The email lands a few weeks before your plan expires: your Wix or Squarespace subscription is renewing, and the price is higher than what you signed up for. Maybe it’s gone up $10 a month. Maybe you’re on a plan you don’t remember choosing, with features you’ve never used. Either way, you’ve now got a decision to make, whether or not you feel like making one.
Why the price keeps creeping up
Wix and Squarespace both raise prices periodically — sometimes by increasing existing plan tiers, sometimes by nudging you toward a higher one at renewal (“your current plan doesn’t include X, upgrade for $Y more a month”). None of this is unusual for subscription software, but a website renewal often arrives once a year, so a $5-10/month bump can feel invisible until you add up what you’re actually paying versus what you started at.
Option 1: Just pay it
The easy option, and often the right one if your site’s working fine and you don’t have the appetite to deal with it right now. Nothing wrong with that — but it’s worth actually reading what you’re being charged for before clicking renew, rather than assuming last year’s price. If a “Business” or “Commerce” plan got bundled in that you don’t need, downgrading before renewal (not after) usually saves the most.
Option 2: Shop around to another DIY builder
Some people use the renewal as a trigger to compare Wix, Squarespace, and similar platforms against each other. Worth knowing upfront: you’re not just choosing a subscription price, you’re choosing to manually rebuild your site on the new platform, because none of these builders export cleanly into each other. That’s real time cost, not just a login change — often underestimated until you’re halfway through and realise your old layout doesn’t translate.
Option 3: Use this renewal to get off the subscription treadmill entirely
If the renewal notice is landing on you every year, and every year the number’s slightly higher, it’s worth asking whether you want to be back here again in twelve months. The alternative is migrating your site onto hosting that isn’t a recurring platform subscription — a one-time move rather than an annual renegotiation.
This is exactly the timing situation Site Care Plan is built around: if you’ve still got time left on your current Wix or Squarespace term, we move your site over now and you don’t start paying us until your old plan would’ve actually expired — so you’re never paying for two things at once, and you’re not stuck watching the calendar for the “right” moment to switch. From there it’s one annual price covering hosting and three content updates a year, guaranteed at least 10% under whatever Wix or Squarespace’s cheapest plan currently costs — so the renewal-creep problem doesn’t come back with a vengeance next year either.
What to actually do this week
If the renewal deadline is close, don’t let it force a rushed decision. A Nelson café owner facing a Squarespace renewal isn’t under any obligation to decide same-day — most platforms give you a grace period after the renewal date before anything actually breaks. Use that window to:
- Check exactly what you’re being charged for — log in and look at the actual plan and add-ons, not just the total.
- Decide if you actually use everything in your current tier — a lot of small sites are on ecommerce-tier plans without selling anything.
- If you’re tired of this being an annual event, get a quote for moving instead of renewing — even if you end up staying put this year, you’ll know what the alternative actually costs before the next notice arrives.
The renewal email isn’t a deadline to dread — it’s just the one predictable moment each year where you’re forced to look at what you’re actually paying for a website. Might as well use it.