reverse. Wix states plainly in its own help centre that you cannot switch a live site to a different template. And Squarespace, whose whole appeal to a trade selling on photographs is the way it displays them, will not give those photographs back to you in bulk when you leave.
Neither of those appears on a comparison table. Both of them decide what your carpentry website looks like in three years, and whether you are free to move it. So this is the head-to-head written around the exits rather than the shop window.
For most UK carpenters and joiners, Squarespace. Not because the templates are better, but because Wix will not let you change template on a site you have already built, and a carpentry business that narrows from general work to fitted furniture needs a different looking site than the one it started with. Pick Wix if you want exact layout control and you are sure the look will hold.
Three questions decide it, and none of them is price
The Wix versus Squarespace choice for a carpentry business is settled by how long the site has to last, how much video you shoot, and whether you might ever want to move it, not by which platform has nicer templates.
Work through these in order. The first one you answer honestly usually ends the argument.
On Wix, the template you pick is the template you keep
Wix's help centre states that it is not possible to switch to a different template for a site you already created, which means the layout a carpenter chooses in their first week is the layout that site carries for its entire life.
The exact wording, from Wix's own support article on switching templates, is that "while it's not possible to switch to a different template for a site you already created, you can create as many sites as you want in your account". That second half is the workaround being offered: build a new site, pick the template you wanted, move your Premium plan and your domain across, and rebuild the pages.
For a blog with nine posts, fine. For a joiner with a page per service, forty project photographs and two years of Google history pointing at specific URLs, that is a rebuild. It is the same amount of work as starting again, because it is starting again.
Why this bites carpenters specifically
Carpentry is the trade most likely to change shape. Almost every established joiner I speak to in the UK started broad, taking whatever came, and then narrowed towards the work that paid best: fitted wardrobes, kitchens, staircases, garden rooms. A site built in year one to say "carpentry and joinery, no job too small" is actively wrong for the business in year four, and the fix is not new copy. It is a different site shape, with the gallery at the top and the price anchoring changed.
Every Wix site I have been asked to take over has ended up rebuilt from scratch rather than restyled, because there is nothing to move: the pages are not files sitting on a server, they are rows in Wix's database, and they only exist inside Wix. That is the same argument I made at more length in Wix against a hand-coded site for tradesmen, and it applies just as hard when the comparison is Wix against Squarespace.
Squarespace lets you restyle, but not leave with the photographs
Squarespace's export produces an XML file of layout pages, one blog page and image blocks, and its help centre states that it is not possible to export all images from your site in bulk, which for a carpenter means the gallery does not come out.
Squarespace is the better platform on the point above: you can change how a live site looks without rebuilding it. But run the exit test on it and the picture is not as different from Wix as it first appears.
The export leaves behind, by Squarespace's own listing: portfolio pages, album pages, index pages, store pages, page specific headers and footers, multiple blog pages, video blocks, audio blocks, draft content, style settings and custom CSS. Individual images can be pulled from the Asset library one at a time. On a carpentry site, the portfolio and the images are the site. Everything else is a phone number and an address.
What to do about it, which takes ten minutes
Keep the originals. Not the versions you uploaded, the full size files off the camera or phone, in a dated folder per job, on your own drive and backed up. Do it from the first job you photograph. It costs nothing and it is the only thing that makes any of these platforms genuinely leaveable, alongside registering the domain in your own name, which is worth checking before anything else and which I went through in who actually owns your domain name.
The gallery decides your Wix plan, not the feature list
Wix sells storage in fixed amounts per plan, from 500MB free to 2GB on Light and 50GB on Core, and for a joiner shooting video the jump between those two plans is the entire decision.
The arithmetic is quick. Forty phone stills at around four megabytes each is roughly 160MB, so photographs alone fit anywhere. Video is different: Apple's own guidance puts HEVC video at 4K and 30 frames a second at more than 175MB a minute, so Wix's 2GB Light plan holds under twelve minutes of walkthrough footage before you are choosing what to delete. Core's 50GB removes the question entirely.
Squarespace approaches the same problem from the other end. It does not publish a storage cap per plan, it caps the individual file at 20MB, recommends staying under 500KB for speed, and generates seven resized versions of every upload from 100 pixels wide to 2500. Its guidance also warns that images under 1500 pixels wide may look blurry. For a carpenter that is the useful number: shoot and upload at about 2500 wide and the detail shots hold up on a large screen.
What a homeowner actually does with your gallery
A homeowner comparing three joiners spends most of their time on the photographs and almost none on the copy, so the platform question is only worth answering after the gallery is right.
Take apart what happens on a carpentry site the moment somebody lands on it. They scroll past the headline. They look for pictures of work that resembles the thing in their head. If they find it, they look for the end grain, the scribe against a wall that was never straight, the gap at the top of a wardrobe against a bowed ceiling. Then they look for a phone number.
The three failures I see most on carpentry sites
The first is a gallery in upload order, so a homeowner wanting fitted wardrobes scrolls past a loft hatch and two door hangings before they find one. Group by job type, not by date. The second is wide shots only, taken from the doorway with the phone at chest height, which show that a kitchen exists but not that it was made well. The third is a gallery of ten photographs where six are the same job.
None of those three is a Wix problem or a Squarespace problem. Both platforms will arrange a gallery by category without an add-on, and both will make a bad set of photographs look tidy. That is precisely why the build order matters more than the badge on the platform, and why I put the photographs first rather than last in the seven steps to making a carpenter website.
Which one, and when neither is the answer
Squarespace suits a carpenter who wants to build it once and restyle it later, Wix suits one who enjoys layout work and will not want a different look, and neither suits somebody who does not want to be maintaining a website at all.
Three quick ones I get asked every time this comes up.
Is Wix cheaper?
Possibly, and it is hard to say cleanly, because Wix's pricing page states that displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions paid in full and that currency varies by location. I priced every realistic route from the live checkout pages in the priced comparison of website builders for self-employed carpenters, and the short version is that the running cost of any of them settles between roughly £120 and £250 a year once the introductory rates run out. That spread is not wide enough to decide anything.
Do I need the more expensive plan?
On Wix, yes, if you post video, for the storage reason above. On Squarespace, the Core plan is the one that handles a large gallery without fighting you. Assume you are paying for the middle tier on either, not the entry one.
What if I do not want to build it at all?
Then this comparison is the wrong page. Both platforms cost you four to eight evenings up front and an evening every time a job needs adding, and if your day rate is £200, those evenings are the real price. That is the whole reason I build carpentry and joinery sites as a flat plan instead: no build fee, £50 every four weeks covering the site, hosting, domain and unlimited small edits, and after twelve months the website is yours to keep.
Bottom line: Wix trades reversibility for control, Squarespace trades control for reversibility, and for a small carpentry business in the UK reversibility is worth more, because the business will change and the website has to be able to change with it.