Squarespace Pricing, Features, Reviews and Alternatives

Are you ready to launch your online presence, but aren’t sure where to start? Squarespace offers an all-in-one platform that allows you to create a beautiful website, online store, or portfolio without the hassle of building everything from scratch. You can literally have everything up and running in less than an hour! Squarespace is an online platform where you can build your own website. There are...

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Squarespace is great for small and large businesses alike. They give you a host of free tools that allow you to create an amazing website or online store. What I loved about Squarespace was how easy it was to create my own web design, their advanced SEO features, and most importantly, their customer service has been top-notch! But if I had to find something negative, it would be that they are not made for large companies that may need more personalized or advanced features than Squarespace currently offers.

The best thing about Squarespace is that you can launch a simple website in a few hours; grab a template, tweak to taste, and go. The competitors still tend to need direct coding to make them look good, but not with Squarespace. The templates are tasteful and generally easy to edit, plus there is a rich backend with tons of analytical tools and e-commerce features for when you're ready to sell. The website editor is truly WYSIWG (What You See Is What You Get) and adding sections is as easy as a click.

Squarespace's templates look nice, but there are surprisingly few of them. I've built several sites with Squarespace, but I always grab the same podcasting template because everything else it way too specific: restaurant! Vlogger! Fashion! But precious little for general-purpose sites, with a minuscule selection for a company that's been at this for over 10 years. The WYSIWG editor can be extremely annoying as well, constantly digging into to floating menus just to make simple edits, and it's unclear where things reside sometimes. It's hard to escape the feeling that there has to be a better way. But it is still easy to use.

Squarespace, arguably earned its popularity with certain designs that were sleek and minimalistic. But it seems to have camped out in that comfort zone because it is no longer the same as it was a few years ago, things change. It's partly easy to use, as long as you're not looking for extraordinary things.

There is no clear integration with social networks, at the same time the templates they offer are outdated. It works more as a portfolio than as a website or blog. Even so, there are many tools that it offers and it is not useful.

Squarespace really is simple to set up and use. A lot of web building best practices are automated for you, with image auto-optimization, mobile-friendly templates, and ADA compliance features. A few years ago the biggest issue with simple website builders like this was performance - drag-and-drop sites tended to be slower. Not the case anymore. All my Squarespace sites load well within Google Page Speed Index benchmarks, with image compression that doesn't reduce image quality at all.

Squarespace will cause some issues if you're at either extreme of tech savvy: If you have zero background building sites, there will be a learning curve. I know their marketing makes it sound like you could build a site with your eyes closed, but do not count on it being that simple. And on the other end, if you have deeper experience building sites and working with code, Squarespace can be a bit basic. You can't access a page's source code, block types can't be edited, and design functions are fairly limited.

As a one-man band with little funds for expenses, I needed to build a website myself and I wanted a modern, well designed look. Squarespace helped me easily do this and looks so good. The building block system works well, the templates bring a modern, clean design, and the analytics provide a comprehensive view of my visitors. And the price is really reasonable.

There isn’t an auto save feature. Several times while editing a web page, I have worked for an hour or two and made a lot of precise changes—but then I accidentally hit escape and it exits the Editor view and I lose all of the my work. As a small business owner I can’t waste time like that.