Should i use squarespace or wordpress

Sign up free to immediately receive:. View privacy notice. All Squarespace templates are responsive , meaning that they will all adjust themselves automatically so that they are sized correctly for any device. AMP is a Google-backed project which drastically speeds up the loading of your pages on mobile devices by stripping out certain bits of code.

When it comes to content management in a Squarespace vs WordPress shootout, WordPress wins comprehensively. First, and most importantly in my view, WordPress provides version history functionality — multiple versions of pages and posts can be stored on the system and you can roll back to any of them at any point. Squarespace, presumably in a bid to save on web hosting costs and resources, does not permit you to do this.

Third, WordPress gives you a proper media library that you can use to store, access and edit your images and documents. This makes it easy to locate and re-use existing content in your site.

Finally, when it comes to blogging, Wordpress allows you to use categories and tags more flexibly than Squarespace you can also create your own custom content types in Wordpress. This allows you to present your blog content in more relevant ways to users, who can also filter it more easily to meet their requirements. This is helpful because it allows people to test a project out on Squarespace before investing more in WordPress. Not all types of content can be exported from Squarespace to WordPress, but you can export key things like blog posts, static pages, and images.

By contrast, you can use WordPress to pretty much create any sort of site you like. This can be done either by installing some WordPress plugins to your site or commissioning a developer to code something for you. With regard to Wordpress plugins, there are loads available around 59, from a dedicated WordPress plugin directory. A WordPress developer can help you craft a truly unique site that involves your own template and functionality rather than those of a third party.

First, there are several built-in integrations you can use for well-known services including Mailchimp , Dropbox and Google Workspace. Currently, the functionality these provide largely involves accounting, order fulfilment and label printing. Finally, as the Squarespace userbase has grown, developers have started to sell snippets of code that enhance the functionality of Squarespace sites.

Although he or she will still face constraints that are part and parcel of Squarespace, there is still a reasonable number of interesting things you can do to a Squarespace site via the addition of scripts and custom code. Finally on the subject of flexibility, and to be fair to Squarespace, you could argue that the visual aspects of the sites you create with it are more immediately flexible than in WordPress.

You can tweak site visuals and the layout of pages really easily in Squarespace — its style and drag and drop editors make it very easy to present your site content exactly the way you want to. Now in many ways, a flat structure for your site is a good idea, because it can make the site a lot easier to use and its content considerably more discoverable.

But for some businesses — particularly large organisations, or those offering a very wide variety of services and resources — a deep hierarchy can become a key requirement for a website build. In this scenario, however, you would need to ensure that you select a WordPress template that facilitates multiple levels of navigation or enlist a WordPress developer who can create one for you. In the COVID era, ecommerce has become a particularly important piece of functionality — because many physical businesses have been forced to turn to selling their products online.

You can learn more about all these ecommerce features here. All these solutions have ecommerce functionality that tends to outclass that provided by Squarespace — but in some cases come with a slightly steeper learning curve.

This is increasingly common in the website builder market — Shopify and Wix now also bundle email marketing with their offerings, in a bid to appeal to users who like to manage multiple parts of their business using just one platform. You might also want to check out our full email marketing reviews section ]. WordPress users will need to use a standalone product to send e-newsletters but — particularly if using Gravity Forms or a similar forms tool in conjunction with an app like AWeber or GetResponse — will enjoy more advanced functionality, both in terms of data capture and email broadcasts, than that which is available from Squarespace Email Campaigns.

Wordpress is the hands-down winner when it comes to a WordPress vs Squarespace SEO battle — it blows Squarespace out of the water in quite a few ways when it comes to search engine optimization. Second, WordPress allows you to make use of a wide range of sophisticated SEO plugins — for example, Yoast — which assess the quality of your on-page SEO efforts and automatically suggest improvements.

Rich snippets are bits of data which enhance your search results by 1 displaying contextual information such as ratings, pricing and reviewer to search results see example below and 2 by letting search engines get a more detailed idea of what your page or post is about. By contrast, adding rich snippets in WordPress is a very straightforward affair — there are many WordPress plugins available which allow you to simply add the relevant data to your web pages with a minimum of fuss.

All that said, there are some positive things to report about Squarespace sites from an SEO perspective — they do a lot of things that Google definitely likes. They use https SSL ; generate a sitemap. There are plenty of Squarespace sites occupying number one spots in search results and in competitive niches too.

