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 also lets you know, allowing you to place website elements only within the defined grid format. Overall, Squarespace is one of the best options for building websites, especially if you plan on having a website with a lot of images.
PROS
- Very easy to use
- Excellent technical 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 a website easy and fast for those who don’t know how to code.
Squarespace offers a modern and attractive design, unlimited bandwidth and storage, and excellent marketing tools.
It’s ideal for those looking to create a website or online store with an attractive, image-centric design and a clean, 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 what you plan to do with your site, what types of products and services you sell, and where you are in the development stage of your online business. Your answers will determine what features your site will start with.
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 Squarespace’s powerful features, it’s one of the easiest website builders for new users to use.
Squarespace Features and Tools
Fluid Engine
Squarespace offers a drag-and-drop editing tool called Fluid Engine. This feature is a revamp 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 designs. Additionally, its excellent responsiveness makes it easy to edit both mobile and desktop websites.
Unmetered bandwidth
All Squarespace plans include unlimited data transfer with no usage limits. This is relatively unusual in the market. Squarespace’s competitors typically charge for bandwidth and force you to upgrade to a more expensive plan if you exceed the set limit.
Unlimited storage
Again, Squarespace impresses by offering unlimited storage on all plans. Most competitors have strict storage limits on their most affordable plans and expect customers to upgrade to more storage as their business grows. With [Plan Name], you can upload as many images and videos as you need without worrying about going over your limit.
SSL security
Squarespace includes an SSL certificate with all plans. This means your website visitors will see that it’s secure and will be more likely to trust 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 a questionnaire outlining your site’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 you see fit.
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 clean and is perfect for beginners, but you can often find yourself searching for a feature you’re interested in until you get the hang of it.
The editor is also relatively restrictive. For example, you can’t just insert a video into an existing text field. instead, you need to create a separate video section to host it. This can be frustrating at first, but it can help inexperienced designers follow modern web design best practices and create responsive websites.
The latest version of Squarespace (7.1) uses a new template system, which basically means you can change templates at will. Until now, replacing templates was possible, but difficult.
If you decide to switch 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 straightforward.
Adding Multimedia to Your Squarespace Website
You can upload your own images to Squarespace while editing your web pages. You can also choose from free images from Unsplash or premium images from Getty Images from the interface.
Videos are also supported, but they must be less than 500 MB. Alternatively, you can embed videos hosted on YouTube or Vimeo.
Adding images to Squarespace is easy, but adding videos is not as easy, which may be a deliberate decision by Squarespace to prevent users from using the service’s unlimited storage.
Marketing Functionality with Squarespace Websites
Squarespace offers email marketing as a paid add-on, which costs between $5 and $48 per month. This allows you to send personalized email newsletters, but there are also several options for automatically sending emails based on user behavior.
Squarespace has excellent blogging capabilities. It also integrates well 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 has excellent 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 find. There’s an SEO dashboard where you can edit all the important SEO features of your website, such as how it appears in search results.
Squarespace’s add-ons are limited. There are less than 30 extensions, and almost all of them allow you to add new products to your website for selling via dropshipping. If Squarespace doesn’t offer the functionality you need, you’re unlikely to find it in the add-ons list.
Ecommerce
Squarespace Commerce is an all-in-one platform that makes it easy to set up an online store. Thanks to Squarespace’s intuitive interface, even those with no prior experience in web design or managing an e-commerce site can set up an online store.
Payment Processing
Squarespace Commerce offers flexible payment options and chargeback recovery to help ensure your customers complete their purchases. You can integrate PayPal, Stripe, or Apple Pay with your Squarespace Commerce site and pay their processing fees. Squarespace Commerce’s mobile-optimized checkout process offers a seamless checkout experience designed to increase conversion rates. The platform also provides SSL security to protect sensitive customer information.
Scalability
Whether your business is small or large, Squarespace Commerce offers a range of features that 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 track their store’s performance and make data-driven decisions to optimize their business.
On the surface, many of the essential e-commerce features are reserved for the pricier Advanced e-commerce plan. This includes abandoned cart recovery, which rival 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. There’s no phone support. In our testing, email responses took 6-7 hours, while live chat was fast.
Squarespace’s user guides, FAQs, webinars, and videos are good. There’s also a very active community forum. Overall, Squarespace does a good job in terms of support, but we’d like to see live chat hours and phone support options expanded.
Squarespace Pricing
Pricing & Special Offers
Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial, but you can’t activate your site until you pay 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 arguably easier to use for beginners and offers more templates than [insert username], but Squarespace’s templates are of higher quality. Wix has a much broader list of plugins than Squarespace, but it doesn’t build responsive websites like Squarespace.
Squarespace vs. GoDaddy
GoDaddy has a particularly simple interface, which makes it a better option than Squarespace for beginners. It’s also significantly cheaper. However, this simplicity comes at the cost of theme selection and design customization.
Squarespace vs. WordPress.com
Squarespace is easier to use than WordPress.com, but WordPress.com beats it in terms of its greater power and flexibility. For developers building larger sites, WordPress.com offers a huge list of plugins and themes that can transform a site, and if you want to learn all the ins and outs of WordPress and even delve into the code from time to time, WordPress.com is definitely 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 very quickly.
Squarespace’s high price is the main reason to consider other options. However, since all plans include unlimited bandwidth and storage, the terms are more fair, especially if you plan to upload a lot of media files to your site. And with Squarespace’s attractive themes, you’re practically guaranteed a modern and elegant website that will wow your visitors.
