Squarespace is a website builder that has been around for more than 17 years, and it’s easy to see why: Squarespace makes it possible for anyone to create their own professional-looking website in minutes with just a few clicks. It offers an intuitive interface, beautiful templates, powerful eCommerce tools, and more. But does Squarespace deliver on its promise? Find out by reading our in-depth review on the software platform!
What Is Squarespace?
Squarespace is an all-in-one website building service. It offers a free trial of 14 days, with no credit card required, with the lowest plan charging $12 per month for its services ($18 if you want to have your site as the primary domain name). With tons of website-building capabilities, including templates, payment integration, eCommerce capabilities, and 24/7 support, there are many features available through the Squarespace platform.
Pros of Squarespace
- Easy to use
- Free Trial With no Credit Card Required
- Tons of templates that are mobile-friendly
- Ecommerce capabilities
- Analytic Tools and Online Support
- Unlimited data and storage transfers
Cons of Squarespace
- Limited Storage and Data on Basic Plan
- No live chat for customer support
- Fees For Domain Name Registration
- Template switching is impossible in Squarespace version 7
- No Free Plans Available
Who Is Squarespace Best For?
Squarespace is great for those who are looking for a variety of website-building tools. In addition, it’s ideal for those who want to start their online store but don’t have the time or knowledge of coding languages such as HTML and CSS.
Squarespace is an excellent option for businesses because it has all the features you’ll need without any hidden fees! If you want an eCommerce site, Squarespace has got what you need with its integration capabilities.
Table Of Contents:
Ease Of Use
Squarespace makes it simple to design websites. Users can create their own professional-looking website in minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse. Squarespace uses a section-based website builder where you can drag and drop different elements to create your ideal webspace, including a variety of text, video, headers, menus, and more.
It’s important to remember that typically what you create is what is going to show up on your web page, which means you won’t need to constantly preview your webpage to see what it looks like. This makes it simple for those who don’t have prior coding knowledge to create a beautiful-looking website. However, if you do like to code, there are options to custom-code your website as well!
Plans And Pricing
Squarespace offers a free trial of 14 days, with no credit card required. However, after that point, you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan in order to continue using the service. There are four different plans to choose from.
- Personal: The lowest monthly plan charges $12/month for a site with 20 pages and is aimed at those who are looking for a basic website set-up.
- Business: The business plan is $18/month and offers Squarespace extensions, professional e-mail, and premium integrations and blocks.
- Commerce: At $26/month, this plan includes everything from the business plan as well as powerful e-commerce analytics, purchasing tools, and point of sale.
- Commerce Advanced: The highest plan costs around $46/month but includes unlimited data and storage transfers as well as real-time shipping integration, which is ideal if you plan to showcase products or services and take payment through your website.
Tools and Features
The variety of tools offered in the Squarespace design panel make it simple to quickly edit and update things like the colors, spacing, and fonts. You can also modify your layouts with drag and drop sections to include videos, text, and images within your website pages. Besides the basics, Squarespace offers many exciting features that can be directly integrated into your website. We discuss the top tools you need to know about below.
Squarespace Extensions
Squarespace Extensions offers thousands of extra features you can integrate into its platform. Similar to the Apple Store or Google Play store, you’ll be able to find and download applications that fit into categories such as finance, inventory, and products, shipping and fulfillment, and sales and marketing. We love the variety of options offered through the store. Plus, all of these applications are carefully chosen by Squarespace to ensure its safe and secure to download.
Search Engine Optimization
If you want to rank higher on search engine results, you need to invest in your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. However, if you’ve never learned about the process or don’t have time to spend hours on research, Squarespace pages make it easy to catch up. Squarespace pages follow SEO best practices, allowing you to use tools to optimize your content, including tags, titles, and keywords.
While there are tons of introduction guides to teach you about how to integrate Squarespace tools easily, it can still seem challenging for those who know what it is or how it works. However, once getting acclimated, most users find it simple to keep up with their website SEO.
Simple Social Media Integration
A critical tool of your website is to link to other social media platforms to advertise your accounts and make it easy for visitors to share the content or products you have on their own social media. With Squarespace, you’re able to link to your social media accounts, including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or even podcasts. You can even have your social media feeds displayed on your website to provide more valuable content and ways for visitors to engage with your website.
E-mail Campaigns
Did you know that you can create and run e-mail campaigns directly through the Squarespace platform? With their e-mail campaign tools, you’re able to keep in touch with current and potential customers by sending out a series of messages. This can be done through one-time blasts or scheduled blasts. You can even use this tool for sales promotions or updates about team members or new arrivals at your store. If you’re still in love with your current platform, like MailChimp, you can still integrate it into your Squarespace platform.
