Squarespace Software

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Out of all the website hosts I have found Squarespace to have the best templates and interface.

A clean professional looking website with easy to modify templates. I've also never had my site go offline or become 'slow-loading' when trying to view. Server issues are virtually non-existent and that's important with a business website.

Pros

The templates are number 1 for what I like most about Squarespace. They are professionally designed in a way that is highly customizable and very clean looking. You can have a great looking website quickly and with customization you can make it look original.

I started using Squarespace over 4 years ago and still haven't come across a better website builder and host. The interface for adding content is a more accurate WYSIWYG(what you see if what you get) management system. Anybody can signup with Squarespace and adjust a template of their choice quickly and aesthetically with the admin interface. There is also advanced options for adding in your own code when needed. I've tried many hosts in the pasts and usually website builders are riddled with issues in spacing, formatting and errors - squarespace just doesn't have this...and for that reason it's a pleasure to use.

Cons

Price. Unfortunately Squarespace has gone up in price over the years for monthly and annual plans. If the cost is within your budget then it's highly recommended.

Still Prefer SquareSpace over WordPress

They are my go-to builder for new clients that want the ability to make edits and changes on their own in the future without causing confusion. Less headache than WP and WIX which are other builders I am familiar with.

Pros

Updates on it's own, unlike WordPress which updates could break 3rd party applications or templates, and happens all the time.

Great for first time users to figure out what they are doing fairly simply. Has great tutorials, help, chat, twitter support, and customer service is much better than WordPress' non existent support.

Cons

They change their pricing constantly without any advanced notice ever. In the past 6 years I've built client sites on this platform, they just keep upping the price for everyone.

They offer ZERO affiliate solutions, just a discounted first year off for multiple builds and circle members.

They have a JavaScript rendering that makes all sites slower than they should be and have not addressed this not playing to well with Page Load Speed or Google Analytics. They don't particularily care either.

Their customer support can get behind quite often, resulting in a solution that comes long after you needed it.

DIY Website Tool is a Good Option for Most Web Design Needs

Pros

While there may be some free options out there that boast the same feature and options in website building as Squarespace, they simply don't measure up. This is a great option for an individual building out their own brand, or a small business entering a new industry, and trying to carve out their niche. The pricing options certainly aren't cheap, but manageable for a variety of budgets. As with most website building options, the larger the site you're looking to build, the more you're going to spend. The ease of use is really what sets Squarespace apart from most other solutions. You can feel comfortable recommending this software to a wide range of skill and experience levels.

Cons

While the ease of use and feature set are certainly a bonus, one of the main things I see as an obstruction is the slow load times. Having a bit of background in SEO, I realize that this is a major factor in how Google views the quality of websites, and unless Squarespace is able to improve their site speeds, they are going to see the SEO of their individual sites drop. For the casual individual webpage or small business owner, this may not be a problem, but it becomes a concern when you're looking at the software for more of an enterprise-level project.

Favorite turn-key web platform I've ever used.

I recommend this product all the time to other small nonprofits and anyone trying to launch a creative idea because of it's immediacy, ease of use, professional abilities, and cost. So many features packed into an affordable website solution pack.

Pros

This is such a powerful website creation platform that anyone can use, regardless of your industry or business size. Plus, it's beautiful, easy to navigate, packed with all the right features you need (page navigation, embedded features, analytics, e-commerce, etc..). Plus, it's extremely cheap given the alternative of custom building a website, hiring a graphic designer, and then waiting for all that to be done. Can't say enough about how impressed I am with this platform.

Cons

At times, you're limited by our own creativity or experiences when trying to setup your website on your own. There is a learning curve to figuring out how to make the site do what you want it to do based on your creative abilities or how the drag and drop features work. This is also a benefit, but takes a bit to learn how to get things to turn out how you have them in your mind.

Wonderful Tool & Easy especially for beginners!

Pros

Squarespace is a really great product because it allows you to build on top of beautiful, professional designs, but you can also tweak it enough if you have the skills, to be completely unique without doing a lot of extra back-end work. If you don't know how to code but you want to have a lot of control over the way your site works and looks, it is absolutely perfect. I love Squarespace because of the very clean and simple layouts you can use, the ease with which you can edit and also the customer service is quote good. Any time I have had a problem, the customer service has been 9/10 helpful and when it wasn't, I ended up being able to solve my own problems after a bit of poking around.

Cons

What I would like to see improved is the organization for bigger sites. I manage several websites, and one of my bigger clients has quite a lot of information and pages required, even after slimming content down to a bare minimum. It is sometimes quite confusing when going through larger website trying to find certain pages, content, or being able to edit that content. It can sometimes be quite frustrating and on those occasions, customer service obviously can't help. I know there must be a better way! Over all the organization is perfectly fine for smaller sites, but when its a service being paid for, I'd love to have something less "cookie-cutter" for other types of clients.

Squarespace to Get a Website Up and Running Quickly On Your Own

While Squarespace is very easy to setup and build content into, you'll want to put time into practicing the How To. Everything is drag and drop, so you add blocks (text and images) to the pages you build. The only thing I've found annoying is the spacing when you drag around these blocks, and trying to remove excess space in a layout. But this is something you'll run into with other site builders. I enjoy using it and it does offer a very user friendly experience.

Pros

Squarespace really helps you create beautiful websites. They have a range of templates that you can scroll through and decide which will suit your business. You have to be somewhat comfortable with technology to get yourself up and running, at minimum to sign up, transfer your domain name if you already have one.

The best part about Squarespace is that it does all the hosting and backups for you. This is a big deal for business owners who just don't have the capacity and knowledge to do this.

Cons

It's a little trickier to customize. I'm a WordPress person and work with clients that use Squarespace. I also find Squarespace a bit more difficult when it comes to SEO. I'm used to having more control over what I set as keywords and structure vs what I can do in Squarespace. That's also because I use WordPress with Yoast.

