Squarespace is a great all-in-one solution for creating websites and online stores, with unlimited bandwidth and storage. It offers powerful tools for e-commerce, marketing, and analytics. Its editor is quite intuitive, but it keeps you within a predefined framework, allowing you to place site elements only within a predefined grid. Overall, Squarespace is one of the best options for building websites, especially if you plan to have a site with a lot of images.
PROS
- Very easy to use
- Excellent support
- Competitive pricing
CONS
- The editor is somewhat limited.
- Cannot add custom code
Squarespace Video Review
Overview
Squarespace is a website building tool that was first developed in 2004. With an intuitive user interface, like other e-commerce platforms, it makes creating websites easy and fast for those who don’t know how to code.
Squarespace offers a modern and attractive design, unlimited bandwidth and storage space, and excellent marketing tools.
It’s ideal for those looking to create a visually appealing, image-centric website or online store with a clean and intuitive interface. However, its limited plugin collection makes it a poor choice if you need a site with advanced features like a community forum or complex forms.
How Squarespace Works
Creating an online store with Squarespace starts with a short questionnaire that asks you what you plan to do with your site, what types of products and services you sell, and what stage of development your online business is in. Your answers determine the initial features of your site.
All of Squarespace’s features, from page design and e-commerce to marketing and analytics, are accessible from the main menu, but the interface never feels cluttered or complicated. Despite its powerful features, Squarespace is one of the easiest website builders for beginners.
Squarespace Features and Tools
Fluid Engine
Squarespace has a drag-and-drop editor called Fluid Engine. This feature is a revision of the existing drag-and-drop functionality that provides an easy-to-use canvas and toolset for designing online store layouts.
You can take web design to the next level by using intuitive tools to create custom layouts. What’s more, its excellent screen responsiveness makes it easy to edit websites on both mobile and desktop.
Unmetered bandwidth
All Squarespace plans include unlimited data transfer with no usage caps. This is unusual in the market. Squarespace’s competitors typically charge for bandwidth and force users to upgrade to a more expensive plan if they exceed the limit.
Unlimited storage
Again, Squarespace stands out by offering unlimited storage across all of its plans. Most competitors severely cap storage on their most affordable plans and expect customers to buy more storage as their business grows. With Squarespace, you can upload all the images and videos you need without worrying about going over your limit.
SSL security
Squarespace includes an SSL certificate with all of its plans. This means that your website visitors will see that it is secure and have more confidence in it. All data sent to and from your site will be encrypted, ensuring the security of your e-commerce transactions.
Creating a website with Squarespace
After filling out the questionnaire about your website’s focus, you can choose from nearly 120 high-quality designs. From there, edit your pages in the site editor, replacing images and text as needed.
Squarespace uses a drag-and-drop contextual editor, so when you edit a section of your online store or website, unnecessary menus are hidden. This keeps the interface organized and is ideal for beginners, but you may have to search for the feature you need until you get the hang of it.
The editor is also relatively restrictive. For example, you can’t embed a video in the middle of a text field; instead, you have to create a separate video section. This can be frustrating at first, but it helps less experienced designers follow modern web design best practices and ensures that sites are mobile-friendly.
The latest version of Squarespace (7.1) uses a new template system, which means you can change templates whenever you want. Until now, changing templates was possible, but complicated.
If you decide to change providers, you can export your Squarespace site. However, the export options are very limited. For example, you can export text from your blog pages, but exporting images is not as easy.
Adding Multimedia to Your Squarespace Website
You can upload your own images to Squarespace by editing your web pages. You can also choose free images from Unsplash or premium images from Getty Images from the interface.
Videos are also supported, but they must be smaller than 500 MB. Or you can embed videos hosted on YouTube or Vimeo.
Adding images to Squarespace is easy, but adding videos is even easier, which may be a deliberate decision by Squarespace to prevent users from canceling their unlimited storage plan.
