Building a website from scratch can be quite intimidating for beginners. It requires an investment of a chunk of time and resources, along with help from professional web designers. All of this can be quite expensive.
But what if you could design your entire website within a few hours all by yourself? This is possible with website builders. I have previously reviewed various website builders like Zyro, Carrd, Dukaan, and SwipePages on my blog.
And when I recently came across Squarespace, I decided to test it out as well. After testing out all the features of Squarespace for a few weeks and designing a few websites with it, I am here with its detailed review.
In this Squarespace Review, we will begin by discussing its user interface, editor, template collection, pricing, support, blogging, and eCommerce features. Later, we will also discuss its major pros and cons along with suitable alternatives.
So how good is Squarespace? Should you use it to build your professional websites and blogs? Well, let’s dive right in and find out in our detailed Squarespace Review. Let’s go!
About Squarespace Website Builder
Squarespace started as a website building platform that was developed by Anthony Casalena for his personal use. Noticing the increased liking of the site from his family and friends, he established Squarespace as a do-it-yourself website builder in 2003.
It is headquartered in New York but serves its software all around the globe and has shown tremendous growth since its inception. Building a website requires one to fulfill three primary criteria.
- One needs to create a domain name that helps to locate the website.
- A web host that helps your website to be accessed by others.
- A catchy design to attract web surfers.
Keeping in mind these requirements, Squarespace helps to set up a website and provides all the basic requirements for managing and growing it. The program also comes up with creative and professional web templates, visual designs, SEO-friendly web pages, and simplistic and heavy content sites that are all easy to use for beginners.
Squarespace can be used by a company or an individual who needs a platform that helps them to create a website for their business. Even for personal use like setting up a blog space or professional service like a business page, Squarespace provides an end-stop solution for all.
Getting Started With Squarespace
You can sign up for a free trial on Squarespace. To help you design your website, Squarespace takes you through multiple steps where you need to select what your site is about and choose your aim and top goals with the site.
Then, it offers you a relevant collection of modern templates according to the choices made in the previous stages. Once you find a template that you like, you can click on ‘View Demo Site’ to view a pre-designed website using that template.
If you’re satisfied with it, you can click on ‘Start with this design’ and sign up with your email or Google/Facebook/Apple account to design your website.
Squarespace Test Website
For testing out the features of the Squarespace website builder, I have used its Personal plan along with the Lakshi template.
The Personal plan offers access to all the important tools like pre-designed templates, SEO features, website metrics, and more. Your website stays as a sub-domain under Squarespace.
However, you can also connect your custom domain or get a free sub-domain by opting for a yearly subscription to Squarespace.
Squarespace User Interface
The user interface of Squarespace is commendable. It offers a clean, minimalistic, and spacious design to allow users to easily navigate different options and settings with no hassle.
The left panel lets you switch between the Squarespace dashboard and domains. The main screen features your website, along with options to edit or tweak its settings. Finally, you can access the Squarespace support and account settings from the top right corner.
Overall, the interface is easy to use and understand for beginners and might be a piece of cake for professionals!
Squarespace Templates
For website design, let’s come to the templates. Squarespace provides excellent styles that have been broken down into various categories based on the requirements. They range from Online Stores and Portfolios to Memberships and Blogs.
Squarespace has received good feedback for its template variations. It has 140+ high-quality templates. All of those templates offer a choice of customization. The professional-looking templates are quite helpful for small businesses, as their attractiveness brings in a lot of customers.
Squarespace Editor
While building a website from scratch, it is necessary to have functional features that are helpful when navigating through the website.
The editor offers nine crucial elements through which one can create a website. The preview button takes the editor to the front end of the page, allowing a sneak peek of the website.
All the other options provide a back-end development. These include:
- Pages tab lets you create new pages and edit the existing ones.
- Design tab lets you customize fonts, colors, browser icons, error pages, etc.
- Commerce tab helps you manage your store’s orders, customers, inventory, etc.
- Marketing tab lets you manage your email marketing campaigns and run promotional material like Instagram stories, pop-ups, etc.
- Scheduling tab serves as an online assistant for making plans, adding tasks, and syncing with popular calendar apps.
- Analytics tab lets you track and analyze your sales, traffic, products, search keywords, customers, etc.
- Profiles tab lets you view a list of your subscribers, customers, leads, and donors.
- Settings tab helps you toggle and change the comprehensive settings of the website.
- Help tab lets you access Squarespace’s knowledge base, videos, webinars, etc.
Talking about the website editor, Squarespace offers its latest editor called Fluid Engine. It is a drag-and-drop editor with a beginner-friendly interface.
With this editor, you get a live editing functionality. This means whatever edits you make will be visible right away on the template. Unlike other website builders, Squarespace lets you edit right on top of the template.
When editing a template, you can directly drag and drop elements into it. These include text, buttons, forms, images, videos, audio, integrations, business products, and many more. You can also add different sections like Intro, Contact, People, Products, About, Quotes, Menus, Forms, etc.
But a downside to the Fluid Engine editor is that you cannot place images or text wherever you want. Unlike the Wix website builder, you can only place the editor elements in pre-made positions defined by grid lines on the page.
The editor also takes longer to load. However, there are tricks to make your site load faster, like you can reduce the size of the images, avoid adding too many plugins, and use a few fonts.
An impressive feature of the Squarespace editor is its responsive mobile design tool. The changes you implement on the desktop mode are automatically reflected on the mobile version and vice versa.
However, this might also serve as a disadvantage for professional users who prefer customizing their websites separately for desktop and mobile viewing.
