Nonprofit Website Builder Comparison: My Honest Review of Squarespace, WordPress, and Wix
Summary
If you're frustrated with your nonprofit website builder — or you're searching for the best one — I'm giving you my honest review of Squarespace, WordPress, and Wix.
Download my free nonprofit website guide at marketyourmission.co/website.
In this video, I'll show you:
A 5-element rubric you can use to evaluate any nonprofit website builder
How WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix compare on setup, features, design, ease of use, and maintenance
Which builder is the best fit for small and medium-sized nonprofits
The hidden maintenance costs that can drain your time and budget
Why having more customization options isn't always better for your nonprofit website
"I believe that paying that monthly or annual subscription fee for your Squarespace website is far and away the best value for your nonprofit website, because then you don't have to worry about maintenance or updates or security features."
If you want to build a nonprofit website that instills donor trust and doesn't require a developer to keep it running, you need to know how these three builders actually stack up — because they are not created equal.
"When I work with a nonprofit who has a website on WordPress, often their complaint is: 'WordPress is frustrating. There's so many options. Things are all over the place. I don't know how to get this website to do what I wanted to do.'"
In this episode, learn how to use a 5-point rubric to choose the best nonprofit website builder for your organization's size, goals, and technical capacity. Plus, you'll discover why ease of use and maintenance — not just features — are the factors that matter most for small and medium-sized nonprofits.
Watch the video to get the full training.
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. Which nonprofit website builder is the best overall?
For most nonprofits — especially small to medium-sized organizations with annual budgets under $1–$2 million — Squarespace is the best overall choice. It earns top marks across all five evaluation criteria: setup, features, design, ease of use, and maintenance. Everything you need to accept donations, manage events, and build a beautiful, on-brand website is included out of the box, with no plugins required. WordPress is the better choice for medium-to-large nonprofits that need deep customization, and Wix is a solid option but falls slightly short of Squarespace in design guardrails and site-wide styling consistency.
2. Is WordPress good for nonprofits?
WordPress can be an excellent platform for nonprofits, but it depends heavily on your organization's size, technical capacity, and budget for ongoing maintenance. Because WordPress is open-source and infinitely extensible, it's ideal for medium-to-large nonprofits that need custom features like a members-only area, a searchable directory, a job board, or complex integrations with a CRM. However, for small nonprofits with one to three staff members and limited tech expertise, WordPress requires a longer setup, more technical know-how, regular plugin and theme maintenance, and additional investment in security. For those organizations, the time and cost trade-offs often don't make sense.
3. Is Wix good for nonprofits?
Yes, Wix is a legitimate option for nonprofits. As an all-in-one platform, it handles hosting, security, and updates for you, similar to Squarespace. It makes it easy to accept donations, create volunteer signup forms, and build a feature-rich website without needing to install plugins. Where Wix falls short is in design consistency. Its fully drag-and-drop editor gives you the freedom to place any element anywhere on the page, which sounds great in theory but can result in layouts that look cluttered or unprofessional — especially on mobile — if you don't have a design background. Squarespace's grid-based layout provides guardrails that make it easier to produce a polished, donor-ready website without formal design training.
4. What features does a nonprofit website need?
At minimum, a nonprofit website should include the ability to accept online donations, a volunteer signup form, event calendar or registration functionality, and integration with your email marketing platform. Beyond that, consider whether you need video hosting, a blog or news section, a searchable resource library, a secure client or member area, or a job board. The key is to identify exactly which features your organization needs before choosing a website builder, because platforms differ significantly in what's included natively versus what requires a plugin or third-party integration.
5. How hard is it to set up a nonprofit website on Squarespace vs. WordPress?
Setting up a website on Squarespace is significantly faster and easier than WordPress. Squarespace walks you through a guided setup process, asks a series of questions about your organization, and automatically generates a starter site with suggested pages and example content — all you have to do is customize it. Security, hosting, and all core functionality are built in. WordPress, by contrast, requires you to choose and install a theme, identify and install plugins for every feature you need (donations, security, contact forms, calendars, etc.), and configure those plugins to work together. That process is considerably longer and requires more technical knowledge, which is why WordPress scores lower on setup for the average small nonprofit.