To be fair to Squarespace however, the company is aware of these issues, and the relevant technical SEO improvements are gradually being rolled out. All the key technical aspects of running a website software updates, web hosting, server configuration etc. Although some of this can be handled automatically, updates are something that you always need to keep in mind — because if you end up with an out of date version of WordPress or a plugin, your site is much more vulnerable to being hacked.

Because Squarespace is a hosted solution, the bulk of the responsibility for security lies with the company making it — i. Managed hosting usually also improves your site loading times, which in turn can improve SEO. We partner with some excellent developers who can ensure your site is extremely robust from a security point of view — and make sure it stays that way.

You can contact us about this and get a free quotation here. Something which is often overlooked in WordPress vs Squarespace comparisons is control of content. If you use WordPress, what you put on your site is, generally speaking, entirely up to you.

Many businesses require multiple versions of their website — in different languages, or for different territories or both. WordPress is a much better solution than Squarespace for this sort of thing — you can use either the WordPress Multilingual plugin or the WordPress Multisite option to create multiple versions of a website in multiple languages. There are three apps available to manage aspects of your Squarespace website, and all are pretty easy to use:.

These include:. But you can get it working with a self-hosted WordPress site — this will involve some configuration and the addition of the JetPack plugin to your WordPress site. As the name suggests, this lets you create videos that align with your brand i. The good news is that this app is bundled with all Squarespace plans — even the free trial.

Squarespace lets you meet many of the core GDPR requirements — it stores user data securely and lets you add all the relevant legal notices to your website easily. However, when it comes to cookie consent management — a key part of GDPR compliance — it lets its users down a bit. One of the biggest implications of GDPR for website owners is that no non-essential cookies should be run without your site visitors providing explicit consent for this to happen. In addition to requiring you to give your your site visitors a means to give this prior consent, GDPR also requires you to log that consent and provide users with a means to revoke it.

So in essence, to avoid breaking GDPR rules whilst using a Squarespace site, you will either need to code your own cookie consent solution or integrate a paid-for cookie consent tool that works with Squarespace.

With WordPress, you will also have to spend some time configuring technical settings to ensure full GDPR compliance where cookies are concerned. However, there are a lot of WordPress plugins designed to help you do this — a popular one being Iubenda — and, given the larger WordPress userbase, considerably more online resources providing advice on this topic.

Customer support is an area where Squarespace generally beats WordPress, particularly if you are building your site yourself and not involving a developer or agency in the process. This is simply because when you buy a Squarespace account, you get customer support included with it live chat or email.

So, if something serious goes wrong with your site, there is somebody to turn to. You may find yourself sourcing help from a variety of locations: for example, the WordPress forums , a hosting company, a plugin provider, a friend who knows a thing or two about WordPress…. Although this means an ongoing cost, a WordPress support contract can give you a personal level of support that you are unlikely to ever receive from Squarespace face-to-face meetings, phone calls etc.

On balance, I would say that if you are building a site for yourself or a client, then there is usually an advantage in using Squarespace as far as support goes at least from a costs perspective.

And, as with most helpdesks, the quality of customer support can depend very much on who you get on the day. WordPress is a considerably more powerful and flexible tool than Squarespace — you can build pretty much any website you like with it.

However, for those on a low budget or intent on building their website without involving a developer, the better option can often be Squarespace. Squarespace is a great website builder for the likes of photographers, bands and small businesses, who just want a simple website quickly and with a minimum of fuss and down the line, if your needs do become more sophisticated, you could consider hiring a Squarespace developer to enhance your site through custom coding.

WordPress is also a much more scalable solution , thanks to the multilingual and multisite options that are available. If you are going down the WordPress route, I would suggest that rather than try to use it on the cheap — by doing everything yourself — it makes more sense to work with an experienced developer or agency, and to keep them involved in maintaining your site on an ongoing basis. You will need to budget properly for this, but if you work with the right individual or team you can get a superb product.

One way of deciding on Squarespace vs WordPress for a website build is by asking yourself 3 questions:. Its interface is very easy to use and its drag and drop page builder makes laying out content a breeze.

Hosting and domain names are included with the product; with self-hosted WordPress, you have to sort these out separately. Squarespace is largely responsible for the security of your website — if you use WordPress, security depends on how diligent you are in choosing and updating your software, theme and plugins.

By contrast, whether or not you can avail of support for a WordPress site depends largely on whether you have commissioned a developer or agency to provide it. Squarespace is arguably a better option than WordPress for users who require an elegant but simple website delivered quickly. You can try Squarespace free for 14 days here. WordPress comes with a more sophisticated content management system which, unlike Squarespace, lets you keep a revision history.

