Squarespace Review: All the Pros and Cons (2021)

Squarespace is one of the most popular website builders on the market. It offers awesome looking templates made by world-class designers.

But Squarespace is not only a website builder, it’s an All-in-One solution for businesses to go online – it also provides an integrated ecommerce solution.

Furthermore, Squarespace is extremely easy-to-use. Anyone can build a website or an online store without HTML or CSS knowledge.

If you’re thinking about going online with your business or setting up an online store – Squarespace could be a great solution for you.

Using bad software tools can end up costing you hours of work and thousands of dollars.

If you want to know whether Squarespace is the right solution for your business, you’ve come to the right place. In this Squarespace review, we’re going to analyze all the pros and cons of the platform.

Let’s dive right in.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace comes with four plans – it’s quite simple, the lowest plan has fewer features than the most expensive plan.

Since Squarespace is an affordable high-quality solution, I recommend going for the Business Plan if you don’t need ecommerce functionalities. 

If you need ecommerce functionalities, I recommend going for the Advanced Ecommerce Plan – it’s only $40 per month.

The Advanced Ecommerce Plan comes with all the features you need to build and run a successful online store. Therefore, Squarespace is one of the top Shopify alternatives to consider.

Here’s an overview of all Squarespace plans:

• $12 – Personal – Great solution for people who want a simple website for the lowest price.
• $18 – Business – You can use additional marketing features like email marketing. You can also turn your website into an online store, but you’ve to pay 3% transaction fees.
• $26 – Basic Ecommerce – Run an online store without additional transaction fees + additional ecommerce features.
• $40 – Advanced Ecommerce – Everything you need to grow your business online.

You should check out all Squarespace plans here.

Squarespace Pros and Cons: Summary

Squarespace Pros and Cons

As with every platform to build a website, grow traffic, and monetize your online marketing efforts, there are also pros and cons with Squarespace.

I believe that Squarespace is one of the best solutions for most businesses – especially for bloggers, small businesses, or any other mid-sized company that needs a website or an online store.

However, you need to check out by yourself whether Squarespace is the right solution for your business. Here are the main pros and cons of Squarespace listed and described:

Squarespace Pros

Best website builder

If you take a look at Squarespace’s website, you probably notice that they provide awesome templates that look like they were made by world-class designers. 

Actually, they were made by world-class designers.

You can easily choose between one of their pre-designed templates, customize them, and be sure your site will look awesome.

Here’s an example:

If you’re going for the Business Plan, you can customize the HTML and CSS code of your website – so you’ll have 100% control of your entire site.

However, what you need to consider is that the Squarespace website builder doesn’t work like a typical drag-and-drop builder. It works section based which takes a little bit longer to understand. Yet, if you’re used to it, it will be easier for you.

Of course, all Squarespace templates are fully responsive – it will be easy for you to build a fully functional website – especially if you’re a beginner.

You’ll also see directly how your website will look like when using the website builder. With WordPress, you’ll only see the changes once you click on the preview button.

Definitely check out this site of Sadie Williams, a popular fashion designer, to see Squarespace in action.

Ease of use

Squarespace is very easy to use. The user dashboard is pretty simple and straightforward. On the left side, there is a menu from which you can easily find your way around:

If you create your first website with Squarespace, they lead you through a predefined path so it will be easy for you to set everything up quickly.

You also don’t need any coding skills to use Squarespace. You can edit the HTML and CSS code of your site with the Business Plan, but you don’t need to. The website builder makes it easy for you to create a website from scratch.

There are also pre-designed contact forms and email opt-ins you can use to collect email addresses – you don’t need a lot of integrations.

What’s pretty cool is that you can also get your domain and hosting directly from Squarespace. However, you need to check whether a Squarespace domain and hosting is the best solution for your business.

Best in-built features

In contrast to WordPress, Squarespace is a closed system. There aren’t thousands of plugins to extend the functionality of your website. Squarespace offers integrations, but it’s not the same as with WordPress.

However, Squarespace has the best in-built features – so you literally don’t need any third-party plugins.

For example, instead of installing Yoast SEO for your WordPress site, you can use the Squarespace in-built SEO tool, which is fantastic.

Here’s a rough overview of the major in-built features:

• Drag-and-drop builder
• Analytics
• SEO tools
• Blogging tool
• Podcast hosting
• Password protection
• Email Opt-ins
• Email marketing
• Pop-ups
• Ecommerce functionalities
• Social Media Integrations
• Scheduling features
• Apps for Ecommerce
• Contributor accounts

Blogging Tool

Everybody knows that blogging is uber important if you want to build a successful website. Recent research from Ranksey shows that 86% of marketers say written content is their top content marketing priority.

Squarespace offers an awesome blogging tool you can use to create SEO optimized blog posts, schedule, and publish them. You can even share your blog posts directly on Facebook, Twitter, and many more social networks.

The Squarespace blogging tool comes with basic features: markdown, RSS, tags, categories, drafts, comments, moderation, customizable URLs, and more.

Here’s how it looks like:

You can also change the featured image of your content that appears when you or someone else shares your posts on social media.

What’s also great is that you can add several contributors to the system and set up accounts for them. Using this feature, you can turn your blog into a professional publishing platform.

The only downside of Squarespace’s blogging tool is that it doesn’t autosave and you’re always prompted to save your work when you want to leave the editor.

SEO Tools

Squarespace offers an integrated SEO tool you can use to customize your title tags (the most important on-page SEO element), descriptions, and URLs of every page of your website.

