WordPress vs Squarespace: Security Compared

The security comparison between WordPress and Squarespace is one of the most searched and most badly answered questions on the internet. Most of the answers come from people trying to sell you one of the two, which means the comparison is never fair. This post is the version I'd give to a friend who asked me over a pint, with nothing to sell either way, and it's current for July 2026.

Short version, if you want it up front: Squarespace hands you a locked box that they patch for you. WordPress hands you the keys and the responsibility. Neither model is inherently safer. What's safer is the model that matches how much attention you're going to give the site.

Worth flagging up front: Squarespace has had a bigger public security incident in the current window than most people realise, which I'll come to in the third section. It doesn't disqualify them, but it's a fact the marketing pages skip over.

What each platform actually secures

Before you can compare them, you have to understand what security means on each one. It's different in each case.

Squarespace is hosted. Squarespace runs the servers, the CMS, the database, the network, the CDN, the TLS certificates. They handle patching, they handle DDoS mitigation, they handle 24/7 SOC monitoring. You don't touch any of that and you can't touch any of that. The security surface you own on Squarespace is small: your account, your Extensions installs, your DNS and domain settings, and anything you paste in via Code Injection or Code Blocks.

WordPress is self-hosted software. You pick a host, you install the CMS, you install a theme, you install plugins, you configure it, and you're on the hook for keeping all of that up to date and locked down. The security surface you own is enormous by comparison. That's not automatically worse, it just means the responsibility model is inverted.

That difference is the whole comparison. Everything else is a consequence of it.

Where Squarespace is stronger

Being honest about this matters, because a lot of pro-WordPress writing pretends there's no advantage the other way. There is.

Zero maintenance security - Squarespace patches its platform constantly and you never see it happen. There's no "your plugin has a critical vulnerability" email at 11pm. There's no core version to update. There's no "I forgot to update it for six months and now there's a known exploit" scenario. If maintenance is the failure mode you're worried about, Squarespace removes it entirely.
A very small, tightly curated Extensions ecosystem - Squarespace has around forty to fifty Extensions across Sales, Marketing, Inventory, Finance and Shipping. That's tiny compared to WordPress plugins or Shopify apps, and it's deliberate. The single most common way WordPress sites get compromised is a vulnerable plugin. Squarespace has almost designed that failure mode out by not having much of a plugin ecosystem in the first place.
Passkey support, and it's good - Unusually for the sector, Squarespace supports passkeys for two-factor authentication, including hardware security keys like YubiKey, up to five per account, plus TOTP apps and (in a handful of countries) SMS. Backup codes are available in sets of eight. As of the May 2026 help doc, that's a stronger baseline than most hosted platforms and better than Wix, which still has no hardware-key or passkey option.
Re-authentication on sensitive actions - Squarespace prompts a fresh authentication when you change your password, change 2FA settings, or touch DNS and domain permissions. That's a specific mitigation against session hijacking that isn't universal even among enterprise SaaS.
Baseline platform security - Squarespace's public pages list TLS, HSTS, a WAF, DDoS mitigation, a 24/7 SOC, PCI-DSS-compliant payment integrations (card data goes direct to the processor, never to Squarespace's servers), and a 99.9% uptime target. They're certified under the EU-US, Swiss-US and UK Data Privacy Frameworks.

If your site is a straightforward brochure with a contact form, and you're not going to touch it after launch, Squarespace's security model genuinely is lower-risk than an equivalent unmanaged WordPress site. Not because Squarespace is magic. Because they've removed the parts of the surface where non-expert users fail.

The domain-hijack incident, and what it actually means

Between the 9th and 12th of July 2024, a coordinated wave of domain hijackings hit Squarespace customers. Compound Finance, Celer Network, Pendle Finance, Unstoppable Domains and around a dozen other companies (mostly in crypto and web3) had their domains taken over. The attackers had exploited a weakness in Squarespace's migration of Google Domains customers over to its own registrar. They pre-registered admin email addresses they'd guessed from public data, then used those addresses to take over the migrated Squarespace accounts. Researchers reported that 2FA was effectively disabled on migrated accounts. Squarespace's own post-mortem, published on 23 July 2024, blamed "a weakness related to OAuth logins" and said it was fixed within hours.

Two things are worth taking from this. One, no CVE-tracked platform vulnerabilities or major breaches surfaced in the year since, in the reputable coverage I could find. So the response held. Two, the design choice underlying the incident (email addresses not validated at account creation) is still there. If you're running a site of any real value on Squarespace, that's a good reason to make sure the email address on the account is one only you control, on a domain you control, and that 2FA is on with a hardware key or a passkey.

I'd hold this against Squarespace less than the internet did at the time, but it belongs in an honest comparison.

