Squarespace Review: This Is One of the Most Popular Site Builders, but Is It Worth It?

Squarespace features

Although the web design market is flooded with many companies that provide drag and drop site builders, one platform that has achieved great success is Squarespace.

Squarespace was launched in 2004, making it one of the oldest site building companies around. After more than a decade in the industry, millions of websites have been created with this platform.

Main Features

Squarespace pitches itself as the go to platform for building blogs, portfolio sites, and online stores. Unlike other site builders, they don’t offer a free website building plan. Instead, Squarespace provides a 14-day risk free trial to test out their site builder at a low entry price point.

When using Squarespace to launch a new site, there are 3 main packages from which to choose. Each plan comes with unlimited bandwidth and storage as well as free domain registration with any site name of your choosing, powerful website reporting tools, and 24/7 customer support.

Plans: Standard vs. Higher-Tiered

The first package is known as cover page, which is perfect for single page sites such as landing pages and online portfolios.

There’s also a Personal plan that allows you to design sites with up to 20 webpages, but you can only sell 1 product and a 3% fee is levied on sales transactions.

Squarespace’s Business plan is for those looking to build online stores. This package features full e-commerce integration, ability to create unlimited web pages, $100 credits to use on AdWords, and a professional e-mail from Google.

Although Squarespace advocates the Business plan to online merchants wishing to start an e-commerce site, this package allows users to sell 25 products only. In addition, Squarespace Business sites incur a 2% sales transaction fee.

Squarespace also offers higher tier packages (Basic and Advanced) catered for full-fledged e-commerce/online stores. These plans come with tools that are more advanced and they have no transaction fees or product limits.

The trade-off, however, is that you would have to pay a higher subscription fee than what’s charged in the standard 3 plans.

Try Squarespace for free for 14 days. Get started now.

Ease of Use

Much like most drag and drop site builders, Squarespace is easy to use. In the latest update, version 7, the preview page and edit mode are morphed into one. This means what you see in edit mode is how your website will look like after you publish it.

Besides being simple to use, Squarespace’s WYSIWYG (what is you is what you get) site editor saves time because there’s no need to switch back and forth between edit and preview mode.

The site editor’s interface is also very intuitive. Instead of using a permanent tool bar, Squarespace opens a dialog box prompting you to select webpage elements to be placed on the spot you just clicked. To add, edit, or remove elements, simply hover the mouse over the available content block.

Squarespace lets you add pages using a side menu panel. It’s also easy to hide and unhide the side menu rail by clicking on an arrow on the top left corner.

Overall, the interface and design tools are intuitive, making it easy even for the average Joe to design a professional looking website.

Themes, Design and Customization

Squarespace templates are categorized into industry specific designs. For example, some of the template choices are designed for photographers, musicians, restaurant owners, online merchants, wedding sites and bloggers.

There are dozens of themes to choose from in categories such as online stores, personal websites and single cover page. Squarespace provides a full screen live preview of themes to help you choose the best layout for your website.

Once your desired template is chosen, you can edit it to your liking. The style editor features all the typical elements to expect on a modern website. These include text boxes, image placeholders, spacers, social media buttons, charts, web forms and links, just to name a few.

The visual experience with a Squarespace website can be undeniably rich. Much of this has to do with the fact that this platform offers a full photo Aviary editor.

Besides editing images, the photo editor allows users to search, preview and purchase stock photography licenses on Getty Images. You can also create a gallery page and display photos in a slideshow, stack, grid, or carousel.

The Aviary photo editor supports a range of behavior customization options as well. For example, you can use the lightbox option for grid-type galleries or enable pop-up texts to appear when the mouse pointer moves over an image.

To design your website on a more advanced level, Squarespace allows you to edit CSS code. This option is a great addition for those who know a bit of code or want to hire a professional to tweak the chosen template to get a more unique website layout.

In case you need to undo any changes, Squarespace provides an option to restore the default CSS code for the template you choose.

Built-in SEO Features and Mobile Friendliness

Most drag and drop website builders usually provide basic SEO functions such as access to page title tags, image alt tags, and meta descriptions. However, Squarespace goes a step further when it comes to SEO features.

It provides support for rich snippets, sets up 301 redirects and it can also generate an XML sitemap to help search engines crawl and index your website.

Squarespace features a built-in analytics program that can help you track website statistics such as traffic sources, devices used by visitors to access your website, periodic traffic amounts, and so much more.

If you prefer a more powerful program to track website visitor stats, you can integrate your Squarespace site with Google Analytics.

As an added bonus, Squarespace generates mobile friendly sites right off the bat. Using the mobile information bar, you can enable mobile sites to show a bottom menu that displays contact information, location and business working hours.

Help and Support

When you experience technical problems while running a Squarespace site, you can reach the support team via live chat or email. Squarespace also makes it easy for beginners to learn about their platform. They have an extensive series of video tutorials and plenty of knowledge-base articles.

These resources will be invaluable when learning about the site builder or looking for solutions to common problems. In addition, you can post questions on the Squarespace forum where other experienced users and even the support staff can provide answers.

Pros and cons

So is Squarespace a good website builder?

Pros

» Beautiful, rich imagery designer templates that also look great on mobile devices.

» CSS customization for each template is possible, making this platform ideal even for skilled web developers.

» Squarespace allows users to export pages and blogs to WordPress, so you are not locked in one platform.

» Squarespace offers excellent blogging capabilities and SEO functions.

» Improved site editor that allows for point and click interactions.

» Good analytics tools and extensive online support for users of all levels.

» Free trial, 14-day money back guarantee.

Cons

» Currently Squarespace lacks a third part widget/apps marketplace.

» There is no plan for creating a free website.

» Phone support is not provided.

Summary

Squarespace is a fantastic site builder if you are looking for a platform that can help you to easily create modern, beautiful and responsive websites for desktop and mobile. The templates it offers are all mobile friendly and can be customized for a more unique website.

Best of all, the improved version 7 now allows for real point and click interactions by allowing users to make changes on the preview page. That said, however, Squarespace is not the easiest to use nor does it provide third party app integrations like other top site builders such as Wix and Weebly.

In spite of these shortcomings, this platform is still a great tool that small businesses and individuals can leverage to put themselves on the web.

Try Squarespace for free for 14 days. Get started now.

Squarespace frequently asked questions

If you’re new to Squarespace, you probably have the same questions that newbies before you had. So, to help you quickly get the answers you seek, here are answers to some of the most commonly asked Squarespace questions.

Squarespace plans & prices

Squarespace’s website builder comes with a range of plans for all your website needs; you find plans for creating cover pages, personal and business websites and ecommerce websites. For latest and most up to date prices visit Squarespace’s website.

Try Squarespace for free for 14 days. Get started now.

Best Squarespace alternatives