What is Squarespace?
Squarespace is a website builder tool that is aimed predominantly at small business owners.
It lets users create a professional site in a browser without coding and edit it easily thanks to a user-friendly content management system (CMS).
In other words, rather than loading Dreamweaver or a similar web design package up and churning out lines of code to construct a site, you do it all online using Squarespace’s templates and style editor.
You pick a template, click on the bits of the design you want to tweak, and then adjust controllers in the style editor to change them. For example, you can click on some text and apply a new typeface; click on a background and change its colour; and so on.
But in general, Squarespace is a website builder that is not designed for those who want to tinker too much: it is a platform which, in general, encourages you to pick a template, add some text and images and hit the ‘go’ button.
And you don’t need to buy any separate web hosting to build a Squarespace — your site is built and hosted on Squarespace’s own servers. The idea behind this is to keep to an ‘all-in-one’ approach.
This method of website building has its pros and cons, and we'll go through them below — after a quick look at pricing.
Pros & Cons of Squarespace
Pros
- Stunning templates optimized for desktops, tablets and mobile devices
- Squarespace mobile apps allow you to edit pages, blog posts, and ecommerce functions on-the-go
- Ability to restore deleted posts and pages for up to 30 days
Cons
- No app store means you’re reliant on in-built features
- The editor can be a little too manual – for example, you’ll be prompted to save your work after each change, but it doesn’t autosave on its own
Features
Squarespace has best-in-class features. Everything is thoughtful, nothing is half-baked and they consistently go beyond their competitors.
Their blogging is excellent. It’s the best of any website builder— they’re the only website builder that can offer competition to Wordpress. There’s a long list of features: markdown, RSS, tags, categories, drafts, comments, moderation, customizable urls and more. Plus excellent support for multiple contributors.
The form builder is excellent: there are Google Docs and Mailchimp integrations, 19 different form field options, custom post-submit HTML and lightbox mode— a way to create a button that loads your form in a lightbox. One note: Squarespace doesn’t store your submissions by default— it’d be great if they did as a fail-safe!
If you’d like to manage your website on mobile, Squarespace has 3 mobile apps: Commerce is for your online store, Analytics is for analytics and Squarespace let’s correct text, add images and manage your blog. You can’t create your website using just these apps but you can manage it.
Some website builders promote features that they don’t really provide. Not Squarespace. Here are two examples:
Squarespace is the only website builder that lets you syndicate a podcast. Syndicating is required to submit your podcast to Spotify and Apple Podcasts which is…. critical for a podcast. Other website builders say they can host podcasts but all they mean is you can embed your podcast in an audio player. They don’t let you syndicate.
Squarespace also has the best donation system of any website builder– and it’s not even close. Other website builders just provide a crappy Paypal button. Or they suggest creating a donation product with their online store— which never works right. Squarespace doesn’t do that. Instead they have a complete donation system that covers the fundamentals: custom email receipts, suggested contributions and custom checkout.
Of course, most websites don’t need podcasting and donations— this is why other website builders just offer half-baked features for them. My point is if Squarespace takes care of those minor features, you can imagine how they treat major features.
Squarespace pricing
There are four Squarespace plans available:
Personal — $16 per month
Business — $26 per month
Basic Commerce — $30 per month
Advanced Commerce — $46 per month
If you pay upfront for a year, then you’re looking at monthly costs of $12, $18, $26 and $40 respectively for the above four plans.
Conclusion
The rather complicated editing interface used to be a major sticking point in the past. Fortunately, this has been improved in version 7. Although still not perfect, the site builder now allows for real point and click interaction. This speeds up your website building efforts and lets you avoid unpleasant surprises.
However, sometimes it feels a little too minimalistic, which can require a decent amount of trial and error until you are completely familiar with the editor. Some of the page elements are limited to an icon and don’t reveal their purpose immediately. Luckily, Squarespace provides many great tutorials that explain all the tools.
