Squarespace Review — All the Key Pros and Cons

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In this Squarespace review, I look at one of the best-known website building solutions on the market, and help you work out if this platform is the right choice for you.

Let’s kick things off by looking at Squarespace’s background.

Squarespace: the background

Squarespace is a website builder tool that is aimed mainly at small business owners and ‘solopreneurs.’

Created in 2003 as a solution to let people without web development skills build and maintain their own websites, Squarespace now powers millions of sites worldwide — over 4.5 million at time of writing (source: Builtwith.com).

Although it started life as a tool for building static, brochure-style websites, Squarespace has evolved over the years into a platform that also offers built-in ecommerce and marketing features.

As you’ll see later on in this review, the platform can now be used to host an online store, sell online courses and even run email marketing campaigns.

But how does Squarespace actually work?

How Squarespace works

Squarespace is a ‘hosted’ solution. This means that it runs on its own servers, and you don’t have to pay for a hosting service or install software anywhere to use it.

The platform lets you create a website in a web browser without coding and edit it easily thanks to a user-friendly content management system (CMS).

The idea is that you pick a template,make a few design changes (via simple style controls provided), add some content and hit the ‘publish site’ button. This simplicity is a key part of Squarespace’s appeal.

Squarespace plans and pricing

There are four Squarespace pricing plans available:

These plans are a little more expensive than those offered by competing solutions (notably Wix and Shopify) — but if you pay upfront for a year, discounts of between 27% and 36% are applied to the above fees, depending on the plan.

You also get a free custom domain name (yoursitename.com etc.) if you pay on an annual basis.

Additionally, there’s an ‘Enterprise’ plan available. This gives you access to priority support and ‘white glove’ consultancy services to help you create and manage a website. Pricing for this plan is negotiable and based on your requirements.

If you’d like to try Squarespace out before buying a subscription, a two-week trial is available, which you can access here.

Key differences between Squarespace plans

When it comes to the key differences between Squarespace pricing plans, the main things to look out for are:

As you go through this review, you’ll learn more about all these features.

Now that we’ve looked at some of the key differences between pricing plans, it’s time to take a look at a particularly important aspect of Squarespace: the visuals.

Squarespace templates and design features

Quality of templates

Template quality is key when it comes to good web design, especially if you’re not a professional designer. So how does Squarespace stack up on this front?

Well, a range of 177 Squarespace templates is currently available, and they are in general very attractive. Nearly all of them have a slick, contemporary look and feel — and in my view are higher in quality than those provided by competing website building platforms.

You can browse all the available templates here.

To put Squarespace’s template range into context against those of its competitors, it gives you more options than Shopify and BigCommerce, which offer 13 and 12 bundled templates respectively.

However, Wix and WordPress give you a lot more templates to play with than Squarespace — 831 and 12,000+ respectively (figures correct at time of writing).

But interestingly, with the recent launch of Squarespace’s ‘Blueprint’ feature, you don’t necessarily have to pick a template at all — you can give Squarespace some information about your project and let its so-called ‘AI Wizard’ decide upon the best look and feel for your site.

While testing Blueprint out, I recorded a video of my experience of using the feature — you can watch this below.

Now, I really like the Squarespace templates, but it has to be said that most of them are very ‘image-centric,’ and really only work well when professional, eye-catching photography is used.

A lot of the templates are designed in a way that requires you to fill your home page with a large, full-bleed photograph (see above screenshot for an example of what I mean here!).

And speaking of pictures…

Stock images in Squarespace

Something I particularly like about Squarespace is that it provides you with access to all of Unsplash’s image library out of the box — this lets you browse over 3 million royalty-free images and add them easily to your website.

And, if the quality of the Unsplash library doesn’t appeal, Squarespace offers you the option to buy images directly from Getty. These images cost $10 each, which is not unreasonable (given how expensive stock images can be to buy from the Getty site itself).

Typeface selection

A huge range of web fonts — 1,000 from Adobe and 600 from Google — is included with Squarespace.

This is far more than provided by most competing website building platforms and makes it easier to make your website’s branding consistent with your other marketing materials.

If you want to use a font that’s not available in Squarespace, you can add it to your site via custom CSS (so long as you’re on a ‘Business’ plan or higher).