You can even modify page titles and descriptions without changing the page titles that your website visitors will see.

You can also hide specific pages of your websites from Google by putting a noindex tag into theof a specific page.

Squarespace sites have an XML sitemap by default, so you do not need to create one manually.

You’re also able to connect your website with Google Search Console so you can see what keywords your visitors use to find your website.

Integrations

Squarespace offers integrations to extend the functionality of your website. Competitors like Weebly and Wix offer more integrations than Squarespace, but Squarespace integrations work better with your website.

Here are some of the most important Squarespace integrations:

• Google Maps
• G Suite
• Major social media networks
• UPS/USPS
• Acuity Scheduling
• PayPal
• Stripe
• ShipStation
• Disqus
• OpenTable
• Adobe Fonts/Google Fonts
• GoDaddy/Namecheap
• Zapier
• Dropbox
• Xero Accounting
• MailChimp

You can check out the complete list of Squarespace integrations here. If you don’t find the integration you are looking for, you can still try to connect your Squarespace website with a third-party app through code injection.

Analytics

Squarespace provides a comprehensive analytics tool that allows you to see not only the number of visitors to your website but also their behavior and much more useful information.

Here’s an overview of Squarespace analytics features:

Visitor overview

You can see how much individual visitors, visits or page views your site has – you can also see the traffic sources and analyze where your site visitors are coming from.

Activity log

You can analyze how visitors navigate through your website.

Geography

You can see from which parts of the world your visitors are coming from.

Keywords

Find out which keywords your customers use to find your business through Google.

Squarespace for Ecommerce

What’s great is that you can turn any Squarespace website into an online store if you’re in the Business Plan or higher.

While you’ve to pay transaction fees of 3% if you’re in the Business Plan, you can use all the ecommerce functionalities with 0% transaction fees if you’re going for the Basic Ecommerce Plan or the Advanced Ecommerce Plan.

The Basic Ecommerce Plan is $26 per month and the Advanced Ecommerce Plan is $40 per month.

You should check out all Squarespace plans here.

If you’re really serious about ecommerce, I’d recommend going for the Advanced Ecommerce Plan – either way, Squarespace is a very affordable ecommerce solution.

Here are the pros and cons of using Squarespace for ecommerce:

Payment methods:

With Squarespace, you can connect:

• Stripe
• PayPal
• Square (supports Point of Sale)

You can accept all major types of credit cards and you don’t have to pay fees for third-party payment providers.

Through their collaboration with Square, you can also sell offline and sync all your transactions in one place. All you need is a Square card reader for $49. This is a perfect solution for small local businesses.

Customer Service

Squarespace offers several ways to contact their customer support:

• Live chat Monday to Friday
• 24/7 social media support via Twitter
• 24/7 email support

They also offer self-help solutions:

• In-depth knowledge base
• Community forum
• Video tutorials

There are two upsides and one downside when it comes to Squarespace’s customer support. One upside is that they really offer high-quality customer support. The second one is that their knowledge base is packed with guides and videos to solve nearly every problem.

The only downside is that they don’t offer phone support at the moment.

Mobile App

What I personally found amazing is that Squarespace offers three different mobile apps:

• Analytics
• Commerce
• Squarespace

You can’t only check your website’s stats, you can also configure your site and write blog posts on the go.

Also, with the Commerce App, you can scan shipping labels, fulfill orders, manage product inventory, and contact customers from your mobile device.

Custom Domain

If you want to go online, the first thing you need is a domain. For example, our domain is https://www.smart-minded.com.

If you don’t have a domain, you can’t go online.

So now there are two ways to get a domain. You can either buy a domain from a third-party provider and connect that domain to your Squarespace website OR you can buy your domain directly from Squarespace.

If you’re going for Squarespace, you’ll get the first year for free.

Security

All Squarespace and third-party domains come with a free SSL certificate.

An SSL certificate enables secure connections from a web server to a browser. Typically, SSL is used to secure credit card transactions, data transfers, and logins and is therefore extremely important for an online store.

Backup & Restores

Squarespace saves deleted pages and blog posts for 30 days. Furthermore, Squarespace makes backups of your entire website and stores them in primary and secondary servers. They also save the backups on physical storage disks.

Squarespace Cons

No multi-language websites

For me, one of the biggest cons is that it’s not possible to create a multi-language website. If you want to offer your blog posts or product pages in different languages, you should go for another solution.

Dropdown menu

Another downside of Squarespace is that you can only create dropdown menus with one level. This is not necessarily a drawback because too many outgoing internal links from your homepage may hurt your website’s SEO. Especially for beginners, this could be a good solution to structure their sites SEO efficient.

No user ratings

If you want to use Squarespace for eCommerce, you cannot provide user reviews for your products.

However, it depends on your niche whether user reviews are important or not.

For example, there are successful online stores like Gucci or Luis Vuitton that also don’t provide user reviews for their products.

Tax Rates

You can set up individual VAT rates for all countries in the world. However, a Squarespace online shop doesn’t show taxes on the product page, which is a requirement for most countries in Europe. Taxes will only be displayed on the checkout page.

Furthermore, you need to add all tax rates manually into the system. There’s no automatic calculator.

Squarespace also allows zip code based tax rates.

No Phone Support

At the moment, Squarespace doesn’t offer any phone support.

Conclusion

Here are the main pros and cons of Squarespace: