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 locked into a predefined grid format, allowing you to place site elements only within it. Overall, Squarespace is one of the best options for building websites, especially if you plan on having a site with a lot of images.
PROS
Very easy to use
Excellent support
Competitive pricing
CONS
The editor is somewhat limited.
Doesn’t allow you to add custom code
Squarespace Video Review
Overview
Squarespace is a website building tool that was originally developed in 2004. With intuitive user interfaces, like other e-commerce platforms, it makes website creation 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 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 what stage you’re at in your online business. 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 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 a step further by using intuitive tools to create custom designs. Moreover, the excellent screen responsiveness makes it easy to edit websites on both mobile devices and computers.
Unmetered bandwidth
All Squarespace plans include unlimited data transfer with no usage limits. This is relatively unusual in the market. Squarespace’s competitors usually charge for bandwidth and force users to upgrade to a more expensive plan if they exceed the set limit.
Unlimited storage
Squarespace surprises again by offering unlimited storage on all of its plans. Most competitors have strict storage limits on their most affordable plans and expect customers to upgrade to a plan with more storage space as their business grows. With Squarespace, 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 your site is secure and will trust it more. All data sent to and from your site will be encrypted, ensuring the security of e-commerce transactions.
Creating a website with Squarespace
After filling out a questionnaire describing the purpose of your website, you can choose from nearly 120 high-quality designs. From there, edit your pages in the website editor, replacing images and text as needed.
Squarespace uses a contextual drag-and-drop editor, so when you edit a section of your online store or website, unnecessary menus are hidden. This makes it easy to create a clean interface that’s ideal for beginners, although you may have to search for the desired feature until you get the hang of it.
The editor is also somewhat restrictive. For example, you can’t just insert a video into the middle of an existing text field; instead, you have to create a separate video section to insert the video. This can be frustrating at first, but it helps inexperienced designers follow modern web design best practices and ensures that sites are responsive.
The latest version of Squarespace (7.1) uses a new template system, which means you can switch between templates whenever you want. Previously, changing templates was possible, but complicated.
If you decide to switch to a different provider, 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, 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, with prices ranging from $5 to $48 per month. This allows you to create personalized newsletters and includes several features for automatically sending emails based on user behavior.
Squarespace offers excellent blogging features. It also integrates seamlessly with Instagram and Facebook, allowing you to automatically redirect users to your Squarespace store pages from these social networks.
SEO Functionality and Add-Ons with Squarespace Websites
Squarespace has 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 plugin list.
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 prior experience in web design or e-commerce management can set up an online store.
Payment Processing
Squarespace Commerce offers flexible payment options and the ability to recover canceled payments, ensuring that your customers make their purchases. You can integrate PayPal, Stripe, or Apple Pay with your Squarespace Commerce website and accept payments from them. Squarespace Commerce’s mobile-optimized checkout process provides a seamless experience designed to increase conversion rates. The platform also provides SSL security to protect your customers’ sensitive information.
Scalability
Whether your business is small or large, Squarespace Commerce offers a feature set 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 monitor their store’s performance and make data-driven decisions to optimize their business.
On the downside, many of the essential e-commerce features are reserved for the more expensive Advanced 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 is 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 is also 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 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 Squarespace, but Squarespace’s templates are of higher quality. Wix has a much wider selection of plugins than Squarespace, but it doesn’t create responsive websites like Wix.
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 with the cost of choosing a theme and customizing the design.
Squarespace vs. WordPress.com
Squarespace is easier to use than WordPress.com, but WordPress.com beats it with its greater power and flexibility. For developers building large websites, WordPress.com offers a huge list of plugins and themes that can transform a site. If you’re willing to learn WordPress inside out and even dig into the code from time to time, WordPress.com is worth your time.
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 quickly create great, responsive websites.
Squarespace’s high price is the main reason to consider other options. However, since all plans include unlimited bandwidth and storage, the situation is more fair, especially if you plan to upload a lot of media to your site. And with Squarespace’s attractive themes, you’re practically guaranteed a modern and elegant website that will wow your visitors.