6. What is the best nonprofit website builder for a small staff with limited tech experience?
Squarespace. It consistently earns the highest ease-of-use ratings for good reason: the interface is clean and intuitive, and even staff members with minimal tech experience can confidently update pages, post blogs, and manage forms and donations. Its design editor makes it easy to apply your brand's colors and fonts site-wide in just a few clicks. Clients who switch to Squarespace frequently say the same thing: "This is so easy, I feel comfortable here and I know I'll get the result I want." If your team experiences staff turnover or has members who've never managed a website before, Squarespace dramatically reduces the learning curve.
7. Does Squarespace accept donations for nonprofits?
Yes. Squarespace integrates directly with Stripe to accept online donations, and the setup process is straightforward. You can create a dedicated donation page, embed a donation form anywhere on your site, and have funds deposited directly into your account. Squarespace also makes it easy to create volunteer signup forms and event registration pages, with form submissions delivered to your email, saved within Squarespace, or sent directly to a connected Google Sheet — all without any additional plugins.
8. How much maintenance does a WordPress nonprofit website require?
A WordPress website requires at minimum monthly maintenance checks to ensure that all themes and plugins are up to date and functioning correctly together. Plugin conflicts — when two or more plugins stop working well with each other after an update — are one of the most common issues WordPress site owners encounter, and resolving them can require expensive developer time. You'll also need to actively manage your website's security, either by installing dedicated security plugins or relying on your hosting provider's built-in protections. If your organization doesn't have someone on staff with the technical knowledge to handle this, it's important to factor in the cost of a developer or web maintenance service when budgeting for a WordPress site.
9. Can I migrate my nonprofit website from WordPress to Squarespace?
Yes, migrating from WordPress to Squarespace is possible, though it requires some planning. Squarespace can import blog posts from WordPress, but other content — pages, images, forms, donation setups — will need to be rebuilt manually in Squarespace's editor. The upside is that Squarespace's intuitive interface makes rebuilding pages relatively fast, even for non-technical staff. If your organization is frustrated with the complexity of maintaining a WordPress site, migrating to Squarespace can result in a significantly more manageable website going forward. It's worth consulting with a Squarespace designer or nonprofit web consultant to plan the migration and ensure nothing is lost in the transition.
10. What should I look for when evaluating a nonprofit website builder?
Use this five-element rubric to evaluate any website builder before committing: Setup — how quickly and easily can you get a functional website live? Features — does the platform natively support the tools your nonprofit needs, like donation pages, event registration, and email integration? Design — does the builder make it easy to create a site that reflects your brand and instills trust in donors and volunteers? Ease of use — can your entire team confidently update and maintain the site, including staff with limited tech experience? Maintenance — what does the behind-the-scenes upkeep look like, and how much time or money will it require to keep the site secure and fully functional? Scoring each platform against these five criteria will give you a clear, apples-to-apples comparison tailored to your organization's specific needs and capacity.
Full Video Transcript
Why Choosing the Right Nonprofit Website Builder Requires More Than a Simple Answer
If you're frustrated with your nonprofit website builder or you're looking for the best website builder for your nonprofit, stay tuned because I'm reviewing Squarespace, WordPress, and Wix. Hi everyone. I'm Ricardo Ibarra with Market Your Mission, where I bring my 20 years of marketing and design experience to help you grow your donor list and attract more volunteers to your mission.
Let's get into it. So, telling you what the best website builder for nonprofits is requires a little bit of thought because it really depends on your nonprofit's size, your goals, and the mission that you're trying to achieve in the world. But what I have for you today is five elements of a rubric that I want you to walk through when you're evaluating a website builder. And as I tell you each of these rubric steps, I will give you my honest feedback on WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix, which are the top three website builders for nonprofits.
Rubric Element #1: Setup — How Quickly Can You Get Your Nonprofit Website Live?
Number one is setup. What does the setup process look like for the website builder, and do you have enough time to go through that setup process?
