Best website builder for small businesses
Best website builder for small businesses
Best website builder for beginners
Best website builder for beginners
| Squarespace 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?
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 answer their questions quickly. Squarespace has an extensive help center with FAQs, tutorials, guides, and videos.
- Templates: Squarespace has a great selection of over 110 templates for 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 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.
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.
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, 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 competitors offer, I was able to get questions answered within a couple of minutes.
- Email: It took 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.
Compare Squarespace Alternatives
Squarespace is one of the best overall website builders, but alternatives could be a better fit for you. See how Squarespace compares with other top-tier website builders:
| Website builder | Starting price | Basic plan features |
| Squarespace Overall rating | $23 per month |
|
| Hostinger Overall rating Read our full Hostinger review. Consider Hostinger for: Innovative free tools to help you build your brand and website. | $2.99 per month |
|
| Wix Overall rating Read our full Wix review. Consider Wix if: You need more design template options. Wix offers far more (and better) predesigned templates to get you started. | $16 per month |
|
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?
Do you own your site on Squarespace?
How I Rated Squarespace
At Whoishostingthis.com, we know how important it is to test products thoroughly and compare how they measure against the industry leaders. I spent hours familiarizing myself with Squarespace’s dashboard, setup process, website builder, and all of its features. While my definition of “easy to use” may differ from others, I approached this as though I was new to website builders and compared it to my experience with some of the top site builders we’ve also reviewed.
This comprehensive overview of Squarespace can quickly answer whether it’s the right website builder for you. We also drilled down to specific features, so you can have a more detailed look at features or services. I gave more weight to some parameters, including features, security, support, pricing, ease of use, and how Squarespace has improved since our last review.
I test website builders based on the following factors:
- Customization options: Can you change the look and feel of a template or add your own code?
- Ease of use: Is the navigation intuitive with built-in tools, such as an in-app photo editor?
- Value: Can you get a free plan or trial to give the builder a test drive? Are there extensive features on paid plans that justify the cost?
- Security: What does the website builder do to keep your site and your customers’ data safe?
- Templates: Are the templates attractive, updated, and generally high quality? Can you find many to choose from?
- Support: Can you get help when needed, whether it’s from a human or support center articles?
- Recent improvements: Has the builder done anything lately to step up its offerings?
Learn more about our review methodology.
