When we started building affordable websites for small businesses back in 2016, we researched all the top platforms available to see what was the best fit for our goals, small business owners needs, and for long term growth.
Guess what?
Squarespace was a top choice! After research, we didn’t consider platforms like GoDaddy, Webflow, Wix or Weebly because they had very obvious limitations, vulnerabilities, design issues, SEO-cracks, and poor direct-support response times.
We actually built over 200 sites on Squarespace, became a part of their exclusive Circle club, and published a ton of videos on how to use the platform.
So why might it be a wrong move for your business website today?
Things have changed. Both at Squarespace and in terms of what Google looks for to trust and understand a website and its content.
What was good about Squarespace
Before I go into all that has changed – let me say what is good about Squarespace. It is easy-ish to customize their templates to your own content. It has global styling options (meaning, change a headline font in your settings and it will change that headline everywhere it exists on the site). It has a very simple add-on to do e-commerce directly from your website. The monthly fees aren’t the cheapest, but they aren’t the most expensive. You can also setup email and grab a custom domain pretty easily.
But Squarespace has a lot of drawbacks now that they’ve changed the platform.
What to be aware of in the new Squarespace
Used to be easy to edit.
It used to be easy to edit in the platform, but now you have to have more of a ‘design eye’ to get your elements placed and optimized in the right space. We loved it when we started because small business owners like painters and landscapers and cabinet builders who didn’t tend to be fluent on web-design-skills could actually go in and easily edit and change their site. That gave them power and control rather than paying for a web design company to edit their site for them – and playing ‘whisper down the lane’ when trying to communicate what they wanted… but that’s not how easy the platform works anymore.
Its upgrades have made it more confusing for home service business owners to use rather than easier. We know this because we still have nearly 100 sites on Squarespace that we update and support, but the business owners slowly opt to have us rebuild them in our new WordPress based environment with the editors we use because it was much simpler to edit.
Used to have more template control.
The provided Squarespace templates no longer offer as many customizations in the style editor, so you may get a few months down the road and want to change the look and feel of your site, and be stuck! They have some really cool looking designs, but they were not built by people who study conversion and visitor-to-lead metrics, but rather mostly focus on aesthetics and beauty – that does not always translate well into growing a business by converting visitors into leads through smart copy, button placements, form integrations and color choices.
Now, you are limited by their existing templates and don’t have back end code access to edit your template directly.
Good luck connecting with support.
There is less access to their support team than 10 years ago. It’s hard to get a person in the USA on the line if you call – and the more specific your question or needs to your site, the less likely you are to find a solution because their entire company is built on ‘what each template does/does not do.’
You’ll be left to figure things like this (below) out with YouTube, your own time, and your own best judgements. Oh yeah – they don’t have a save and go back to what you had before feature yet… yikes!
Find a firm who does just Squarespace website builds.
The biggest drawback is that you’d have to hire a ‘squarespace site building firm’ to build a website for you on Squarespace which can mean more time and money that ‘the advertised fees’ on Squarespace. It will cost even more if you need someone with search engine optimization talents to write your site content for you.
Hosting can’t be optimized.
Squarespace is in itself a hosting platform – meaning if you need more bandwidth, speed, or resources dedicated to your site, you can’t turn up ‘your specific site dials’ to meet demands. Everyone on Squarespace is hosted on the same environment, whereas if you have a website built on WordPress and hosted on a separate server environment like AWS or Kinsta or LiquidWeb, you have control over your resources and speed directly.
Before you build, be aware
A different (not wrong) model.
If you want a site that you have the most control over all the features, styles, device displays, and speed and security of your site, then Squarespace won’t give you all you need to grow down the road. They simply can’t (not necessarily their fault, just not their business model) bend and twist to your specific needs because they are built around templates that work generally for a ton of different types of business.
Consider Conversion.
Conversion is a key element to consider when building a website – not just aesthetically pleasing designs. Conversion is the method a designer uses to ensure that the right visual triggers, color science, and word choice is used to compel a visitor to take your desired action. It can be clicking a specific button, visiting a certain page, filling out a form, calling your office – but it doesn’t happen by accident.
Conversion starts with knowing what you want, researching what your customers want, and designing a wireframe (or a high fidelity blueprint) that will put the correct structure in place to create the desired response.
We love a lot about Squarespace, especially how simply it allows e-commerce for your brand… but even so, Shopify is a great e-commerce program that is affordable and simple to setup. It hurts when people ask to have things done that simply can’t be done in their chosen template. Switching to a new template causes a mess in Squarespace that you then have to rebuild and replace much of your content.
Can’t export to WordPress easily.
The developers say you can export your site into a wordpress file (.xml) to use, but trust us – that doesn’t really help you rebuild on WordPress… we’ve tried it more than a dozen times.
So our hope is that you can make a decision that’s right for you in the season you are in. Just a few months ago, we built a site on Squarespace for a nonprofit because it had some features they simply had to have, and their staff knew the environment so we opted to make it easy for them since they were familiar with that… but if you are a small business owner who wants a website for your home service industries (painting, cabinetry, flooring, roofing, landscaping, decorating, christmas lights etc), you should think twice before putting all your eggs in that basket.
That’s just our 2 cents after launching over 1,500 entrepreneurs online with websites built with wordpress, hosted securely on Kinsta, and using some smart editors to make your life easier and your website performance blazin’!
Take the next best step! You can find out about how our website process works – with real people and proven designs that convert if you think it’s time to launch a website.