WordPress has the most lengthy setup process of those three website builders, and that's because WordPress is infinitely customizable. It's an open source platform, and you've probably heard about it. It's been around for decades, and it has plenty of websites that use it for their nonprofit. However, one of the things that's really important to pay attention to on WordPress is the setup will take longer because all of WordPress functionality comes from themes and plugins. WordPress by itself is a blogging platform, so if you want a calendar, if you want to be able to accept donations online, if you want to have a mobile friendly website, if you want to customize the look and feel of your call to action buttons or the headings on your page, you're going to need to install a theme and you're going to need to install plugins.
So the setup process for WordPress takes the longest out of those three website builders. I'd give that a three out of five stars, just because for the average small to medium sized nonprofit, that setup process is going to take considerably longer than the other two website builders. And also it's going to require a little bit more technical expertise. For instance, WordPress by itself doesn't automatically come with any sort of security plugins, so you're going to need to download and install plugins that will help make your website more secure from hackers and other bad actors on the internet. So I give WordPress a three out of five in the setup category.
Now there are a number of website hosts like DreamHost that offer one click WordPress installs, and that comes with a package of their recommended themes and plugins. So that can make things a little bit faster. But if you're a small to medium size nonprofit, maybe one, two, or three staff members, you might want to be careful with WordPress because it'll just take a little bit longer to set up.
Up next is Squarespace. Squarespace is an all in one website builder, and the setup process is extremely easy. There is a guided tutorial that asks you a series of questions to help you create your website, and Squarespace automatically builds out the pages and example content that you may want to have on those pages. So all you have to do is go in and customize and make the website your own. What I particularly love about the website is it's an all in one website builder. So all of your security, all of your plugins and functionality are baked right into the core product.
Now, Squarespace is a little bit more expensive than WordPress on its face, but I believe that paying that monthly or annual subscription fee for your Squarespace website is far and away the best value for your nonprofit website, because then you don't have to worry about maintenance or updates or the security features of your website, which I'll talk about soon. So I would give Squarespace a solid five out of five stars for setup, because I think even the most tech newbie, the person on your staff who has the least tech experience will have no problem setting up a website and getting that up and running.
And finally, Wix. I will give Wix a four out of five stars. Wix setup is a little, takes a little bit longer. They've really emphasized their AI tools, which I'm not a huge fan of. Not because it's AI, but because it adds a little bit more time to the setup and ultimately can result in websites that are not as sturdily built as the other website builders like, particularly Squarespace and WordPress. So Wix gets a four out of five for setup. It'll still be faster than WordPress because Wix, like Squarespace, is also an all in one, so you pay one subscription fee, and Wix engineers are making sure that your site is secure. They have tons of features and functionality, including the ability to accept donations and create volunteer signup forms on your website. So I'll give Wix a four out of five stars.
Rubric Element #2: Features — Does This Website Builder Have What Your Nonprofit Needs?
Up next is features. What are the features of your website builder?
With WordPress, of course, like I mentioned, all of the features and functionality are dependent on the theme that you install and any plugins you install. At its base level, WordPress enables you to publish blog posts, which is great. We'll talk about that later, but if you want to accept donations online, you're going to need to choose from lots of different plugins and make sure that they all work with your payment processor. It's just a more convoluted, in-depth process.
That said, WordPress has the most extensibility of all the website builders, so it's ideal for organizations that have custom features that they need. For example, posting a job board and posting job listings that have locations and dates and times, adding additional features like creating a members only area or an area for your clients, or a secure directory of people or organizations that work with your nonprofit. These are all features that WordPress is really good at handling, and if you're a medium to a larger size nonprofit, WordPress might be the ideal website builder for you just because of that extensibility. Your internal team or your developer or an agency you work with will be able to really customize the website to do exactly what you want.
Now, if you're not a medium to a large size nonprofit, if you're like most of the folks I work with, a small to medium sized nonprofit, typically with an annual budget of under 1 or $2 million, then I can't recommend enough Squarespace. But before I get there, I've got to give you my WordPress rating. I will give WordPress a four out of five for features because it's so extensible. You can find a plugin that'll do just about anything for your WordPress website. The challenge is making sure that those plugins continue to be updated and maintained by the developer who created them, and that they're compatible with other plugins on your site.
