Squarespace is great for small businesses

My overall experience with Squarespace is that it has allowed me to increase my profits, I've had a better time at events when people want to make purchases, and in general it is a well run software, so I really appreciate it. It is very accessible, it has made me look more professional, and it rarely has any bugs. Good job !

Pros

I have been using Squarespace for a few years as a working artist with a small business. There are a lot of events that happen for crafts and painting, and no one has cash, and I certainly don't have change to give them. When I got onto squarespace a few years ago I was amazed that they sent me a free sliding card chip reader, how easy it was to sign up, and I was a bit upset with myself that I hadn't signed up sooner. The amount of sales I missed before squarespace could probably have paid for a vacation or a big increase in my business, however all is well because I have it now. I really like that I can also keep profiles of different people, I can send people invoices, I can send people receipts, I can really make sure that I stay in their minds as a future place to buy from. I think that square space has also been successful for me because having a squarespace account has made me more professional with overseas buyers. Sometimes I get quite a bit of traction on sales through instagram, and paypal is not seen as the best route by these people, they prefer square space. It has given them ease of mind when they receive a digital receipt, when they see that i take my business seriously, and that has created a lot of good relationships for me in places like Australia, New Zealand and so forth. It has also allowed me to let people set up payment plans by tracking all their payments through square space and that too has increased a lot of business for me. Squarespace has helped!

Cons

I think that I am always worried about losing the swiper. If there was a way where squarespace could get rid of that all together and yet allow a one go swipe I would be really grateful for that. The only other issues I have had is sometimes the software has frozen while I am in the middle of a transaction and that has made things a bit difficult for me in the moment, however, this is common for a lot of apps that have high usage, so I am not super upset about it. I think that in the moment you can hope that things will be perfect but they can't always be. Overall though I think the software has better positives than negatives. I think that it is very good software.

Best option for Small Businesses that aren't IT savvy

If you are a small business or a startup trying to get a professional web presence, or an existing company with a horrible website, don't believe the limitations of a decade ago and "pro" web developers and companies that create websites for you for a large sum of money with continuing maintenance costs. Website development sites like Squarespace allow for any moderately computer literate individual to create amazing looking professional websites and professional emails with little hassle. You don't need an IT department or a website developer, and honestly, your site will look better than many I've had created by corporate webdevs. The trick is that sites like Squarespace use templates that you choose and customize with your own content. The con is, while there are tons of options in templates, what you see is what you get and you can really only customize content and minor aesthetics like font, pages, color schemes, pictures, etc. However, the templates are gorgeous and modern designed sites that will make your website look cutting edge. I've used several competitors, and while Wix is probably my next favorite due to customization, Squarespace is leagues better than any other site developer I've used, including Weebly, Wordpress, GoDaddy, Wix, etc. It is just so simple and the templates, while probably the least customization, are the prettiest ones available that add a professional touch you can't replicate in something like Wix. No IT, no problem.

Pros

Ease of use is unparalleled.
Templates are aesthetically unmatched by competitors- it's not even close.
The ability to switch between templates whenever you want is amazing.
Very professional feel to website with seamless G Suite integration.
Cost is very competitive.
Mobile optimized websites are lightyears beyond GoDaddy and Wix.

Cons

The templates are amazing, and there are a lot of choices, but if you don't like the options, you are stuck with what they have. Customizing is very limited within the Template framework, unlike Wix.
In order to be glitch-free and mobile optimized, the templates have very little customization.

Squarespace remains my top choice, but just barely.

I used to build my own sites - first manually then through Wordpress. I used to have a lot of security issues. Multiple hacks and breaches. Lost sites and downtime. I haven't lost a wink of sleep over a website since I signed up for Squarespace. For me, that's worth the money I pay. The software is beautiful, slick and simple (once you understand it - it's a bit quirky). But the cost keeps rising while other, cheaper options keep getting better. I still love Squarespace, but it's increasingly tough to recommend based on price.

