The Squarespace vs WordPress question comes up in almost every first call with a charity that already has a website. Usually because someone built the current site on one of them years ago, that person has moved on, and you are now deciding whether to stay or switch.
The honest answer is that both platforms can run a good charity website. The right one for you depends on two questions that have nothing to do with features: who updates the site, and who controls the account it lives in.
Where Squarespace genuinely wins
Squarespace deserves its reputation for being hard to break. Everything lives in one subscription: hosting, templates, SSL, updates. There is no plugin to patch, no hosting renewal to forget, and the editor keeps your pages looking consistent even when three different volunteers update them. For a small charity with no technical support and a simple brochure site, that is worth a lot.
If your site is five pages, your donations run through a link to JustGiving or CAF, and one person keeps the content fresh, Squarespace is a reasonable home. We say that as an agency that builds on WordPress.
Where Squarespace costs charities
The problems appear at the edges, and charities hit those edges more often than businesses do.
The account is the site. A Squarespace site belongs to the account that created it. When a volunteer builds your site under their personal login, your charity's website is legally your asset but practically theirs. If they move on, stop answering emails, or let the card on file lapse, you have a problem that no export button fixes.
The 30-day clock. If the subscription lapses, Squarespace deletes the site's content permanently around 30 days after expiry. Squarespace's own reactivation guidance is clear about this. Recovery through their support team requires proof that you control the domain attached to the site, which is exactly the proof a charity in this situation tends not to have, and tickets can take weeks. We have seen a charity lose its entire site this way: built pro bono by a series of well-meaning volunteers, ownership fragmented across several personal accounts, and by the time anyone noticed the site was offline, nobody was sure who controlled the domain.
Donations and Gift Aid. Squarespace's built-in commerce tools are built for selling products, not for UK charity giving. Regular giving by Direct Debit, Gift Aid declarations, and integration with a donor CRM all mean bolting on third-party services, at which point the simplicity you chose Squarespace for is gone.
Accessibility evidence. Squarespace templates are reasonable out of the box, but if a funder or commissioner asks you to evidence WCAG 2.2 AA compliance, you are limited by what the template allows you to change. On WordPress you can fix anything, and prove it.
Where WordPress wins, and what it honestly costs
WordPress is open source. Your site is a folder of files and a database that you can move to any host, hand to any developer, and back up independently. Nobody can delete it because a subscription lapsed. For an organisation that must outlive any individual volunteer, trustee, or supplier, that portability is the strongest argument.
It also handles the things charities grow into: donation journeys with Gift Aid, events calendars your team maintains, resource libraries, multilingual content, and CRM integrations.
The honest cost: WordPress needs looking after. Core, theme, and plugin updates, security monitoring, backups. Unmaintained WordPress sites get hacked; that is not scaremongering, it is the main way charity websites fail. Budget for a care plan or equivalent support from day one, or you are trading Squarespace's subscription risk for a slower-burning one.
Four questions that decide it
- Who updates the site? One confident person with simple needs: either platform. A rota of staff and volunteers publishing news, events, and resources: WordPress, structured so they cannot break it.
- Do you take donations on the site itself? If you want Gift Aid and regular giving built in, WordPress.
- Who controls the account today? If the answer is "a volunteer's personal login" on either platform, fix that before you decide anything else. Our guide to auditing who owns your charity's website takes about 20 minutes to work through.
- Will a funder ever audit you? Accessibility evidence, data protection questions, and procurement requirements all favour a platform you fully control.
If you are switching from Squarespace to WordPress
The move is routine when it is planned. Pages and blog posts export from Squarespace in a format WordPress can import; images, product data, and some page layouts do not, so allow for rebuilding those. The part that protects your search rankings is the redirect map: every old URL pointed at its new home before the switch, not after. If your site has been indexed by Google for years, this is where a rushed migration does lasting damage.
If the site is already offline, the order changes: recover access first, export second, rebuild third. Our guide on what to do when your charity website is down covers the recovery clocks that matter.
The short version
Squarespace is a good tool that charities outgrow, and its biggest risk is not the platform but the ownership pattern that tends to come with it. WordPress asks more of you in maintenance and gives you back control, portability, and room to grow. If your website matters to your funding, your services, or your safeguarding, that trade is usually worth making.
If you are weighing this decision for your own charity, a 20-minute call will settle it faster than another week of reading. We will tell you honestly if Squarespace is the right place for you to stay.
