Why Squarespace (Probably) Isn’t the Right Choice for Your Business Site
You’ve seen the ads. The influencer marketing. Squarespace is the best, most user-friendly all-in-one website builder for anyone who needs to get a simple site up + running fast. Emphasis on simple.
Squarespace is a decent option for small businesses just starting out with founders who are doing it all on their own. The drag-and-drop editing style + pre-built templates make it easy to build a site with zero coding experience. Plus, it has e-commerce + blogging capabilities built in, so there’s no need to worry about complex plug-ins.
If you’re doing it all by yourself, Squarespace is probably a pretty desirable platform. With that said, if you’re *not* doing it on your own, there are certainly better options out there.
Typically we try to steer our clients away from using Squarespace, considering WordPress or Shopify, if you’re a retail business, to be much better options. When businesses come to us looking for web design + development, we like to make fully custom sites that we design + then build from scratch based on the design. When they want a Squarespace site, we’re much more limited in what we can do in terms of customization.
The same easy-to-use drag-and-drop templates Squarespace uses are the same reasons why so many Squarespace sites look so similar. They very much want you to stay within their little pre-built squares. We don’t really like staying in the lines.
With WordPress, if you can dream it, you can build it. With Squarespace, if it fits in a box, then you can make it. If it doesn’t fit perfectly, no can do. It makes it a lot more difficult to create something unique + special (+ unique + special sites are our favorite kind).
We would always prefer to build sites in WordPress, but we understand that some clients only need a very basic site + value the ability to update elements themselves over time. As long as clients understand that the ease of use for them does have a trade off.
The lack of plug-ins makes things simpler + easier to maintain, but also restricts what you can do in terms of optimizing for search engines with tracking + on-page tools. Without the ability to code everything in the backend of your website, you’re stuck with the more basic systems they have built-in. The templates are often bloated with unnecessary background code leading to longer load times that can’t be fixed.
You can’t edit or add your own optimized meta titles or descriptions to certain pages + sections making it harder to rank for keywords related to your business. With other platforms, you can optimize to your heart’s content, customizing the meta titles + descriptions of every single page on your site, if you so choose.
Squarespace automatically generates a (visually appalling) sitemap for your website, but you can’t make changes to it to clean them up or get rid of system urls which can make it more difficult for engines to crawl your site efficiently. If your business is relying on organic web traffic to keep the doors open + the lights on, WordPress is the way to go.
Basically, if you’re working with a web design + development company (like us) + you won’t be needing to make extremely regular changes + updates to your site content yourself, *do not* go with Squarespace. There’s no reason. It’s just worse. With WordPress, we can create a fully custom site for you that helps you stand out + feels uniquely you with better options for searchability + less lag.
If you’re concerned about maintaining your WordPress site yourself, we can help with that too. We’ll take care of all the routine plug-in + version updates to keep your site secure + user-friendly. Interested in building (or upgrading) your site with us? Get in touch to learn more about how we can help out.