However, when building Squarespace sites for clients I’ve found this to be a bit of a difficult process — and one that definitely requires a detailed understanding of CSS. It would be much better if Squarespace gave users a code-free way to add custom fonts (as Wix does, for example).

Behavior of Squarespace sites on mobile devices

All Squarespace templates are fully responsive, meaning that your site’s template will automatically resize itself to suit the device it’s being viewed on (smartphone, tablet, desktop computer etc.). Not only does this make your site more accessible to a wider range of users, responsive design can provide some SEO benefits too.

It’s worth pointing out here that not all Squarespace’s competitors let you create truly responsive websites — Wix being a key example here.

Styling templates

It’s easy enough to configure a Squarespace template design to your liking. You use a menu of styling options on the right hand side of the screen to adjust how components — displayed on the left — appear. These controls let you adjust things like fonts, colors, page width and so on easily.

A key thing to note about the latest version of Squarespace (7.1) however is that it doesn’t allow you to switch templates once you’ve selected one. This is frustrating, but less of a big deal than it sounds at first, as all the 7.1 templates work the same way — you can achieve the same look and feel as another template by tweaking your site fonts and colors.

Nonetheless, I don’t really like this approach — it would be much better if Squarespace offered the option to switch to another template design with the click of a button, as many competing platforms do.

In terms of styling your template via code, so long as you’re on a ‘Business’ or higher plan, you can add your own custom CSS to your website. This is useful for making changes to your website’s appearance that Squarespace’s design controls don’t permit.

You won’t be able to see or edit the full CSS stylesheet in Squarespace, but you can add your own CSS rules to change the appearance of certain items on your website (see screenshot below for an example).

However, it’s important to note that if you add your own CSS, Squarespace’s customer support team reserves the right to limit the kind of support they give you.

And some competing products are better than Squarespace when it comes to providing full control over the templates — Shopify and BigCommerce, for example, both provide you with complete access to your site’s CSS and HTML on all plans.

Video backgrounds

Squarespace provides a useful video backgrounds feature — this can turn an already nice-looking Squarespace template into a stunning one. The feature lets you use a Youtube or Vimeo URL to create a looped video background for your Squarespace site; you can then apply a range of filters to it and speed up or slow down playback.

You can also upload videos to be used as backgrounds — you are given 30 minutes of video storage by default on all Squarespace plans, with more storage available if you purchase a ‘Members Area’ plan.

(More on which shortly!)

Content management and ease of use

There’s lots to like about content management in Squarespace — but a few negative aspects to be aware of too.

Let’s explore these key pros and cons of the Squarespace content management system (CMS) now.

Importing and exporting content

Imports

It’s easy enough to get basic web content into Squarespace. Helpful ‘wizards’ are provided to help you import pages, blog posts and other content from WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr.

As for importing products, so long as you are on a ‘Business’ or ‘Commerce’ plan, you can import up to 10,000 products via CSV or, using an import tool, from Etsy, Shopify and Big Cartel.

Exports

You can export certain types of content from Squarespace into a WordPress-format XML file — not everything exports, but content that you can get out of the platform includes key items like pages, posts and galleries.

There are limitations to watch out for when it comes to products, however — only physical products can be exported, and exports are capped at 10,000 products (with each variant counting as a product).

Content layout

When you set up a new page in Squarespace, you can choose from a range of pre-defined page layouts — for example contact pages, about pages, team pages etc. — and this can really speed the design process up.

Once you’ve decided on a page layout, you’ll find that Squarespace’s ‘Fluid Engine’ drag and drop editor is easy to use, letting you insert ‘content sections’ — blank or pre-defined content areas containing images, text, forms, videos etc. — anywhere on the page.

It’s very easy to change the position of these content sections too — it’s simply a case of grabbing an element and dragging it to another location on the page.

It’s easy to place elements within content sections too — most sections allow you to add ‘content blocks’ to them (pictured below).

As with Squarespace’s content sections, these can be moved around the page easily.

Content blocks you can add include:

As you move these blocks around the page, you’ll see a grid appear — you can use this to ‘snap’ things into the right place (see my screenshot below to get a sense of how this works).

And, when moving blocks, lines appear that let you know when an item is centered relative to another block or section (see ‘smart guides’ screenshot below).

You can also edit the mobile version of a page too, by clicking the mobile icon at the top-right hand corner of the screen.

Once you’ve selected this option, you can adjust the layout of the mobile version of your site by dragging and dropping your content blocks into desired positions.