Okay, now we're on to Squarespace. Squarespace features for small to medium size nonprofits. I give them a five out of five because they make it extremely easy to integrate with Stripe to accept online payments, including donations. The ability to create forms that deliver data directly to your email, to a Google Sheet, or saved within Squarespace is all baked in, so right away you can accept donations. You can accept volunteer sign ups and event registrations right out of the box. Squarespace also has built in calendar functionality for events, and of course, has a beautiful library of blocks that you can use to add content to your page. I believe Squarespace, for a small and medium sized nonprofit is the way to go, because they have all the features that you need right out of the box. There's no plugins required, there's no worrying about compatibility or maintenance. It's just, hey, I want to set up a donation page. Great. Follow these steps and it's ready to go.
I'll give Wix also a five out of five on features, because Wix matches Squarespace pretty closely in terms of what you're able to do with their website builder. Again, they make it really easy to create a donation page to create volunteer sign up forms, and they have lots of other options for different features that you can bake into your website.
Rubric Element #3: Design — Will Your Website Inspire Donors and Volunteers?
Up next is design. One of my favorite things. This is so important to consider when you're building your website, because of course, design instills trust and can help motivate your donors, volunteers, and the people that you want to serve with your mission.
Now, WordPress, because it is so extensible, there's so many options, there's so many different themes and ways to control the WordPress platform. I'm going to give it a four out of five for design with a giant asterisk, because most themes on WordPress do a pretty good job of presenting a beautifully designed website, but it can be overwhelming for someone to have so many toggles and buttons and options to change around that. Sometimes it can make your website look a little Frankenstein, because you might not find all of the different settings for changing the design and look and feel of your website. One of the challenges with WordPress, and why it's a four out of five stars, is each theme developer can choose to customize their theme, or put the controls to customize their theme in a different place, or sometimes in multiple places. And so it can be a little harder to create the design you want. And there aren't as many guardrails to make sure that the design you're creating is going to be one that inspires your donors and volunteers.
For Squarespace, I'm going to give them a solid five out of five because their design editor is incredibly simple to use. Yes, you can get granular and you can choose the nitty gritty details of each color and font and spacing. But out of the box, Squarespace makes it really easy to update your color palette to your brand, to choose the fonts that will match your branding, and it populates that design style throughout the entire site instantly for you, so you really have less to worry about. You know that you're just going to have a beautifully designed site. The other thing that I love about Squarespace — and some folks claim that this is their detriment — but one of the strengths of Squarespace is each page is built on a grid layout, so you can be sure that you're presenting a layout that is beautiful, easy to understand, and follows typical reading order.
Some website builders like Wix use a drag and drop editor, but you can really place anything anywhere, and that can lend itself to folks over decorating their pages or inadvertently covering up some content or areas of the page when looking at it on mobile. So I find that Squarespace's Fluid Engine design page builder is so much easier to use, and it has some built in guardrails to make sure that every page looks really, really beautiful.
Wix I'm going to give a four out of five for design. I kind of alluded to this. Wix has more customization in terms of design. Their drag and drop editor truly does let you drop anything anywhere on the page, but I find that unless you're a trained designer, that might lead to some ugly looking pages or pages that reduce donor trust in your website. And of course, we want to instill trust. We want to showcase our work in the best possible light. So that's why Wix gets a four out of five stars for design, because I think they actually offer a little too much customization that can run afoul of good design principles.
Rubric Element #4: Ease of Use — Can Your Whole Team Actually Manage the Website?
Up next, ease of use. This is the most important and critical factor I see when working with nonprofit clients. They come to me and they say, oh my gosh — our website builder is so complicated. It is not easy to use. And it's really difficult because when we have staff turnover or if we hire staff members who haven't worked on a website before, there's a steep learning curve.
Well, sadly, WordPress is usually the culprit. When I work with a nonprofit who has a website on WordPress, often their complaint is wow, WordPress is frustrating. There's so many options. Things are all over the place. I don't know how to get this website to do what I wanted to do, and I don't know how to update it easily. And so sadly, I'm going to give WordPress a three out of five stars for ease of use just because it's sort of designed for developers. It's not as user friendly as the other platforms.