Pros

Squarespace is easy to set up (a site can be completed in an hour or less if you have all the info you need ready to go). Once a site is live, it rarely has any issues, becomes visible on Google fairly quickly, and there are no security worries to deal with as everything is hosted on THEIR servers, not mine. The templates are the best in the business and it's difficult to make a Squarespace site look ugly. Not impossible of course, but tough :) Drag and drop interface is great and integrations abound.

Cons

Squarespace has become increasingly expensive, moving more and more features to higher and higher tiers. Their e-commerce options are great for a simple store with few product options, but you cannot change the image of a product when a customer selects a variation of that product - like a different colour of shift, for example. This was a deal-breaker on a recent project and drove us toward Shopify.

Wix sites used to look terrible. They can now look pretty good (again, mileage may vary with templates and design skills). Bandzoogle has more features for bands at a better price point. Weebly has great design options. All claim easy drag and drop interfaces. All offer cheaper options than Squarespace for a similar feature set.

Squarespace domains are free for the first year only. Then, thye cost more than many other options. I found that one out the hard way.

The argument for Squarespace over Wordpress: for simplicity and beginners

Pros

There are many, many website creation platforms… and making the wrong decision is a disaster no one should have encounter. Because Squarespace and Wordpress are so prominently recognized, this review is intended for those trying to decide between the two. Overall, I would recommend Squarespace for organizations, entrepreneurs, small size businesses, startup company, or anyone who wants to take a more simplistic approach to building their website. Wordpress would be better utilized for websites with a lot of content, images, or heavily customizable needs and/or larger businesses.

Pros
Squarespace website generation platform is a heavily controlled and monitored environment, run only by the company itself. All the testing is done within their own environment to ensure all plugins, tools, etc. are running correctly at all times.

Squarespace is a great fit for beginners who would prefer to have the web creation platform make the decisions for you or those who want something simple and navigationally instinctual. Navigating my way around Squarespace took me a simple day to learn its ins and outs; it took me nearly a year to learn all the unique, in-depth features of Wordpress.

Because Squarespace is not an open source platform, its customer support team is available 24-hours a day, to help resolve issues and provide advice (via live chat). It’s their responsibility to fix any plugins, or issues that arise outside of your control.

In contrast Wordpress is an open source platform, meaning the responsibility for fixing any issues that arise would fall on you; you will most likely need to hire outside help if you are a beginner and/or have little tech/coding experience. Although Wordpress is more customizable (developers/programmers can create their own plugins, themes, and tools and apply it to your site for a specific look) you take the risk of running into potential compatibility issues; open source does not always guarantee 100% reliability.

Cons

Because Squarespace is a more simplistic approach to web creation, you don’t have the option to fully customize the theme or jazz it up the way you may want. If you are really looking to create a website that is fully automated and stands out from the general information website I would suggest WordPress.

I have not found Squarespace’s community help center to be as helpful in providing answers or pointing me in the right direction, however you always have support available to you; Wordpress has a larger collection of help forums on the web that can help you figure out fix issues, compatibility, coding adjustments, etc.

Easily Create an Ever-Beautiful Website

I have been using Squarespace for my e-commerce business for a few years now and love it! Squarespace sites are easy to create and update, while always remaining beautiful. I have used other drag-and-drop website building software in the past and even though the layouts looked right when I was editing, once I viewed them live and on different devices, there were always problems. With Squarespace's platform, my site always looks exactly the way I expect it to. I recently added the e-commerce component to my site and while it doesn't have a ton of features, like other sites, it works perfectly for what I need. Some templates are better suited for e-commerce, so if that's what you're looking for, make sure to look into which ones those are. Squarespace websites are also automatically optimized for search engines! Last year I took an SEO course to improve traffic to my website and a bunch of the suggestions involved manually updating parts of my site every few months so that search engines would continue to find my site. When I inquired with Squarespace about how to go about this, they let me know that their platform already does this for my site automatically--yay! I also discovered a variety of other SEO features that are built into every Squarespace site, so you don't have to worry about updating or even knowing about much of it--it's all done for you! While Squarespace doesn't offer customer service by phone, they are timely with responding to inquiries via email and their robust online knowledge base has answered many of my questions in just a few minutes. They also offer a chat feature Mon-Fri. Finally, one of the reasons I decided to switch to Squarespace was for integrations, like MailChimp--they make it easy to connect with my customers and streamline collecting their information. They also just added an integration with PayPal for checkout, which I can already tell has made purchases easier for my customers. Overall, I am extremely happy with Squarespace and look forward to discovering, even more, features!

