Top 10 Reasons We Recommend Squarespace Over Wordpress
Written by Rob Ennis • Co-Written & Edited by Anastasia Matveeva Hisel
We hear clients all the time telling us they want a website design built on Wordpress. Over the years, we’ve gone from suggesting otherwise, to simply not starting any new projects with Wordpress at all. Why? It simply brings way more problems than solutions. We’ve seen it become a pain for many of our clients: struggling with constant need of maintenance, high prices, plugin issues, security breaches, constant dashboard usability complaints, long learning curves, outdated systems, and the list goes on and on! So as you can see, we simply can no longer recommend it.
Instead, we suggest using Squarespace for the great majority of our fully custom websites (with the exception of some high-inventory e-commerce websites which we build on Shopify) as a CMS that our clients love time after time, and here’s why:
Easy In-House Maintenance
Once a website project is wrapped up, after a quick training session, clients can feel empowered to make small changes like updates to some text, add new blog posts, update important information, etc. on their own –without having to hire a professional web design team again & again for minor edits, saving them from unnecessary wait times for quick changes, and unnecessary costs that can easily be avoided.
No Hidden Fees
With other platforms like WordPress, you’d be responsible for hosting fees, domain fees, security plugins, updates, and a ton of other things. With Squarespace, they take care of hosting your website, keeping the security up to date (including SSL certificates), and optimizing SEO. They also have an email campaign software built-in.
Great Security (& No Spam!)
Wordpress has a history of being a favorite CMS for spammers and hackers. Since each plugin in Wordpress is developed by individual developers, they are more susceptible to security breaches. So unlike Squarespace, you would have to constantly be updating plugins and working on very thorough maintenance to ensure you don’t get heaps of spam or glitches. This can get really expensive since you’ll have to hire a proficient Wordpress developer for constant maintenance. On the other hand, Squarespace has everything secure and verified within their own platform (and really great security) so you don’t have to constantly worry about spam or hackers.
Customer Care & Direct Support
Squarespace has fantastic customer care & support services & forums. You can live chat with a specialist and they can access your website to find a solution for whatever problem you are experiencing. As Squarespace Circle members, we can contact them on your behalf as long as we have contributor access to your site.
Responsive Websites
Every Squarespace website is designed to look awesome on desktop, mobile, and tablet screens. This means you can focus more time and budget on making sales, and less on designing entire websites from scratch for mobile responsiveness. There are always optimizations to be adjusted and made, but Squarespace gets you far enough ahead so you can save loads of money and time on something that should be quite simple.
Custom CSS & Code Injection Capabilities
You could absolutely have a beautiful Squarespace website without code, but you can ALSO develop Squarespace websites to achieve specific customizations, improve load time, functionality, and user experience, as well as pretty much customize anything you like! The CMS platform allows for custom CSS & Code Injections, you just need someone who has experience and coding knowledge to add it in.
Easy To Share Access
Squarespace’s contributor permissions feature allows you to invite others (like designers & developers for example) to have access to your website without having to give your private password or sharing your private billing information. You can also have contributors for your blog that have limited permissions which allow them to add new blog posts, but not change anything else on your site.
Seamless Embedded Social Media
Squarespace makes it super easy to directly embed all your social media profiles and feeds without needing to go hunting for a specific plugin and have to worry about updating and maintaining it.
Email Marketing, Scheduling & Other Useful Integrations
Over the years, Squarespace has continued to optimize their CMS platform, making it quick and easy to track your website’s analytics, create and manage email marketing campaigns, easily allow your site visitors to schedule appointments and more with their powerful integrations. You can also easily add different payment methods and shipping tools like PayPal, Apple Pay, Stripe, UPS, FedEx, USPS, ShipStation, and Xero. You can also track conversions and other actions easily with integrations for Amazon Affiliate tracking, Facebook Pixel, Instagram Shopping, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Open Table, and the list goes on.
Simplified SEO
Now, don’t get me wrong… SEO can be quite tricky and requires some constant updates for best results, but this is exactly why Squarespace has worked hard to make it way easier for you to add keywords, metadata, descriptions, edit the automated order of website page naming conventions, edit URL slugs, manage tags, change image titles, and adjust image sizes –which all greatly add to your websites’ SEO.
In general, Squarespace is a really great CMS that allows for an impressive amount of customization, integrations, and security without the headaches many have experienced with platforms like Wordpress. We’re not the only ones who feel this way either! Check out the reasons Megan Minns, Charlotte O'Hara and countless other experts agree.
To summarize, I would say, that unless you have a big store that requires tracking huge amounts of inventory, or you want to create a very complex website where users have lots of extra features in their own private customer accounts; Squarespace is probably the right CMS platform for you.
If you’d like us to help you create the website of your dreams, check out our branding & web design packages! We’ve been Squarespace Circle Certified Members for years, so we’ve had a lot of time to become experts and know how to make all kinds of detailed customizations within the CMS platform.
Is your site is built on Squarespace? If so, how do you like it? Do you find it easy to use? Have you or are you considering making the switch from another platform? Reach out and let us know your thoughts! Or check out our Instagram and drop us a line in our DMs!
Also take a look at this related Blog Post: What is SEO and Why Is It Important?, or this one: 5 Costly Mistakes Most Business Owners Make When They Want A New Website
Here are some links to some of the custom websites we’ve built on Squarespace:
Published on October 5, 2020
As Squarespace Circle members, we’re able to offer our clients 20% off their first year of Squarespace! Let’s get started!