If you’re tired of fees for Etsy and Wix (and Squarespace) jumping into the stratosphere, it’s time to consider how you’ll get off Etsy and Wix in 2026. Everyone has been noting how these SaaS platforms are ever increasing cost (often with a degradation in search performance at the same time!) What are they thinking delivering less and asking more? It’s time to move! You should love your website, the price, the performance, the capabilities.
The most economical path forward is a self-hosted WordPress + Woo Commerce site on the host of your choice. I know that strikes terror in the minds of many people, but WP is easier to use than ever (especially with a professional one-hour training to get you going), there are tons of resources available. A host, which you can feel free to shop around or move easily if your current host is too expensive, usually runs about $6-25 per MONTH for hosting. Woo Commerce is free, as is WordPress. Your annual cost is as low as $72 per year! And because you control your own site, if the host you are on is jumping up in cost, you can pretty easily move a site to another host.
Let’s compare Etsy versus WordPress:
Etsy used to be a good place for makers/designers/creators but lately the proliferation of AI products in all categories has reduced traffic for most legitimate creators. The marketplace of creators that was the whole reason for Etsy has been polluted with AI slop. Add to this the Etsy practice of reducing traffic randomly to previously-well-performing sites, and you have a bad recipe!
WordPress does take you off the marketplace aspect of Etsy, and you’ll have to promote your own products via social media – Instagram, Threads, YouTube, Facebook – but you’re already doing that now with your Etsy store. You won’t have the Etsy app, but all WP sites are mobile-ready for easy online shopping.
Let’s compare Wix vs WordPress
Wix is also a SaaS platform that many clients choose to host their site. Wix is (as is Squarespace) not tied to any marketplace, so you’re already promoting your own website on social media anyway.
Like Wix, WordPress uses a “blocks and patterns” layout method that allows you to drag and drop elements into your pages for an easy to design experience. You can use standard shop pages available in Woo Commerce, or you can create your own native layout using blocks and filling the spots with your chosen products (by popularity, by alpha sorting, by whatever you want to choose). Unlike Wix, WordPress has a million plugins (more than 1 million, actually) that help you extend your site’s capabilities, affordably. Need a rock solid way to intake customer information? Try the free Hubspot CRM plugin! How about events? So many events calendars and event management system, many blogs about it here and elsewhere. Learning management/course systems? So many of those too. Maybe you just want a plugin that lets you add a custom field to a customer’s product order, I use a free one called Product Input Fields for my 3 e-commerce websites that I run.
Let’s compare Squarespace vs. WordPress
Squarespace, like Wix is also standalone, there is no marketplace aspect of it. You’re already responsible for your own promotion here too. And the blocks interface is almost exactly the same as WordPress because they are built on the same source code (mostly!)
I have clients that love Squarespace, and it’s the platform that has consistently garnered my seal of approval for clients who absolutely do NOT want Woo Commerce/WP. I think it’s a good platform, but their costs continue to rise, and some are beyond what clients want to pay. So having an alternative plan is always good.
The other things you get with Wix and Squarespace may have included marketing, such as email marketing. You may also have had analytics (both for products and for site traffic.) Here are the matched items (all listed are free):
Other services you can get (for free or low cost) that add on to a WordPress website:
Analytics for site traffic – Google site Kit + Google Analytics
Email marketing – Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, and dozens of others are available with excellent WordPress/Woo integration
Onboard product analytics – Woo Commerce has these too
You can do anything in WordPress! There are over 1M plugins available, many either free or low annual cost that can give you whatever functionality you want – surpassing the SaaS platforms because YOU decide what features you want (and I promise someone’s got a WP plugin for that!)
What’s it going to take to move from Wix or Etsy to Woo Commerce?
If you have a lot of products to move, you might consider a migration plugin (yeah, they make those!) that migrate your product catalog, sku, pricing, and other data from your Squarespace, Wix or Etsy site currently.
You’ll likely have to copy/paste your main content pages to redo them in the new site, but it’s a good time to take a look at that copy and decide what stays/goes. Most clients this year are revamping or refreshing sites and removing old content, taking far fewer pages into sites that had gotten big and overgrown over the years.
The process for migration is pretty straightforward: You’ll make a new site (at a temporary URL) on your new host, migrate your products into Woo Commerce, develop your WP site and move over the static content yourself. Once the site and products are ready (tested!) you will migrate the URL to the new site. URL switchover (takes 24 hours usually but practical experience is usually under 12 hours.) In other words your exising site continues to operate up until you’re ready to launch the new one. I do recommend “pausing” orders during the migration (pause your commerce site from orders once you’re ready to move URLs) just in case someone tries to order on your “old” site during the migration. You’ll always have access to those orders at your old site’s admin area until you cancel that service. I recommend having an overlap of about a month of service just in case someone contacts you about an order.
This might, at this point, sound really daunting, but guided by a WP professional (me!) you can have an affordable migration. Most of my clients do the content move on their own, and I guide them along the way, helping with the tricky bits of getting new sites launched, or setting up the WP site with theme design and configuring plugins.
It really is possible to free yourself from the shackles of SaaS platforms. Don’t get me wrong, they are good, but you’re at the mercy of their dev team for features, and you can’t control the pricing. I run all my own e-commerce sites using WordPress and Woo Commerce, even if I assist clients with Wix, Squarespace and even Etsy. So I’ve seen it all, and still choose the WP/Woo option because of it’s flexibility and it’s performance.
In short, it’s time to consider moving off Wix, Squarespace and Etsy and onto a site where YOU control the cost.
