With its beautiful templates and built-in e-commerce and marketing tools, Squarespace is ideal for SMBs wanting to create a professional website. You don’t need to learn to code or hire web designers — you can do it all yourself thanks to Squarespace’s easy design tools. And its excellent customer service team is available to help with any issues.
When choosing the website builder for your website, you have many options. We’ve reviewed most of them, and it is hard to beat Squarespace in terms of overall ease of use and features. As with any website builder, Squarespace has some drawbacks, like the lack of in-depth SEO features, but these don’t outweigh the benefits.
Read on to learn more about Squarespace’s pros and cons, features, and recommendations if you’re considering it for an e-commerce website or just a basic portfolio site.
| Squarespace website builder standout features | |
| Support |
|
| Best for | Small businesses and individuals seeking an easy-to-use yet customizable platform |
| Strengths |
|
| Weaknesses |
|
| Promotion | 14-day free trial |
What Are the Pros and Cons of Squarespace’s Website Builder?
While Squarespace is lauded for its features, it does have some drawbacks. Despite its search engine optimization (SEO) features, advanced bloggers will likely find the toolset lacking. The most glaring omissions are its lack of multi-currency support and no free plan available after the trial. Read on what works and what doesn’t:
Pros of Squarespace Website Builder
- A 14-day free trial: While Squarespace doesn’t offer a free plan, they offer a 14-day free trial to test the platform. No credit card is required, and the signup process took me under two minutes to start.
- Tools for e-commerce: With Squarespace’s flexible settings, handy integrations, and good marketing tools, I found it especially useful for managing e-commerce businesses.
- Great customer support: I like that Squarespace offers a live chat and email feature for all of its plans, ensuring that newbies and pros alike can get their questions answered quickly. Squarespace has an extensive help center with FAQs, tutorials, guides, and videos.
- Templates: Squarespace has a great selection of over 110 templates for all kinds of websites, such as online stores, local businesses, and home decor. You can edit the templates in real time with a drag-and-drop editor, and you can switch between mobile and desktop views to ensure your site looks great on any device.
Cons of Squarespace Website Builder
- Lack of SEO features: Although Squarespace offers SEO features such as page titles, descriptions, sitemaps, and alt text, it lacks many additional features WordPress offers, including good SEO plug-ins. Despite this, I found it offers enough features to create a blog and rank it. However, WordPress probably offers the most benefits.
- Lack of multi-currency: Another downside is that Squarespace doesn’t have a multi-currency option for merchants who want to sell globally. This is not a deal breaker if you want to sell globally, but it would be nice to have the option. Other providers, like Shopify, offer this, making it easier for sellers to sell in different countries.
- No free plan: It’s a drawback that there is no free plan with Squarespace. There’s a market for free, very basic websites, but Squarespace has elected to ignore that low-hanging fruit. leaving it to competitors such as Mozello, Weebly, and Webnode.
Squarespace Website Builder may be the best website builder for: Professionals, bloggers, small businesses, and individuals who want a great website builder that’s easy to use and has great features.
| Personal plan | Business plan | Basic commerce plan | Advanced commerce plan | |
| Price | $23 per month | $33 per month | $36 per month | $65 per month |
| Best for | Personal users | Small businesses Professionals | Small businesses E-commerce brand owners | Global sellers |
| Basic features |
|
|
|
|
| Customer service |
|
|
|
|
| Scalability |
|
|
|
|
| Sales support | None |
|
|
|
| Order management | None |
|
|
|
| Reporting | Basic website metrics | Advanced website analytics | Advanced website analytics | Advanced website analytics |
| Marketing |
|
|
|
|
| Security |
|
|
|
|
| Transaction fee | n/a | 3% per transaction | 0% per transaction | 0% per transaction |
| Tax calculations | Automatically calculate sales for your customers at checkout with TaxJar tool | Automatically calculate sales for your customers at checkout with TaxJar tool | Automatically calculate sales for your customers at checkout with TaxJar tool | Automatically calculate sales for your customers at checkout with TaxJar tool |
Store design and templates
As a starting point for your website, Squarespace offers over 110 professionally designed templates. Squarespace has fewer templates than competitors like Wix, but in my opinion, they are the most beautiful.
