Established in 2003 by Anthony Casalena, Squarespace has become a popular choice for creating visually stunning websites without any coding experience. Squarespace is an all-in-one solution for hosting and building websites with pre-built templates and a drag and drop editor. Users can create everything from a blog to a simple online shop. While this digital platform is user-friendly and minimalistic, its lack of effective content management, plugins, site customization, SEO functionality, and content control options does not make it a scalable option for growing businesses. Indeed, I will discuss these primary factors that prevent Squarespace from being a sustainable, scalable choice, and alternatives to consider.
Content Management
To reduce site hosting costs and resources, Squarespace users cannot store all of their site’s content on the Squarespace system and access that content at any time. For a business, this could be a major issue if their content is necessary for accessing past records, products or services, and sensitive information. However, a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress.org allows users to store every version of their site’s content from pages to posts on their system and access it later on. Additionally, Squarespace doesn’t have a central location for storing various types of media needed for building, editing, and maintaining a website. Compare this to WordPress, which includes a media library on every site admin dashboard, allowing users to quickly access and re-use content, such as images, videos, and documents.
Aside from content storage, Squarespace offers a limited approach for using categories and tags, which organize your site’s content in a relevant way for visitors. Indeed, WordPress.org allows users to not only use as many categories and tags as they want but also create custom content types. This customization makes it easier to categorize content, so site visitors can easily and quickly filter content to find what they are looking for.
Plugins
Currently, Squarespace offers a limited number of ‘extensions,’ which are similar to WordPress plugins that add features to enhance a site. Squarespace offers built-in integrations available to all plans, except for the personal plan. If you have a growing business that needs to fully customize a website with various features, a better option would be WordPress. This open-source CMS boasts nearly 57,000 plugins (paid and free) to fully build and customize a site to meet every type of need. WordPress users also can upload third-party plugins to their site or hire a developer to build a custom plugin or template to meet their specific needs.
Site Customization
Like physical stores, online business sites have unique needs and storage requirements to ensure they continue to grow. For large businesses with complex content, Squarespace is not an ideal option for handling complex site hierarchies. For example, this platform only allows users to have two basic levels of site navigation, the main level, and one sublevel or drop-down menu. This results in a flat website, which is better suited for simple websites. Business sites that need a scalable option should consider WordPress, which allows users to create as many layers of site navigation as needed. It is recommended that you research a template that allows for complex site navigation or hire a WordPress expert.
For e-commerce sites, Squarespace has a straightforward, simple system that is available on one of their commerce plans. Of course, this platform has some limitations, such as not offering multi-currency payments, only being able to use Stripe and PayPal as payment gateways, and not being able to set up automations for setting tax rates. If you have an e-commerce site with an extensive inventory, Squarespace may not be ideal because it doesn’t allow you to export digital products and sets limits on how many products can be exported. However, WordPress offers several e-commerce popular choices, such as Woocommerce that allow users to fully customize the functionality of their sites.
SEO Functionality
Aside from building a user-friendly, responsive website, it is imperative to optimize your site with SEO. Search engine optimization is the process of improving your site, which helps it rank higher for relevant searches and offers useful, accessible content for your users. Despite the importance of this optimization, Squarespace does not offer effective solutions for improving a site’s long-term SEO. For example, Squarespace uses uncommon terms to describe SEO techniques, such as ‘captions’, ‘descriptions’, and ‘extracts’, compared to alt tags and metadata used by most site platforms such as WordPress and Wix.com. Aside from the different naming conventions, these Squarespace terms may be shown on the live site, depending on which template is used. Also, Squarespace lacks the variety of SEO plugins available to WordPress users, which not only assist with optimizing your site but also analyze the quality of your site’s SEO approach and provide helpful recommendations for improvement.
WordPress also allows users to easily add rich snippets to their site, which are bits of data that improve their search results by providing contextual information for users, such as ratings or reviews, and allowing search engines to gain a more detailed picture of what their pages or posts are about. Numerous plugins make this an easy task for WordPress users, which is not possible for Squarespace users.
Content Control
On Squarespace, users must be aware of this platform’s acceptable use policies. If you post content that violates their policies, Squarespace can remove the site. To prevent your site’s content from being removed, consider using WordPress, which offers its users much more freedom about what content to publish on their sites. In a situation where site content must be removed or crashes, WordPress has plugins to easily export and back up content. This gives users peace of mind that they have control over their content and have options for safekeeping that content.
A Better Option
While Squarespace is a good choice if you need to build a simple site quickly, it is not ideal for growing a business site. Squarespace may be appealing because it is easier to learn and has less site flexibility, but this can quickly become frustrating when you need a unique site to stay competitive in the digital marketplace. If you are looking for complete flexibility and customization with your site, a top CMS such as WordPress.org is a great option. 445 million site owners powered by WordPress agree too. You can choose which hosting provider you want, how your site looks and feels (choose a theme or hire WordPress experts), how your content is managed, and have access to a huge resource for optimizing your site with plugins, widgets, and applications.