Squarespace Extensions and Integrations
Extensions help you extend the functionality of your website builder platform. Squarespace provides 30+ powerful extensions to cater to your website needs. However, some extensions are available on a monthly subscription basis.
You can find integrations from the following categories.
- Shipping and Fulfilment Category: Shippo, ShipBob, Order Desk, Ship Station, etc.
- Finance Category: TaxJar, Dext, FreshBooks, etc.
- Inventory and Products Category: Trunk, Spocket, Printify, Art of Where, etc.
- Sales and Marketing Category: Mailchimp, SmartSEO, Judge.me, Channable, Outfy, etc.
I like the integration of Squarespace with Mailchimp (for email marketing), Google Analytics (for tracking website stats), and Stripe (for payments).
Squarespace Blogging Features
Setting up blogging websites is one of the significant services provided by Squarespace. Based on the theme of users’ blogs, Squarespace proposes an endless list of templates to select through.
It has beautiful and aesthetic-looking web pages that help you represent yourself. Talking about limitations, you can publish up to 1000 pages on your website along with unlimited blog posts, which is fantastic for a website builder.
In order to edit your blog, you need to use the Squarespace editor and head over to the Blog page under the Pages tab. The blog layout pans out with the header, followed by many sections you can add. Each section can accommodate many blocks.
These blocks can range from basic elements like text, audio, video, and forms to integrations like social media accounts. For stock images, they have inbuilt support from the Unsplash image library that makes the process smoother.
But the best part about Squarespace Blog is again its live editing feature. It has a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. This means that while you are editing, it displays the text and elements exactly how they would appear on being published.
Squarespace SEO Features
Squarespace is the best solution for bloggers, as it makes their work simple. Talking about the SEO features, it lets you optimize both your website pages and blog posts.
You can add a featured image, image alt tags, post excerpt, post URL, social sharing options, etc. It also offers built-in mobile optimization, metadata editing, automatic markup, and the provision of sitemaps.
The SEO tools also give out an SEO checklist, which makes it easy for an individual to learn to optimize their site. Overall, Squarespace is a reliable platform for SEO features.
Squarespace Marketing Features
Email Marketing
Squarespace offers its native email marketing feature where you can create detailed marketing campaigns for your business.
Here, you can select your email templates from their collection, create mailing lists or import them to Squarespace, draft emails, and even automate them.
However, Email Marketing is a paid feature of Squarespace starting at $5/month. The Starter plan allows you to send out 500 emails/month on an annual plan, which is quite good when starting out.
Analytics
With Squarespace Analytics, you can track the performance of your website along with the behavior of your audience. This feature helps you analyze and track how your audience is interacting with your website.
You can get detailed insights and reports on your sales, revenue generated, website traffic, products sold, orders, traffic sources, traffic by location, and more.
Squarespace eCommerce Features
Squarespace is a great option for building eCommerce sites and online businesses. It can help you quickly set up an online store for your business.
Let’s look at all the eCommerce features of Squarespace, from adding products to your store to selecting a subscription plan.
Adding Products
The first step to setting up your eCommerce store is deciding what product you want to sell.
Squarespace offers you six different product options to choose from. This includes physical products, digital products, services, gift cards, memberships, and scheduling services. On selecting the product type, you can add products along with their images and descriptions.
You can also set the price, stock, sale price, and related products, and customize the checkout pages. If you already have products listed elsewhere, Squarespace lets you import them from Etsy, Shopify, and Big Cartel.
Squarespace also offers SEO optimization for your product pages. You can add product categories, and tags, customize the URL and add social sharing buttons on your product page. Overall, it is quite effortless to add a product to Squarespace.
Setting up Payment Methods
Squarespace provides a limited number of payment options. Users living outside the US can connect Stripe and PayPal to collect payments from their customers. Whereas, users residing in the US can also opt for Square Payments.
You can also choose a currency for your online store from a list of 25+ currencies. Another thing to note is that if you opt for the Business plan, you are charged an additional transaction fee of 3%, which is eliminated on the higher plans.
Choosing Fulfillment Options
Under fulfillment options, you can specify the method according to which your shipping would be calculated.
It can be a flat rate, according to rate, or as per different delivery services like FedEx, UPS, etc. You can also set shipping zones if you wish to sell your products in specific countries.
Finally, under pickup options, you can specify the detailed address where your products will be picked from for delivery to customers.
The eCommerce options provided by Squarespace are really efficient and would help you sell a variety of products with ease. However, you can also look at Dukaan and Zyro as potential alternatives for building eCommerce stores.
Squarespace Pricing Plans
Access to such good websites and beautiful templates come with a price! Here is the Squarespace cost breakdown, so you can choose which Squarespace plan will be the best for you.
| Personal Plan | Business Plan | Basic Commerce | Advanced Commerce | |
| Pricing (paid annually) | $16/month | $23/month | $27/month | $49/month |
| Free Custom Domain (1 year) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Unlimited Bandwidth | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Video Storage | 30 mins | 30 mins | 30 mins | 30 mins |
| Premium Integrations | N.A. | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Contributors | 2 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Squarespace Video Studio | Limited Access | Unlimited Access | Unlimited Access | Unlimited Access |
| Fully Integrated eCommerce | N.A. | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Transaction Fee | N.A. | 3% | 0% | 0% |
The paid plans of Squarespace are on the expensive side compared to other website builders like Zyro or Weebly. They can be purchased on a monthly or a yearly subscription.
Squarespace also has an option to switch between plans, thus allowing users to upgrade or downgrade their subscriptions conveniently.