All plans include templates that are suitable for online stores, portfolios, memberships, scheduling, blogs, and one-page websites. Your website can be easily customized after you select your template.
Squarespace comes with a drag-and-drop editor, which I found easy to use and ideal for building all kinds of websites.
Squarespace is easy to learn even with no experience, and all the tools you need are right at your fingertips. I’m not a coder myself, but if users who are can use HTML and CSS to customize to your Squarespace website to your liking.
E-commerce features
Squarespace has great e-commerce features, including e-commerce templates, order management, and integrations with tools like Printful.
As for e-commerce, it doesn’t outperform Shopify, but it is really close. Shopify offers more advanced multi-currency options, better app integrations, and better inventory management. As for editing, Squarespace has an advantage over Shopify because of its drag-and-drop editing interface.
When deciding what to sell on your online store, you can choose between physical or digital products, different services, gift cards, and memberships.
These are some of the e-commerce features Squarespace offers:
Adding new products
This is easy and straightforward and includes everything that an online store owner would want.
The process includes naming the product, adding images, setting a price, stock amount, description, variants, and additional marketing features like SEO and social share. Depending on what kind of products you sell, you could have additional features like custom forms on checkout.
Abandoned cart recovery
With Squarespace, you can collect email addresses and send abandoned cart emails to your customers, which is critical for boosting your conversion rates.
Payment processor options
Squarespace makes connecting payment processors such as Stripe to your online store easy.
You can connect Stripe to your online store and accept the following payment methods with it:
- Visa (credit and debit)
- Mastercard
- Apple Pay
- Afterpay and Clearpay
- American Express
- JCB
- Discover (for U.S. merchants)
PayPal and Venmo payments can also be accepted through PayPal. Squarespace also has cash and card payment options if you sell in person, which is available through the Squarespace mobile app.
Cart and checkout settings
Squarespace offers many options to customize your checkout page, such as the ability to add a logo or custom messages throughout the checkout process. The checkout process can also be simplified by enabling “Express Checkout” so that the cart page does not appear during checkout.
Product reviews
You can also showcase customer reviews on Squarespace and request them through email automatically. You don’t have to install any third-party apps to add reviews, unlike on Shopify.
SEO and blogging tools
In addition to having great e-commerce features, Squarespace offers competitive blogging functions, which are only surpassed by WordPress in my opinion.
While it lacks the wide selection of SEO plug-ins that WordPress offers, Squarespace’s award-winning templates make it easy to create visually appealing blogs.
If your traffic is coming from social media, SEO is less critical, which makes Squarespace is one of the best choices available.
Squarespace’s blog management system is easy to use. The left sidebar displays all of your blog posts sorted by date, and you can edit them individually.
Mobile support
As almost 60% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices, it’s more important than ever to have a mobile-responsive website and website builder.
Squarespace is known for its responsive design, which means it automatically resizes your content and images to fit different devices. That means your customers should have a good experience no matter how they view your site.
You can also easily switch between mobile and desktop views in your Squarespace editor, so you can see your website from different perspectives.
Integrations and extensions
Squarespace offers different apps and extensions designed to expand the functionality of your store. During my testing, I noticed that Squarespace offers fewer than its competitors, but they do cover most of the important features, including email marketing, print-on-demand, fulfillment, and accounting.
Squarespace integrations can be divided into different sections:
Social media and marketing connections
You can use these extensions to connect your social media profiles with Squarespace and pull content from them. Your website visitors can also share this content within their own social media accounts.
Music and video connections
This enables you to easily embed videos from YouTube or Vimeo, and music from Spotify or SoundCloud on your website so that fans can hear your latest sounds, shorts, and images.
Business connections
These include payment, shipping, and tracking integrations with companies such as UPS, Stripe, U.S. Postal Service, FedEx, Apple Pay, and PayPal. These allow you to offer more payment and shipping options, which could make the customer experience more positive.