Domain Names
When you purchase an annual paid plan for the first time, you’ll be able to choose a few domains. However, after that, you’ll need to pay a yearly fee to keep your domain which can range between $5 – $100 per year.
Some users complain that the cost of purchasing and renewing a domain through Squarespace is a little pricy. While this is a higher fee than other platforms like GoDaddy or BlueHost, it can sometimes be beneficial to have everything managed under one platform.
Security
One of the most significant features of Squarespace is that it’s a secure platform. With SSL, Squarespace will encrypt all communication between your website and its visitors, so you don’t have to worry about any potential security threats or breaches. This is included for free with your website, which is especially helpful if you take payments through your online store.
On top of that, Squarespace security is an industry leader in website security, with regularly updated systems and improvements. A few Squarespace users have reported occasional downtime; however, this is not a common issue since Squarespace has 24/hour customer care agents who will help you restore your site if there is any malicious activity or hacking attempt on their servers.
Scheduling Options
It’s easy to have your visitors book classes, sessions, or appointments directly through your website. Squarespace has various options for scheduling, including an events calendar or appointment module that allows guests to find open slots, make appointments, and fill out any important information before it’s confirmed on your calendar. Website owners will then receive notifications of the appointment through their set-up notification system, like e-mails or text messages, as well as receive alerts when they log on to their Squarespace account.
Website Analytics
Squarespace offers a thorough analytics section that helps to account for your monthly, weekly, and daily traffic statistics for your page views. It also tracks where the traffic is coming from, which can help you analyze what parts of your social media marketing are working and which are not up to par.
Plus, you’ll have access to tools like the Google Search Keywords panel, which lets you view search positions, keywords, and the number of times they’ve visited once you activate it on your account.
Templates
One of the most important aspects of your website is choosing a template that works well with your company brand or style. When you sign up, you’ll have tons of options to choose from for your templates, depending on the category of the website you’re looking for, such as Marketing, Music, Food, Retail, and more.
Once you choose the type of category, you’ll get to pick what you want to use the platform for, whether for selling products or scheduling sessions with clients. From there, you’ll be matched with templates specifically designed to meet your needs. They usually include standard pages like the home page, about me, contact our product page. The best part is that they’re customizable, so you can completely change the colors, format, and more.
If you don’t want to use one of the hundreds of available templates, you can always either import one from an alternative source or build it yourself using custom coding.
Support
Squarespace offers 24/hour social media support and e-mail support to help you with any questions, problems, or concerns, as well a live chat help options on Monday to Friday. Squarespace also has a blog for support which includes videos tutorials on how to use the platform more effectively and answers to commonly asked questions.
However, they don’t offer any phone support, making it difficult to navigate complex issues. Thankfully, you’re likely to find the answers you need through their resources, and you can always use their e-mail, social media, and live chat support as needed.
Uptime
The uptime of your website, or how long it stays online without any issues, is essential to make sure you are meeting customer expectations and remain open for customers to visit. If your site is down, you could be missing out on potential sales and customers. Squarespace has a 99.95% uptime, so your site is very unlikely to have a ton of downtime. Overall, we find Squarespace a very stable application to use if you want reliable uptime on your website.
Payment Integration
Squarespace offers tons of selling options for all account types. The most significant difference between the plans is the 3% transaction fee applied to personal accounts and 2% charged to business accounts. However, there is no fee if you have a Commerce account.
This allows your business to add products, start selling and take payments, all through one platform. You can set up annual or monthly subscriptions, gift cards, save payment history and automatically convert transactions to the user’s currency. You can either connect directly from Apply Pay, PayPal or Stripe to receive payment for your services. When you’re ready to ship, you can integrate shipping services like ShipStation and USPS to expedite the procedure. This allows you to run a fully functional online shop without using multiple browsers or providers to do so.
The only negative part of Squarespace payment integration is that you’re limited to the options listed above. If you want to incorporate outside methods that are not approved or available for download through the app store, you won’t be able to execute a seamless transaction.
Squarespace Summary
If you’re looking for an easy, quick, and customizable website to start your own business or sell products online, Squarespace is a great option. This online platform offers a user-friendly interface, tons of templates to choose from, and a wide variety of easy integrations for payments. It can be pricey, but it is worth the investment if you’re looking for an all-in-one solution that will save time on your business needs.
However, it’s not all sunshine with this software. You will need to learn about the products and how they work, which can take a significant amount of time. Plus, you won’t be able to call for support if you have an issue. Instead, you’ll have to wait for an e-mail or live chat response.
Besides those points, Squarespace is an incredible software to integrate into your eCommerce business and is likely to meet a lot of your needs as a small to a medium-sized business owner. If you’re on the fence about the platform, we recommend going for it! However, make sure to take the time to read through all user guides and tutorials to ensure you’re on the right page.