Marketing Functionality with Squarespace Websites
Squarespace offers email marketing as a paid add-on, with prices ranging from $5 to $48 per month. This allows you to create personalized email newsletters and includes various features to automatically send emails based on user behavior.
Squarespace has excellent blogging features. It also integrates seamlessly with Instagram and Facebook, allowing you to automatically direct users to your Squarespace store pages from these social networks.
SEO Functionality and Add-Ons with Squarespace Websites
Squarespace offers very good search engine optimization (SEO) features for building websites. Sitemaps and markup are automatic, and all pages are automatically optimized for mobile devices. All URLs are static, making them easier for search engines to crawl. There’s an SEO dashboard where you can edit all the important SEO features of your site, such as how it appears in search results.
Squarespace plugins are limited. There are less than 30 extensions, and almost all of them include adding new products to your site for dropshipping. If Squarespace doesn’t offer the functionality you need, you’re unlikely to find it in the list of add-ons.
Ecommerce
Squarespace Commerce is a comprehensive platform that allows you to easily create an online store. Thanks to its intuitive interface, even those with no experience in web design or e-commerce management can set up an online store.
Payment Processing
Squarespace Commerce offers flexible payment options and canceled payment recovery, helping to ensure that your customers complete their purchases. You can connect PayPal, Stripe, or Apple Pay to your Squarespace Commerce site and process their payments. Squarespace Commerce’s mobile-optimized checkout process offers a seamless experience designed to increase conversions. The platform also provides SSL security to protect your customers’ sensitive information.
Scalability
Whether your business is small or large, Squarespace Commerce offers a range of features that you can scale to meet your needs. The platform provides users with the tools and resources they need to scale their online store as their business grows.
With advanced inventory management features like real-time tracking and low-stock alerts, businesses can effectively manage their inventory. Commerce also offers a variety of analytics and reporting tools to help users monitor their store’s performance and make data-driven decisions to optimize their business.
On the other hand, many of the most important e-commerce features are reserved for the more expensive Advanced plan. This includes abandoned cart recovery, which its competitor Wix includes in all of its e-commerce plans.
Squarespace Customer Support
Squarespace offers 24/7 email and live chat support during business hours, Monday through Friday. They don’t offer phone support. During our testing, email responses took 6-7 hours, while live chat was fast.
Squarespace’s user guides, FAQs, webinars, and videos are good. They also have a very active community forum. Overall, Squarespace offers good support, but we would have liked to see extended live chat hours and more phone support.
Squarespace Pricing
Pricing & Special Offers
Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial, but you can’t activate your site until you sign up for a plan. All four plans can be paid for monthly or annually, with a 25-30% discount for annual payments.
Squarespace vs. Wix
Wix is probably easier for beginners to use and offers more templates, but Squarespace’s templates are of higher quality. Wix has a much more extensive plugin list than Squarespace, but it doesn’t create responsive websites like Squarespace.
Squarespace vs. GoDaddy
GoDaddy has a particularly simple interface, making it a better option than Squarespace for WordPress beginners. It’s also significantly cheaper. However, this simplicity comes at a price: theme selection and design customization are limited.
Squarespace vs. WordPress.com
Squarespace is easier to use than WordPress.com, but WordPress.com surpasses it in power and flexibility. For developers building larger sites, WordPress.com offers a huge list of plugins and templates that can transform a site. If you want to learn the ins and outs of WordPress and even dig into the code from time to time, WordPress.com is worth checking out.
Bottom Line
Squarespace is one of the best online store builders we’ve tested. While its minimalist interface takes about an hour to learn, once you get the hang of it, you can create great responsive websites in no time.
Squarespace’s high price is the main reason to consider other options. However, since all plans include unlimited bandwidth and storage, the playing field is level, especially if you plan on uploading a lot of multimedia content to your site. Plus, with Squarespace’s attractive templates, you’re practically guaranteed a modern and sleek website that will wow your visitors.
