Should You Use Squarespace For Your Business: 13 Pros and Cons
Table of Contents
Criteria to choose a website platform
Pros: 8 reasons to use Squarespace for your business
Cons: 5 cases when you shouldn’t use Squarespace
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You’ve heard good things about Squarespace, but is it the right platform for your business? Read on as we break down Squarespace's pros and cons and when you should not use this website builder.
Picking one among various website platforms isn’t easy, but this decision comes down to 3 factors. Before you consider whether Squarespace is right for your business, take a moment to answer the following 3 important questions:
1) What do you need the website to do?
Brainstorm ideas based on your customers' needs, processes related to the website, and even browse other websites in your industry.
Do you need video backgrounds or other specific visual features? Do you need the website to be able to integrate with any other software (e.g. accounting, payment processor, email marketing etc.)? What do customers need to be able to do on your site? Don’t forget the tasks after setting up your website, like adding pop-ups for marketing campaigns or writing blog posts.
2) How comfortable are you with technology?
Since you’re reading this, chances are you want to set up the website by yourself or at least be able to update and maintain the site by yourself after the initial setup. So ease of use will be a major factor in your decision.
Do you know how to code? Are you generally able to learn new software easily? Do you often feel curious and enthusiastic about new tech tools?
If you say yes to one or more of these, ease of use isn’t too important. But if the opposite is true, you will need to pick an user-friendly platform.
3) What are the possible future changes to your website?
Think ahead of what you may add to your website in the future. Will you be selling products? Will you offer membership plans? If you have an online store, do you anticipate rapid growth in sales and products? Answering these questions ensures your chosen website builder can grow with your business.
Now that you’ve outlined criteria for your business website’s platform, let’s talk about whether you should or should not use Squarespace. Let’s start with the pros about Squarespace.
Squarespace is one of the most popular website builders for small businesses and solopreneurs. If you value the following characteristics, it’s likely you will enjoy using Squarespace.
1) Squarespace is an all-in-one solution
Squarespace comes packed with everything you need to get a website up and running quickly. While a regular website development project takes 2-3 months on average, the website design process for Squarespace can be done in days. This is because Squarespace has already taken care of hosting, domain, templates, features, security, analytics dashboard, SEO tools, basically every aspect of your website.
Squarespace also offers additional services integration to support your business. In a few clicks, you can easily connect your website with Email Campaigns for list building, Acuity Scheduling for appointment booking, FreshBooks for accounting, and so on.
2) Squarespace is easy to use
You can create a website without any coding in Squarespace. Their drag-and-drop interface allows you to see changes as you make edits, which is very different from WordPress where your edits are made from the back-end and you’ll have to flip between the design and the editor.
Squarespace’s content and styling are separate, which makes for an efficient design process. The main drag-and-drop editor allows you to add content (texts, images, gallery...) and move these elements around to create an optimal layout.
Once you’re done with the content, you can customize your logo, colors, fonts, and more in the styling editor. With Squarespace 7.0, you can even switch between templates to see how another style looks on your content.
3) Squarespace is low-maintenance
Once your website is created, you can be assured that it will continue running smoothly without any upkeep. This is a major benefit compared to WordPress where you have to regularly update plugins to keep your website secure from hackers (or pay someone else to do it).
In fact, I don’t charge clients maintenance fees even though it’s an industry norm. Instead, I show my clients how to use Squarespace at the end of their project and they’re able to make future updates by themselves without my help.
4) Squarespace has beautiful templates
The high-quality design is a key differentiation between Squarespace and similar website builders like Wix or Weebly. Squarespace has about a hundred templates and each one is beautifully crafted by designers. Their design styles are often clean, modern, and professional.
With their templates as a starting point, you can create a stunning, sophisticated website look without design experiences.
5) Squarespace pricing plans are affordable
Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial so you can experience the tool completely risk-free. After that, you can choose between four pricing tiers. The two most popular pricing plans are Business Plan ($18/month) for informational websites and Basic Commerce ($26/month) for online stores.
6) Squarespace websites have good security
Getting hacked is one of the worst nightmares for a business website. And unfortunately, the more your website grows in traffic, the more attractive it becomes as a target for hackers. Since Squarespace is a “closed” system developed by an internal development team, there’s a much lower chance for your website to have security vulnerabilities compared to an open-source system like WordPress. All their built-in features are developed with security in mind so you can have peace of mind.
7) Squarespace has 24/7 customer support
If you ever run into issues or questions, you can get in touch with Squarespace Support through 24/7 emails or live chat. Their technicians will take all the possible steps to help you, even logging into your site from the back-end to identify issues or walk you through step-by-step how to make certain edits.
8) Squarespace has solid SEO features
Squarespace offers solid SEO capabilities and you don’t need any coding to make it work. There are several built-in features that make your site SEO-friendly, such as auto-generated clean site map, automatic redirects, SSL security, and mobile responsiveness. They also have an SEO tab for each page and blog post, which makes adding title and meta descriptions extra simple.
Though Squarespace has a lot of advantages, it is not built for all business types. Below are 5 situations where you should not use Squarespace.
1) Multilingual websites
While you certainly can create a multilingual website on Squarespace, it’s not the most straightforward way. You will be creating a set of pages for each language, which means the more languages you need, the more extra work there will be.
2) Online stores that solely sell products
Squarespace’s strength is its ability to build beautiful content pages. If the main purpose of your website is displaying products, you’re better off using a platform specifically built for ecommerce like Shopify. You’ll be able to take advantage of a wider range of ecommerce functionalities, such as being able to receive payments in multiple currencies, more inventory management options, and a number payment gateway options (which Squarespace only has 3 choices).
3) Large online shops
Similar to #2 scenario, Squarespace is not built for large online shops. Though you can have up to 10,000 products on a Squarespace Store page, as your number of products grows, it will become harder to organize product items and integrate with different third-party services to make your process efficient. This disadvantage makes Squarespace a poor choice for large online shops.
4) If you need complete freedom of functionality
If you have a complex website or simply prefer absolute freedom of choices with functionalities, your best bet will be with WordPress. Since Squarespace is built in-house, it’s hard to impossible to find outside developers who can help you code a specific feature. These limitations are what keep Squarespace secured and easy to use, but they almost make the platform not a good fit for large websites.
5) If you need complete freedom of design choices
If you’re a web designer or creative who wants the website to look exactly like your vision, you may be disappointed to find that you can’t fully customize Squarespace (or at least not without using a lot of CSS). The better alternatives for you will be Showit (no code) or Webflow (require coding).
I hope these considerations were helpful for you in making a decision. If you think Squarespace might be right for your business, give it a try!
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If you’re looking to take your website to the next level, check out my Squarespace designer services and book a free consultation call today!