Where WordPress is stronger

Now the other direction, which also has to be said honestly.

You control the security response - When Squarespace has a vulnerability, you find out when they tell you, or when your site behaves oddly, or not at all. The July 2024 incident is a case in point: customers found out because their domains were being drained, not because Squarespace saw it coming. WordPress core and plugin vulnerabilities get published CVEs and you can patch on your own timeline. That's more work, but it's also more agency.
Full data ownership and export - Squarespace 7.1, which has been the default for all new sites since 2020, does not support the built-in XML export at all. Older 7.0 sites can export a WordPress-compatible XML file of blog posts and basic pages, but products, galleries, member areas, forms, design, CSS and images embedded by reference are all excluded. If you're on Squarespace 7.1 and you decide to leave, you're rebuilding. WordPress can be moved between hosts in an afternoon.
No vendor risk - Permira took Squarespace private in a $7.2 billion deal that closed on 17 October 2024. Anthony Casalena is still CEO, and the platform is unlikely to disappear, but private-equity ownership does change the incentive structure over time and it's worth noting. WordPress isn't owned by anyone.
You can implement things they won't - IP allow-listing on the admin login. Custom rate limiting. Custom security headers on any tier. A web application firewall of your choice. Log aggregation to your own SIEM. Enforced 2FA policies for all collaborators. Code Injection and Code Blocks on Squarespace let you paste arbitrary JavaScript, which is powerful but also means the same code you'd use for tracking can be used against you if your account is taken over. On WordPress you can layer all of the above properly.
Missing compliance paperwork - Neither of Squarespace's public security or measures pages currently lists SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification. That doesn't mean it isn't in progress somewhere, but it does mean that if procurement asks, you may struggle to hand over the same paperwork that Wix or a serious WordPress host can produce.

If your site needs any of these, Squarespace genuinely can't do the job, and that's not a WordPress bias. That's just the shape of what the platform is.

Where they're closer than the marketing suggests

A few areas the comparison usually gets wrong.

Account security is on you either way - Every platform has a login. Every login can be phished. Every login can be brute-forced if you use a weak password. Turn on 2FA, use a passkey or hardware key on Squarespace where the option exists, use a password manager. That single hour matters more than the platform choice.
"WordPress gets hacked more" is a misleading statistic - Yes, more WordPress sites get compromised than Squarespace sites. WordPress runs somewhere in the region of 40% of the web. Squarespace runs a few percent. If you compare absolute numbers, of course WordPress "wins". If you compare rate per properly-configured site, the numbers are much closer and much harder to pin down, because Squarespace doesn't publish theirs. The absence of headlines is not the same as the absence of incidents, and July 2024 is a specific example of that.
Squarespace's AI features add a new surface - Design Intelligence (Blueprint AI, Brand Identity, the Beacon AI assistant) was introduced in May 2024 and rolled out through Refresh 2024 and 2025. There's no published documentation on the account-access security controls specific to these AI features. If you're using them in an account with sensitive data you should be reading the settings carefully. This applies to Wix's AI agents too, but neither platform's security page has caught up with what's now possible.

How to actually choose

If you're comparing WordPress and Squarespace and security is your main concern, the honest decision tree is short.

Pick Squarespace if the site is going to be simple, you're not going to touch it after launch, you don't need to own the data or move it later, you don't need custom code or unusual integrations beyond Code Injection, and you'd rather pay a monthly fee than think about maintenance. If you do go this route, put a hardware key or passkey on the account, use an email address on a domain you fully control for the login, and turn on the strongest 2FA option. The July 2024 lesson is that Squarespace's defaults are more forgiving than they should be, and the strongest available settings matter.
Pick WordPress if you need customisation, ownership, portability, enforced team 2FA, SOC 2 or ISO 27001 paperwork through a serious host, or capabilities Squarespace doesn't offer, and you're prepared to either keep it updated yourself or pay someone else a modest retainer to do it.
The one thing that trumps the choice - whichever platform you pick, spend an hour on account security. Long unique password. Password manager. Two-factor authentication with the strongest method the platform supports. Review who has access. That single hour makes more difference to your real-world security outcome than choosing between the two platforms does.

Where this fits

The Protect My WP handbook is for people who've picked WordPress, or who are running one and want to understand what actually keeps it secure in practice. It's thirteen chapters covering the server, the core, the users, the files, the database, HTTPS, the firewall, plugins, performance, monitoring, backups, and the maintenance workflow. Everything above is expanded in there in a lot more depth, along with the specifics that make WordPress properly hardened rather than just "hardened enough".

If you've decided WordPress is the right choice and you want to make sure your site's on the "properly maintained" side of the comparison above, the book is where the specifics live.

Get the book for £19.