Squarespace extensions
From accounting to email marketing, Squarespace extensions are designed to get more out of your online store. Squarespace, as I mentioned earlier, doesn’t offer a ton of extensions, but the ones it does offer are excellent.
You can find apps in the following categories:
- Accounting
- Product reviews
- Customer support
- Inventory management
- Email marketing
- SMS marketing
- Dropshipping
- Print on demand
- Wholesale
- Multilingual website
All of these apps come with their own costs on top of Squarespace’s monthly plans, so you have to be prepared to pay if you want to use them.
Email marketing
Squarespace integrates with different email providers, but it also has a built-in email marketing tool. In my opinion, it is definitely a standout feature because e-commerce providers like Shopify and Weebly don’t offer the same built-in email tools.
However, it does come with an additional cost, which is between $7 and $59 a month, depending on the email marketing plan you choose.
Sensitive card data is never handled by Squarespace. It doesn’t have access to this information as it goes directly to the payment processor’s servers.
- Live chat: The live-chat feature of Squarespace is the best way to contact its support team. It is available Monday to Friday. While it lacks the 24/7 availability that Shopify offers, I was able to get questions answered within a couple of minutes.
- Email: It ook less than a day to get an answer from Squarespace email support, and I found it to be the second-best option for contacting their team.
- Help center: Squarespace has one of the best help centers out there. It is full of tutorials divided into different categories, guides by topic, and the ability to contact a real person if you can’t find an answer to your question.
- Hire an expert: It is also possible to hire a Squarespace expert that can help you with design, marketing, and anything in between.
Squarespace also has a dedicated support page for developers who are using the Squarespace developer platform to create websites. The developers support page goes through basic as well as more advanced functions such as local development, custom post types, and template annotations.
Design custom merch
The largest new Squarespace update is the ability to design and sell custom merchandise with your logo or create custom designs. This was not available on Squarespace before.
The custom merch feature works hand in hand with a platform called Printful, which can be connected from your “Commerce” page inside the Squarespace editor.
One of the best parts is that Printful handles all orders, so you don’t have to worry about keeping inventory yourself. This is called print-on-demand.
Duplicate blocks
Squarespace recently launched a block duplication feature that allows you to copy blocks and place them across different sections on your page. This is not a huge update, but it is something that can save you a lot of time.
Use the Unfold video editor
Another new feature is Unfold templates, which allow you to create trendy videos for TikTok and Instagram Reels. Unfold is a video editing app designed by the Squarespace team that is available in the Apple and Android Play stores. New templates are available within the app.
Features coming soon to Squarespace
- Reusable sections: Lets you repurpose sections from one page on others.
- LiveChat extension: The new live chat extension allows you to add a live chat directly to your home page, so customers can contact you.
- Asset library: Makes it easy to organize, manage, and add photos and videos.
Compare Squarespace Website Builder Alternatives
Squarespace is one of the best — if not the best — overall website builders, but competitors including Shopify, Wix, Weebly, BigCommerce, and WordPress could be a better fit for you. Each company was carefully evaluated, its services examined, and hours were spent researching them.
See how Squarespace compares with other top-tier website builders that the team here at Digital.com recommends:
Frequently Asked Questions About Squarespace Website Builder
Can I use Squarespace for free?
How long does it take to create a website on Squarespace?
Is Squarespace good for beginners?
Is Shopify easier than Squarespace?
How I Rated Squarespace Website Builder
I rated Squarespace using a thorough and detailed study of the platform. I looked at the various facets and features offered by Squarespace in comparison with other major players in the industry. I used direct testing and third-party services to ensure an accurate rating. I even created a dummy store and added relevant apps to get a thorough understanding from a user’s perspective.
While I did a comprehensive overview, I gave more weight to certain parameters that I felt were most important. These include available templates and their mobile responsiveness, price, available third-party apps, customization, scalability, and customer support.
In all these areas, Squarespace excelled, proving to be a high-quality website builder, particularly for small businesses. It also offers features for scaling and enterprise businesses. The monthly plans start at $23, and when billed annually, it’s even cheaper. With its many benefits and some disadvantages, Squarespace provides users with a flexible and feature-rich website builder.