You can use WordPress to create sites with deep levels of navigation — this is not really the case with Squarespace without custom coding anyway. A vast range of WordPress plugins — paid-for and free — is available to help you add functionality to your website. The offering available from Squarespace on this front is much more limited. Data capture options are more extensive in WordPress than in Squarespace so long as the correct forms plugin is used.

Of course, when it comes to building a website, you are not restricted to Squarespace vs WordPress — there is a large number of alternative solutions available. On the self-hosted front, the best-known alternatives are probably Joomla and Drupal : very flexible platforms that host millions of websites.

Like Squarespace, these are chiefly aimed at people starting a business for the first time ; they all feature a drag and drop approach to content layout, and are fairly easy to use for non-technical users. For more information on the first three of these website builders, you can read our Wix review , our Big Cartel review and our Jimdo review. Shopify free trial Full Shopify review. Check out our BigCommerce review , our Shopify review and our Shopify fees post for more information on these two products; our Shopify vs Amazon comparison , our Shopify vs Etsy shootout , our GoDaddy vs Shopify comparison and our Big Cartel vs Shopify comparison might also be of interest if you are particularly focused on building an e-commerce site.

Finally, for even more in-depth information on Squarespace, do check out our Squarespace review , our Youtube review of Squarespace or our comprehensive guide to its free trial. WordPress is the better solution for blogging because unlike Squarespace, it has autosave and version history features. It also lets you use categories and tags in more sophisticated ways than Squarespace.

However, there are ultimately more ecommerce options open to WordPress users, thanks to a very wide range of plugins that let you add an online store to your site. Both platforms are pretty easy to use, but Squarespace is easier to set up — getting a self-hosted WordPress site off the ground usually involves quite a lot of configuration.

Once live, changing the fonts and colors used in a Squarespace site is generally easier than in WordPress. So long as you set your site up correctly, WordPress is the better option when it comes to search engine optimization. This is because WordPress gives you complete control over all elements of technical SEO, and you also have the freedom to invest in super-fast hosting with Squarespace, you have limited control over technical SEO and none over hosting.

You can also use the industry-standard Yoast tool with WordPress — this analyses your content and makes useful suggestions regarding how you can improve it from an SEO perspective. Self-hosted WordPress is free to download — however, running a WordPress site can involve paying for hosting, themes, plugins and development. So in many cases, Squarespace can actually end up being the cheaper option. Have you any thoughts on Squarespace vs WordPress?

Would you recommend a different website builder? Do let us know in the comments section below. Pretty good stuff for anyone suffering from source-code phobia. WordPress recently improved their editor with the Gutenberg update, adding a building block system similar to Squarespace. However, you will still require a minimum amount of technical knowledge. Likewise, if you want to make the most of the platform, it would help if you can manually update your plugins, have a basic knowledge of FTP to upload files to your website, and maybe even of databases such as MySQL if you want to do really advanced stuff.

Winner: No surprises here — Squarespace is the undisputed winner when it comes to ease of use. Squarespace website templates are simply beautiful. You have more flexibility when it comes to layouts, thanks to the introduction of pre-built sections that let you chop and change designs. But Squarespace templates also have one big limitation.

Sure, they look really stylish when you pick them, but this is because they have been professionally designed with big beautiful pictures. With WordPress, you have a nearly unlimited amount of free and paying templates to choose from with virtually infinite customization options.

While this is great news for people who know exactly what they want their website to look like, it also means two things:. But with the thousands of options available, chances are that you might not even have to do any tweaking at all.

You can check out numerous professional looking WordPress themes on websites such as themeforest. Winner: A tricky one. Here again, Squarespace offers a very practical, efficient, and simple online shopping platform for your website right out of the box.

You can easily insert a Product Page into your website to create an online store and add items to it. You can control your inventory. You can add product variations. You can manage coupons and shipping options. And you can sell both physical and digital items, including subscriptions. You can even integrate your shopping platform with other products such as Mailchimp for mailing lists and Xero for your accounting. Their integration with Zapier lets you connect it to hundreds of other email services and CRM tools.

It also offers you a very decent range of payment providers: credit cards via Stripe, Paypal, ApplePay, Afterpay, and Square for Point of Sale support. The main drawbacks are that real-time shipping rates are currently only available for the US. Same goes with automatic taxes — these are available via a TaxJar integration, which is currently in beta.