Pros

Ease of use
Beautiful designs
Great customer service
Affordable
useful integrations (PayPal, MailChimp, etc)
built-in SEO
constantly updating and adding more features

Cons

e-commerce platform has minimal features
No customer service phone support
Some features are only available on a limited number of templates

An high quality web solution for non-technical people who need create and manage a website

This product helped me launch my web storefront quickly and easily. It was truly a pleasure using this solution for my personal business.

Pros

- Beautiful templates. Initially they offered relatively few templates compared to other website providers, however, all of their templates were very polished. Since their early days, they have plenty of templates to get you go quickly for almost any look you are going for.
- The page editor is very easy to start using and experiment and becoming productive.
- Product management: Product management is great in how you can manage dimensions, price, inventory, etc. When you make sales, it decreases the inventory accordingly (quite a nice little feature). The dimensions you input for your products works hand-in-hand with shipping options you offer with your storefront. HUGE benefit here for making sure the products you offer and are puchased will fit in the right boxes your customers purchased. I cannot emphasize how awesome this is.
-Sales reports and analysis tools: This is so nice to track your monthly/annual sales and correlate them to your promotional and marketing efforts.

Cons

- Pricing: More expensive than competitors, but you are paying for refinement and amenities. For non-technical people, refinement and features may be worth it. For Technical folks who can develop their own website, pricing may deter them from using SquareSpace.
- Template customization confusion: From a non-technical perspective, it may be very confusing why one template reacts differently to similar changes to layout/content creation. This could cause some frustration for those users.

I'm a Squarespace User for Life

Overall my experience with Squarespace has been positive. I can't imagine moving to another service.

Pros

I use Squarespace to create and manage my website. I chose Squarespace because I didn't want to spend a tremendous amount of time managing my website, and Squarespace makes it easy to set up and maintain. Unlike other website creation tools, Squarespace allows me to make my website look just the way I want it. It's fully customizable. I've never had to reach out to an actual person for support or service. However, their help documentation is easy to search through and follow the steps to complete the required tasks. I've implemented the e-commerce solution that works in conjunction with PayPal and Stripe.com. Payments are collected and deposited through the applicable service and into my account within seven days or less. Squarespace makes the process of collecting payments from clients easy and allows me to focus on doing the work that I do, not managing a website.

Cons

There are some features that I feel should be included in the level of service I've subscribed to. For example, I wanted to create a discount code that would automatically be applied once a client purchases a certain dollar amount or quantity. Unfortunately, this feature required me to upgrade to the next tier of service.

Absolutely the best website building platform for small businesses!

Choosing Squarespace to build my website for my business is the reason I'm able to continue growing my small establishment. Since I'm able to use the analytics and connect further with Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools, I'm able to properly target my correct audiences and monitor their traffic accordingly. I'm able to test what works best for my company, and quickly modify anything that isn't working. Squarespace is one of the software's that I accredit my success to.

Pros

For the minimal price that you pay, you get an incredible amount of features. There is practically an infinite amount of uses, especially if you have even the most basic understanding of CSS, which you can apply to every template. You can easily connect all of your social media, upload pictures, easily migrate content to new pages and templates, the list goes on. If you get stuck on something, the company has page after page of help guides, and since Squarespace is so popular and has been around for awhile, there is even more information and troubleshooting from actual users. The built in analytics are so easy to understand, and all of the necessary information is right there. You can easily connect API's, email servers, etc right on your account. Using the page builder is so easy. From rearranging content, to fully customizing the text and format-there really isn't anything you can't do with your website with this software.

Cons

My only complaint is what everyone else complains about: the templates! There's almost 100 templates now, so there's plenty to choose from. The main issue is that the templates tend to not have all of the functions you want, and you have to sacrifice certain functions for another. For example: you may need sidebar navigation, but the templates your client likes don't offer that, and you can't cross templates. I understand why you can't have ALL of the features on one template, but some templates with crossed features would be great.