Let's move on to Squarespace. I'm going to give them a solid five out of five stars, because their ease of use is unparalleled. Clearly, from the start, Squarespace prioritized the user experience and making sure that it is super, super easy. Like I mentioned before, the drag and drop page builder is so clean and simple it makes creating pages really, really easy, and their navigation to manage the site, to change your settings, to change the design, to add or remove pages and features and functionality is so easy and intuitive. Often when I have older clients or clients who aren't very tech savvy switch to Squarespace, they often say, oh my gosh, this is so easy, I love it. I feel so comfortable here. I know I'm going to get the end result that I want.
And for Wix, for ease of use, I'm going to give them a four out of five stars. I think it's a very, very easy to use platform. The challenge is the number of customization options and the way they want you to build the page can be a little convoluted. My complaint about Wix also is that they make it very easy to individually style elements on a page, like a banner or an image or a text block, but they don't make it as easy to ensure that that style matches the rest of your site. So you tend to do a little bit more fiddling, a little bit more customization as you're building your Wix website or maintaining or updating your Wix website. So that's why it gets four out of five stars.
Rubric Element #5: Maintenance — What Does Keeping Your Nonprofit Website Running Actually Look Like?
And the final thing I want you to evaluate as you're looking at a nonprofit website builder is maintenance. What does maintaining your website look like?
Now, this is different from ease of use that I was just talking about. When I think of ease of use, I think of you updating your website, posting a blog, or updating your about page. Maintenance is the behind-the-scenes, technical work of making sure that your website stays up and ready for visitors.
And WordPress — as you've probably guessed — I'm going to give a three out of five because it takes at least monthly maintenance checks of making sure that the themes and plugins are updated and working nicely with each other, and if the plugins start conflicting or causing issues on your website, that can cause a significant amount of headache and require some expensive developer time. That's not to say there isn't great value in WordPress, but you really do need to know what you're doing in terms of basic website maintenance on the back end, especially setting up a regular cadence of evaluating your website's health, making sure that your plugins and your themes are updated, and making sure that your hosting is secure.
Squarespace and Wix I will give a five out of five stars to both of them, because they're so similar as all in one website builders. They have their own teams of developers who are really good at keeping the site secure and making sure that the platform works. So all of the functionality that comes with both Squarespace and Wix works perfectly across the site at all times.
I've been building websites on Squarespace for almost 20 years, and it's very, very rarely where I've run into a bug or a minor issue that would prevent me from doing exactly what I wanted. And usually there's a simple workaround and then the bug gets fixed very quickly. I don't work in Wix very often, so I can't speak to their uptime or how quickly they're able to resolve issues, but I know that they do have great teams of developers making sure that the platform is secure and all of the features and functionality work together.
The 5-Point Rubric for Choosing the Best Nonprofit Website Builder
Let's review. So I have five criteria in a rubric that I want you to use when you're evaluating your nonprofit website builder, whether you're rebuilding your website from scratch or you're starting brand new. Check out these five elements of how to evaluate the nonprofit website builder that'll work for you.
Number one is setup. How easy is it to set up the nonprofit website builder? Does it work quickly? Can you enter a few things and get started on your website? Or are you going to have to search for plugins and themes to make it work?
Next are the features. Does this website builder have the features that your nonprofit needs? It's a pretty basic question, but also something to think really carefully about. What email marketing provider do you use? How will you accept donations? Do you need to have volunteer signups? What kind of video hosting capability do you want on your website? These are all features that you should consider when evaluating a website builder for your nonprofit.
Up next, design. How good will your website look built on this website builder? Does the website builder make it easy for you to customize the design and make it look like your nonprofit's brand? Or are there too many options and it's difficult to find how to customize and make it truly yours?
Ease of use. Of course, you know you need to keep updating your website every week. Every month there's regular updates that need to be made, like posting a new blog or posting a video. So how easy does the website builder make it to update your website?
And finally, maintenance. How easy is it to keep the technical aspects of your website online? If you have a bunch of plugins and themes and extensions, how easy is it for you to check and make sure that they're working correctly and make any corrections if they aren't?
All right. Thanks everyone for staying tuned. If you'd like more nonprofit website tips that will help you attract more volunteers and get more donations online, stay tuned and subscribe to this channel.