But it absolutely cannot securely allow you to sell memberships. But that is a strong reason for choosing WordPress or other platforms like Rainmaker who allow you to create a membership business. I recently decided to move from WordPress to Squarespace. I had been using self-hosted WordPress for over 2 years, but was just finding I was spending most of my time solving site, technical, and performance issues, instead of building content, which was always my goal.

You can learn about my thought process as to why I made the switch in a recent post I made to my site:. On the contrary wordpress will cost you more to develop. But it absolutely kills squarespace with features.

With great power comes great responsibility. There is a reason why not many medium size businesses use squarespace or other template builders. SS is clearly meant for those unwilling or unable to learn the little you need to know about WP. My grandma would be fine with SS for sure. And yet, the guys over at weebly, squarpace and wix spend a ton of money on advertisement even tv ads which will result in more WordPress users once the people expose to those ads start doing some research.

Comparing Squarespace with WordPress is like comparing apple with orange. WordPress has more freedom and cost effective, it wins hands down. Squarespace should be compared with WordPress. Thanks for choosing to leave a comment.

Please keep in mind that all comments are moderated according to our comment policy , and your email address will NOT be published. Please Do NOT use keywords in the name field. Let's have a personal and meaningful conversation. Don't subscribe All Replies to my comments Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting. All Rights Reserved. Last updated on February 14th, by Editorial Staff. Ease of use Costs Design and templates Extensions and integrations E-commerce Data portability Languages and internationalization Ready?

WordPress WordPress is the top choice among users who want to start a blog or small business owners building a DIY website. Despite the slight learning curve, in our experience, most users quickly adapt to WordPress. Squarespace Unlike WordPress, Squarespace does not come with a lot of choices. Conclusion Squarespace fares a little better than WordPress out of the box in terms of ease of use for absolute beginners. The Costs Knowing how much each platform cost is important in making a business decision.

WordPress WordPress itself is free. Conclusion WordPress beats Squarespace with flexible pricing plans available from a variety of web hosting services from around the world. Design and Templates Both WordPress and Squarespace come with ready-made templates and design tools to make it easy for you to create a custom website. WordPress WordPress offers access to thousands of free and paid website templates. Squarespace Squarespace offers ready-made website templates neatly organized into different categories.

Conclusion WordPress comes out as a clear winner in terms of design choices, customization options, and flexibility. Extensions and Integrations All website builders come with a collection of built-in features. WordPress The real power of WordPress comes from its massive ecosystem of plugins. Squarespace Squarespace comes nowhere close to WordPress when it comes to extensibility and integrations. For eCommerce, you can use their built-in platform, but you cannot extend it in any way. Conclusion WordPress is the clear winner here with an incredible ecosystem of thousands of plugins and integrations at your fingertips.

E-commerce Are you building an online store? WordPress WordPress allows you to integrate and use any payment processor or platform you want. Squarespace E-commerce is limited on Squarespace.

Apart from that, you can only sell products in Business or Commerce plans. Conclusion WordPress is way ahead of Squarespace when it comes to running an eCommerce website. Data Portability When signing a business agreement, you always have safety clauses. WordPress WordPress comes with built-in tools to easily export all your data.

Squarespace Just like everything else, the export feature on Squarespace is also very limited. Your product pages, album pages, text, audio, and video blocks will not be exported. Conclusion The content you create on your site is yours, and you should have the freedom and tools so that you can move it elsewhere. Languages and Internationalization We live in a global world and many businesses cater to a multilingual audience in different geographical locations. WordPress WordPress is fully translated into dozens of languages.

You can only use currencies supported by Stripe or PayPal for your store products. Conclusion WordPress is way ahead in terms of languages and localization options. Summarizing Squarespace vs WordPress Comparison WordPress is a far superior platform than Squarespace when it comes to building a website.

Thanks for all your excellent work! Hello All, Please advise. Oh wait. Time will still tell if it was the right switch, since it is still early in the process. You can learn about my thought process as to why I made the switch in a recent post I made to my site: My reasons may not make sense for everyone, and its still early in the process.

Regards, Michael. Squarespace is premium, wordpress is free. The good news is that this model is very flexible, so you can choose cheaper themes and plugins in order to stay within your budget. The main costs are attached to purchasing premium themes and plugins. Note that this does not factor in ongoing costs; if you need to hire someone to help you make modifications to your WordPress site or to help troubleshoot, this will inflate the cost even more.