A little more expensive than some other options, but very much worth the simplicity

I got a beautiful website setup fast. It looks great, operates well, and never requires any updating or maintenance from me.

Pros

The best part of this software is the simplicity of it. I have tried to dabble in WordPress and setting up more revenue driven websites, and it just gets too complicated for me. I don't want to be hosting and updating my own versions of the backend, or worrying how a certain plugin will interface with anything.

Squarespace is fantastic for this because it's just dead simple, and does pretty much anything you want it to. It doesn't have more powerful features than hosting your own site through WordPress, but it will get you 90% of the way there and that's certainly what matters for most people out there.

The support is fantastic as well. Their software is generally very straight forward and can be figured out with a few quick searches, but the few times I didn't know what to do they were there for me and walked me through literally step by step on how to do anything. I consider a good amount of my monthly fee to them to be going towards the piece of mind knowing someone else is out there managing everything about the backend for me, and can give me advice whenever I need it.

Cons

With simplicity comes concessions in the way of customization. For one, you are very limited with what sorts of plugins/add ons you want to put on your site. SEO for example, you basically just work with Squarespace and hope theirs works pretty good.

As a result, you just don't have control over every little piece that you would if you built your own site up. However, I am not super technical. I think an appropriate analogy is cars - If you're a mechanic, you want to be more hands on and customize/maximize everything you can because you enjoy it and know what you're doing. Then there are people who aren't mechanics, but sure enjoy a nice car that works well and looks sexy with the understanding that you take it to a professional when you need help.

I'm the latter and Squarespace is built for people like me.

Excellent design templates

This software is really useful because thanks to the fact that it provides the best tools for the design of sites or pages it is much simpler to do this process without having to do it from scratch, besides the pages designed with it can have a great commercial growth thanks to they can position themselves in a much simpler way, which is why it is the ideal tool to grow and make known any type of business.

Pros

I really like this platform based on the design of pages or websites because it provides templates that adapt automatically to devices, but also offer a very modern and attractive design so designing web pages with them give a unique touch and very visually attractive, it also has an extremely elegant interface that can be navigated to visualize the progress of what has been done without having to do it separately, but by means of a preview which is an excellent advantage, since that in this way you have an idea of ​​how the page will look and if it fits what you are looking for, it also provides very complete tools for design where you can select the logo, edit styles by changing colors to give it a touch more personal to each design and not only you can modify it also the images or add from other platforms, that is why designing with this software is really great because provides everything necessary to build a good page that can represent a business.

Cons

One of the things that I do not like and I think they could improve is that it would be great to choose elements to attach on the page can be done through a bar that is displayed to the side because that way it would be much simpler to work and Do not get disoriented with what you do.

Squarespace review

Squarespace is easy to use and easy to connect DNS settings, It generally takes 24 hours for a site to go live after the DNS settings have been connected. The templates are beautiful, you can choose anyone and upgrade to either personal or business, I suggest business. The trial is 14 days but that is usually enough time to create a site since you are usually just replacing images and text.

Pros

Squarespace is amazing if you are not familiar with code, it has a drop-and-drag function and many visually appealing functions, You can also add additional things like promotional popups (which is your subscriber block that pops up when you open a site), Facebook pixel, google analytics, connect MailChimp to collect a database and ad words.

With Squarespace your images won't be converted to low res, you can also add videos but these videos have to be connected via a third party such as youtube or a video service. The best thing about Squarespace is their customer service, their live chats. These experts help you with your issue and if they can't help you with the solution you were hoping for, they suggest alternative methods.

SEO is amazing.

Cons

The business package is expensive and if you don't have a business package you can't use a mobile info bar, place a Facebook pixel on the backend of your site and you also can't use Mail chimp to collect a database or a subscriber list.

The e-commerce site is not available in rands yet.

You also can't have an except dropdown on a page, this is a problem is you have long text and want a "read more" option. You can use anchor points but only if you are paying for a business plan.

You also can't have a video on a banner if you are viewing in on mobile.