That said, I've researched Squarespace and they do seem to do some decent ranking with their SEO tools. I am not an SEO expert so if that's a thing you want to learn more of, def dig in a little more.

A challenge I found was with the Comments field. Have a look at how they work when you do a test run. If you have a client that's not comfortable with the admin side of Squarespace then pre-empt that with a walk through, and if you're administering the site you'll want to coordinate and handle the actual comment updates on their behalf.

The best all-inclusive website designer

Pros

As a wedding photographer, my website is many times the first point of access for potential clients. Squarespace has helped me, extremely easily, build a fully-customisable site to showcase my work, keeping my photography front and centre. There are dozens of templates to choose from, and the page builder is made in a way that even someone that isn't too tech savvy would be able to make their website from scratch. Their customer support team replies to queries within a few hours, and their pricing is very reasonable.

Cons

My only downside with Squarespace is that some very basic design functions, such as font sizes, vary so greatly between certain templates. For instance, the template I currently use doesn't give me the option to change the size of the normal text font, but only lets me change the size of the body text as a whole, altering headings in the process. This is a minuscule problem, and I easily found a way around it.

A very capable site builder

Pros

Squarespace makes it easy for just about anyone to make a functional, aesthetically pleasing website. They offer a good variety of competent templates to choose from, spanning everything from online stores to photography portfolios.

The editor is easy to use, and well laid out, making it a breeze to add and edit site elements, as well as site-wide design pieces. I've used Squarespace to create a number of sites over the years, and the quality to time invested ratio is always astounding - its easy to create something great.

Cons

Where Squarespace is so easy to use, it does come with drawbacks. Unless you know custom coding, you'll likely find yourself and your ideas somewhat limited by what you're actually able to do in any given template. This is the trade off you accept with Squarespace - greater ease of use for less customization. Other editors, such as Wix, offer a bit more freedom (but with that, they require a great technical skill to manipulate). But, if you're happy with somewhat standard features, there is a lot to love about Squarespace.

One other thing is that even though there are a number of templates, Squarespace templates (and many pre-fab site builders these days) have a "look." So don't go in expecting to completely break the mold

Be there or be square (JK)

Amazing. Really. I've made countless sites and was always super happy with the result and customer support along the way. The only platform I created that I wasn't entirely happy with was an e-com site, not only does it cost 3x but it doesn't offer a-lot of the robust options that site like Shopify and Magento do. Granted it's cheaper, but I can't see a serious e-comm store using the platform in it's current state. Overall if you're building a portfolio site, or a site for your restaurant, SS is better then WIX and any other web builder I used. But if you're looking to build something more complicated I would look elsewhere.

Pros

How flexible the templates are, once you figure out how to use spacers, blocks and all the good stuff you can really customize the templates to pretty much look like anything, and if you HTML savvy, well the then, the world is your oyster.

Cons

SquareSpace recently updated their terms so that HTML code injection are only available for business users, which doesn't make much sense to me since the people who tend to use square space the most are designers, photographers, etc. for their portfolios. I can understand why an e-commerce plan would cost more, after all you're using their platform to generate income, but why would a young designer that's just trying to get hired by showcasing his portfolio and skills should be charged more for using code is beyond me.

We migrated to Squarespace for our web host almost a year ago and could not be happier!

Pros

Our business is centered around getting people outside, enjoying their time on the water and hopefully helping them to learn some interesting stuff along the way. We pride ourselves in going above and beyond for our customers and anticipating what they'll need or ask for while onboard. So when we were shopping around for a new web host, it was actually fun to find out that Squarespace takes the same approach. Even better was discovering how easy Squarespace is to use. Look, we're outdoorsy boat and water and nature and wildlife people, not coders. Squarespace makes it easy for us to tell customers our story. Super easy to include photos, video clips and imagery. Quick and reliable integrations with online booking, payment systems and social media. Could not be happier!

Cons

There are a couple quirks involving text formatting for drop down boxes that can expand and collapse (like are often seen on FAQ pages). Overall though, this is such a minor issue for us it's hardly worth mentioning. Plus, I've heard Squarespace is aware of it and is working on a solution. One of the great things about Squarespace is that they not only seek feedback from customers, they actually listen and respond!

The Website Platform That Lives Up to the Hype

Squarespace is the perfect solution for a small business owner, entrepreneur, creative, or even a casual user who just wants their own beautiful website. While a Squarespace user will encounter the limitations that come with being such a user-friendly platform, it's almost always worth it to build through Squarespace.

Pros

I've made or contributed to at least a dozen sites through Squarespace & I can confidently recommend it to anyone. The ease of use is really incredible, and it's so easy as a designer (mainly graphic design, not much coding experience) to create a beautiful website and then hand it off to my client to maintain.

Cons

While Squarespace is ALWAYS improving their software, I have had to deal with some extreme glitches on their end. There have been instances where hundreds of Squarespace-built sites will not function properly. They generally remedy this within an hour, and it's only happened sporadically once every 1 or 2 years.

Point and Click Web Design

Pros

My grandma could build a webpage with Squarespace. Her grandma could have done it too. It is really that easy to make an honest to goodness professional website.

In my small office, we have given editing access to several members of our staff, and allow them to update and improve the website at will. With the edit permission settings on Squarespace, they just can't mess things up. And if they do manage to destroy things, somehow, I know we can reconstruct the whole thing from scratch in an afternoon. The templates are that straightforward. We no longer need to pay a web designer to make changes and do upkeep for us.

Cons

The built in payment system is mandatory. For some businesses, like mine, we are mandated to use specific vendors for credit card processing and just can't go with the provided vendor. That is frustrating.