You can see their estimates here. But if you want built-in features and much less work, then Squarespace is the better choice. What is SEO? Now all you need is an admiring audience to appreciate all that hard work. Time to become an SEO pro! If your website has bad SEO, it could stay stuck in the th results page forever.

With amazing SEO, you could get to number one. But who wakes up one morning ready to be an SEO expert? If you are technical you can jump into the code real quick, and if there is a cosmetic change to make, you can check the page as a front view and then make those changes. Yoast guides you through the best SEO practices, from creating cornerstone content to adding keywords and meta descriptions. Squarespace comes with more built-in features than WordPress. These are just a few of the ones we found most useful:.

WordPress is known for its powerful tools — the only catch is that you have to install most of them yourself. WordPress is a little different. This is really important because an outdated site is more at risk of being hacked. However, hosting providers like Bluehost carry out automatic WordPress updates for you on their tailored WordPress plans, making your life easier and keeping your website secure.

Which Has More Extra Features? Think of Squarespace like a restaurant. Your food is prepared and cooked in-house. Your waiter knows the menu inside out, and is there to answer questions.

You can pick and choose what you want, but all the food arrives from the Squarespace kitchen. WordPress is more like a fancy buffet. It has dishes from different places and different kitchens. With WordPress, you have to put the dishes together yourself. WordPress is an open-source platform, meaning that its codes are open for anyone to use and customize. Developers or programmers can use WordPress to create their own tools such as templates, themes or plugins to share for free, or sell to other WordPress users.

These give you the ability to include all sorts of essential features a business may want to utilize, like online shops and membership areas. You can add contact forms, open comment sections, improve your Google rankings with SEO plugins, or even use WooCommerce to sell through your WordPress site… the possibilities are endless.

There are both free and paid plugins available. Squarespace comes with a good selection of apps already built into your site, including tools for blogging, tracking performance, and displaying images. And if you do find that you need additional functionality, Squarespace has a separate app market called Squarespace Extensions. The third party apps available there are high quality, but there are only 24 to choose from. If you want to sell online, you can! Both Squarespace and WordPress have the tools to let you create a powerful online store.

Squarespace lets you create an all-in-one store, with all your sales tools at your fingertips. WordPress relies on plugins like WooCommerce to add ecommerce to your site. All sales tools are fully integrated, meaning your online store will look totally seamless and professional.

For additional shipping and tax functionalities, you can also browse the Squarespace Extensions marketplace. You can create promotional pop-ups, sell unlimited products and accept donations, have a professional email and more. With these, you unlock a whole range of advanced ecommerce features , including:. Just upgrade to the best plan for you and start selling! You can create a really powerful online store on WordPress using the ecommerce plugin WooCommerce. WooCommerce is specially designed for WordPress users, to help them sell online!

WooCommerce has every tool in the box, making it a powerful way to kick-start your ecommerce business. Some of those features include:. A few of these worth checking out include Ecwid and Easy Digital Downloads. You can even use an ecommerce website builder like BigCommerce or Shopify to build your store, then easily integrate it with your WordPress site.

How Do They Compare? Squarespace gives you all the tools you need to run a small to medium sized store successfully, for a set price per month. Its high quality designs are easy to customize, which is perfect for branding and really making your products shine. WordPress has a range of options for setting up an online store — the most highly recommended is the plugin WooCommerce. This gives you a totally customizable platform to build your store on — this is great as it means you can tailor it to your needs.

WooCommerce will take longer to build from scratch unless you already have a WordPress site, and is harder to budget for because of the range of extra features such as hosting that you need to factor in per month. Good to know…. If you already have a WordPress site, then WooCommerce is the clear choice. Squarespace now offers an integration with Square, meaning you can sell products offline, take card payments, and keep everything synced with your online inventory.

Every WordPress site includes commenting abilities, plus helpful plugins that you can add later. Visit WordPress A blog is a great way to connect with your audience or simply document your work online. But not all websites are built to display a regularly updated stream of articles.

Squarespace and WordPress are both up to the task of supporting a high-quality blog, but they offer slightly different tools to help bloggers create a website. Users can pick from a variety of modern interfaces that display blog posts on the homepage either in a single reverse chronological feed or in a more compact magazine-style grid of blog posts. Many allow multiple authors to contribute, making it easy to run a blog with friends or coworkers. Within Squarespace, blog posts can be tagged, categorized, and edited.

They can also be excerpted, and a link to each new post can be automatically sent to social media feeds like Facebook and Twitter. In other words, Squarespace lets you accomplish all the basics needed to easily operate a sleek blog.