Web design
Three platforms, compared for a small business
WordPress, Squarespace or Shopify? What each suits, what it costs to leave, and what 118 Oxford websites on Google’s first page are built on.
For most small businesses in Oxford that want to be found on Google, WordPress is the safest of the three. Squarespace suits a small site you want to run yourself with no technical help. Shopify suits a business whose main job online is selling products. Any of the three can rank, and what goes on the site matters more than the platform under it.
To see what actually ranks here, we checked what every website on Google’s first page for 23 Oxford marketing and web searches is built on. Of the 118 we could read in October 2026, 74 run WordPress. Three run Squarespace, and none runs Shopify or Wix.
If WordPress is the answer for you, our WordPress development work is priced and timed on its own page.
In short
- WordPress suits most businesses that want to grow through Google; Squarespace suits a small site you run yourself; Shopify suits selling products.
- Of 118 websites on Google’s first page for Oxford marketing and web searches, 74 run WordPress.
- Three Squarespace sites held page-one places, so a hosted builder does not stop a site ranking.
- Leaving a hosted builder usually means rebuilding the design; leaving a WordPress host does not.
- 74 of 118Page-one Oxford websites built on WordPress, October 2026
- 3Built on Squarespace, each holding a page-one place for an Oxford search
- 0Built on Shopify or on Wix
What Do Oxford’s Page-One Websites Run On?
On 25 and 26 August 2026 we saved Google’s first page of results for 23 searches about marketing and web services in Oxford. 122 different websites appeared on them. In October we read each one’s home page and recorded what it is built on, from the traces each platform leaves in the page: WordPress’s theme and plugin folders, for example, or the note Squarespace writes into the code of every page it serves.
Four home pages would not let us read them: two never answered and two turned us away. Of the other 118, WordPress ran 74, a little over six in ten. Thirteen were written in code, nine sat on hosted builders, four used other content systems, and 18 left no trace we recognise, which may mean hand-built pages or a system we do not detect.
| Built on | Websites |
|---|---|
| WordPress | 74 |
| Written in code | 13 |
| Squarespace | 3 |
| Webflow | 3 |
| HubSpot | 2 |
| Framer | 1 |
| Joomla, Drupal, Craft or osCommerce | 4 |
| Shopify | 0 |
| Wix | 0 |
| No trace we recognise | 18 |
Can a Squarespace Website Rank in Google?
Yes. Three of the page-one websites run on Squarespace: Bitten Digital, on the first page for seo audit services oxford; Naomi Waite, a graphic designer, for design agencies in oxford; and The Small Biz Expert, for ecommerce seo services oxford. Each held its place beside agencies on WordPress.
In our judgement the platform itself is not what Google rewards. What a builder can limit is how much of the site you are able to change, such as how quickly its pages load or how their addresses are written, and those are the first things to check when a site on a builder struggles to climb.
Why Was No Shopify or Wix Site on Page One?
These were searches for services, so the results were agencies, studios and directories rather than shops. Shopify is made for selling products, and a service business rarely needs it. Even the 28 websites on page one for the three ecommerce searches were mostly on WordPress, 17 of them, and none on Shopify, because most of them belong to agencies that build shops for other people.
No Wix site appeared either. That tells us nothing certain about Wix, which we also build on. It says only that none of the businesses ranking for these searches had chosen it for their own website.
What Is Each Platform Good At?
None of the three is a wrong choice. The right one depends on what the website has to do and who will look after it. In our judgement these are the differences that matter most to a small business:
| WordPress | Squarespace | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Service businesses that want to grow through Google | A small site you update yourself | Selling products online |
| Who runs it | You choose the hosting; updates fall to you or your agency | Squarespace, for a monthly fee | Shopify, for a monthly fee |
| Room to grow | Almost anything, through plugins or code | What its templates and settings allow | Strong for shops, through apps |
| Leaving | Move the whole site to another host | Rebuild the design somewhere else | Rebuild the design somewhere else |
What Matters More Than the Platform?
A site ranks on what is on it and how it is put together: pages written for the searches customers make, titles and headings that say what each page is about, pages that load quickly on a phone, and other websites that link to it. All three platforms can do that. The difference is how much of it you control, and who does the work. These are the questions we would ask of any platform, or of anyone building on one:
- Can you change each page’s title and description yourself?
- Can each service have its own page, with its own address?
- How fast does the home page load on a phone before anything is added?
- If you change supplier, can the site move with its addresses kept?
- Who applies the updates, and what happens if nobody does?
Which Should You Choose?
We build on WordPress, Wix and Shopify, and our standard WordPress site is £800 for up to ten pages. As a rule of thumb:
- Choose WordPress if you want to be found on Google for several services, expect the site to grow, and want to own it outright.
- Choose Squarespace if the site is small, you want to update it yourself, and you are content to stay with one company.
- Choose Shopify if most of your income will come from selling products online.
- Whichever you choose, register the domain name in your own account, not your builder’s.
