Squarespace is a great all-in-one solution for creating websites and online stores, with unlimited bandwidth and storage. It has capable tools for e-commerce, marketing, and analytics. Its editor is reasonably intuitive to use but keeps you “on rails”, allowing you to place web page elements only within a set grid pattern. Overall, Squarespace is one of the best website building options, especially if you plan to have a website with a lot of images.
PROS
- Very easy to use
- Excellent support
- Competitive price:
CONS
- The editor is a bit limited.
- Can't add custom code
Squarespace Video Review
Overview
Squarespace is a website builder that was first developed in 2004. With intuitive user interfaces, it, like other e-commerce platforms, makes it easy and fast to set up a website for those who don't know how to code.
Squarespace offers a modern, aesthetically pleasing design, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, and great marketing tools.
It's best for those who want to create a great-looking, image-focused website or online store using a clutter-free, intuitive interface. However, its limited set of plugins means it's a poor choice if you need a site with advanced features like a community forum or complex forms.
How Squarespace Works
Building an online store with Squarespace starts with a short questionnaire that asks what you plan to do with your website, the types of products and services you sell, and how far along you are in building your online business. Your answers dictate the features your site starts with.
All of Squarespace's features, from page design and e-commerce to marketing and analytics, are accessible from one main menu, but the interface never feels crowded or complicated. Despite Squarespace's powerful features, it's one of the easiest web builders for new users.
Squarespace Features and Tools
Fluid Engine
Squarespace has a drag and drop editor tool called Fluid Engine. This feature is a revision of the existing drag-and-drop functionality that provides an easy-to-use canvas and toolkit for designing online store layouts.
You can take website design a step further by using intuitive tools to create custom layouts. And excellent screen responsiveness makes it easy to edit both mobile and desktop sites.
Unmetered bandwidth
All Squarespace plans include unmetered data transfer with no usage caps. 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 a set limit.
Unlimited storage
Again, Squarespace impresses by offering unlimited storage on all plans. Most competitors have a hard storage limit on their cheapest plans and expect customers to upgrade to more storage as their business grows. With , you can upload as many images and videos as you need without worrying about going over the limit.
SSL security
Squarespace includes an SSL certificate with all plans. This means that your website visitors will see that your website is secure and will be more inclined to trust your website. All data sent to and from your website will be encrypted, ensuring e-commerce transactions are safe and secure.
Creating a website with Squarespace
After filling out a questionnaire that outlines your site's focus, you're free to 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 contextual drag-and-drop editor, so when you're editing a section of your online store or website, irrelevant menus are hidden. This does a great job of keeping the interface uncluttered and perfect for beginners, but you may often find yourself searching for a feature you want until you get the hang of it.
The editor is also relatively restrictive. For example, you can't just insert a video into the middle of an existing text box; instead you need to create a separate video section to place the video inside. This can be frustrating at first, but can help inexperienced designers stick to modern web design best practices and means sites are responsive.
The latest version of Squarespace (7.1) uses a new template system, which essentially means you can switch between templates at will. Until now, exchanging templates was possible, but difficult.
If you decide to switch to another provider, it's possible to export your Squarespace site. However, the export potential is very limited. For example, you can export text from your blog pages, but exporting images isn't nearly as easy.
Adding Multimedia to Your Squarespace Website
You can upload your own images to Squarespace while you edit your web pages. You can also choose free images from Unsplash or premium images from Getty from the interface.
Videos are also supported, but must be less than 500MB in size. Alternatively, you can embed videos hosted on YouTube or Vimeo.
Adding images to Squarespace is easy, but adding videos is less so, which may be a conscious decision by Squarespace to prevent people from getting rid of the service's unlimited storage.
Marketing Functionality with Squarespace Websites
Squarespace offers email marketing as an additional paid feature, ranging from $5 to $48 per month. This allows for personalized email newsletters, but there are several features to automatically send emails based on user behavior.
Squarespace has great blogging features. It also works well at integrating with Instagram and Facebook, so you can automatically direct people to your Squarespace store pages from these social media sites.
SEO Functionality and Add-Ons with Squarespace Websites
Squarespace has pretty good search engine optimization features for a website builder. Sitemaps and markup are automatic and all pages are automatically optimized for mobile devices. All URLs are static, making them easily readable by search engines. There is an SEO panel where you can edit all the important SEO features of your website, such as how it will appear in search results.
Squarespace plugins are limited. There are fewer than 30 extensions and almost all of them involve adding new products to your site to sell via dropshipping. If Squarespace doesn't already offer a feature you need, it's unlikely you'll find it in the list of add-ons.
Ecommerce
Squarespace Commerce is an all-in-one platform that allows you to create an online store with ease. With Squarespace's intuitive interface, even those with no prior experience in web design or managing an eCommerce site can set up an online store.
Payment Processing
Squarespace Commerce offers flexible payment options and abandoned payment recovery, helping ensure your customers complete their purchases. You can connect PayPal, Stripe, or Apple Pay to your Squarespace Commerce site and pay their processing fees. Squarespace Commerce's mobile-optimized checkout provides a seamless checkout process designed to increase conversion rates. The platform also provides SSL security to protect sensitive customer information.
Scalability
Whether you're a small or large business, Squarespace Commerce offers a set of features that can meet your needs. The platform provides users with the tools and resources necessary to scale their online store as their business grows.
With advanced inventory management features, including real-time tracking and low stock alerts, businesses can manage their inventory effectively. Commerce also offers a variety of analytics and reporting tools to help users track their store performance and make data-driven decisions to optimize their business.
On the downside, many important eCommerce features are reserved for the expensive advanced eCommerce tier. This includes abandoned cart recovery, which competitor Wix includes in all eCommerce plans.
Squarespace Customer Support
Squarespace offers 24/7 support via email and live chat during business hours, Monday through Friday. There is no phone support. Email responses took 6-7 hours during our testing, while live chat was fast.
Squarespace's user guides, FAQs, webinars, and videos are good. There is also a very busy community forum. Overall, Squarespace is doing pretty well in terms of support, but we would like to see the live chat hours and phone support option expanded.
Squarespace Pricing
Pricing & Special Offers
Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial, but you can't activate your site until you've paid for a plan. The 4 plans can be paid monthly or annually, with a 25-30% discount for paying annually.
Squarespace vs. Wix
Wix is probably more beginner-friendly and offers more templates than , but Squarespace's templates are of a higher quality. Wix has a much larger list of plugins than Squarespace, but it doesn't create responsive websites like .
Squarespace vs. GoDaddy
GoDaddy has a particularly simple interface, making it a better choice than Squarespace for complete beginners. It's also significantly cheaper. But that 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 due to sheer power and flexibility. For developers building larger sites, WordPress.com offers a huge list of plugins and templates that can transform a site, and if you want to learn the ins and outs of WordPress and even dig into the code once in a while, WordPress.com. worth checking out.
Bottom Line
Squarespace is one of the best online store builders we've tested. Although it takes about an hour to get used to its minimalistic interface, once you get the hang of it, you can create great responsive design websites in no time.
Squarespace's high price is the main reason to look elsewhere. But given that all plans include unlimited bandwidth and storage, the playing field is leveled, especially if you plan to upload a lot of media to your site. And with Squarespace's beautiful templates, you're practically guaranteed a sophisticated modern website that will impress your visitors.