Now, while some users will appreciate this level of control over both their mobile and desktop sites, the problem with it is that you end up having to manage two versions of your website, which can mean more work and complexity.

In use I found that making relatively minor changes to the desktop version of a page quite often messed up the mobile version — resulting a lot of toggling between the two versions, and additional editing work. Being honest about it, I prefer the way Squarespace’s old editors used to seamlessly update the mobile versions of your site automatically for you — I’m not sure that the flexibility provided by Squarespace’s mobile site editor offsets the extra work it generates.

And oddly, when testing the mobile site editor in Squarespace, I couldn’t find a way to hide elements — something that would arguably be the most useful aspect of this level of control over your mobile site (for the record, Wix and Webflow both facilitate this).

Images

The way Squarespace that lets you work with images is a key plus point of the platform — its image manipulation and management tools are really strong.

You can resize, stretch, crop or rotate any image you add to your website with ease in Squarespace, or apply shapes to it.

A range of impressive dynamic effects can also be applied to your images — these include ripple, film grain and parallax scrolling effects.

You can also pick a ‘focal point’ for your images; this helps ensure that no matter what type of device a user is viewing your site on, the part of the image you care most about is always on display.

In this era of responsive websites, where images are resized according to device, this can be a bit of a design lifesaver, ensuring that your images always ‘make sense,’ regardless of what your site is being viewed on. I really like this approach.

In terms of using galleries and slideshows, Squarespace offers you several different presentation options — including slideshows, carousels and grids — and all look excellent.

This wide range of gallery features makes Squarespace a particularly good option for photographers who need a website to showcase their portfolio.

So all in all, it’s a really big thumbs-up for image management in Squarespace.

But what about text?

Blogging features

What’s Squarespace like as a blogging platform?

Well, first the good stuff:

For more information about blogging in Squarespace, you can watch our video guide to the topic below.

There are however, two significant flaws in Squarespace’s blogging setup that need to be pointed out:

The bottom line with blogging in Squarespace is that it’s fine for most users — but if you’re a professional blogger, or intending to run a large publication, there are better options available to you, not least WordPress.

Charts — but no tables?

An unusual but potentially useful feature in Squarespace is its ‘charting’ functionality — this lets you drop some data into Squarespace and use it to create a pie chart, line chart or bar chart.

These charts look good and are a handy way to include a nice visualization of your data in your site content.

A related feature that’s sadly missing however is the ability to insert tables into Squarespace pages and posts. The omission of such a feature is rather strange, but workarounds do exist, thanks to third-party plugins developed by Squarespace experts.

Navigation limitations

As things stand, Squarespace is not really a great tool for creating websites with ‘multi-level’ navigation systems. While all Squarespace plans technically allow you to create up to 1,000 static pages (and an unlimited number of blog posts), limits apply to how you organize them.

In practice, the platform only permits you to create rather ‘flat’ websites, with a maximum of two levels of navigation.

In many ways this is a good thing, because your site will end up being easy to navigate — but some users will find this frustrating.

Version history

Unlike competing products like Wix and WordPress, Squarespace doesn’t automatically keep a history of changes to your website. This means that if you accidentally mess up a page (or worse, permanently delete it), you can’t restore an earlier version of it.

That’s not to say that Squarespace doesn’t back up your website — the company says that it keeps copies of its customers’ content in multiple locations and that your data is safe with it.

However, it’s not clear what actually happens in the event of a data loss — and the fact that the Squarespace help page on troubleshooting lost content encourages you to try to retrieve accidentally deleted content by searching an Internet archive (the Wayback Machine) or visiting a Google-cached version of a page doesn’t inspire confidence!

Workarounds exist however: you can create your own backups by copying and pasting your content somewhere else, or by using Squarespace’s export features to create a copy of your website’s content or products.

Editing HTML and CSS on a Squarespace website

HTML — adding widgets and code blocks

Unlike competing platforms like WordPress or Shopify, Squarespace doesn’t let you toggle between a WYSIWYG (‘What You See Is What You Get’) editor and HTML mode on pages and posts.

It is, however, possible to add HTML code blocks to a Squarespace website — these let you incorporate a third-party form or widget into your site easily.

CSS — styling your website

So long as you’re on a ‘Business’ plan or higher, you can add custom CSS to your Squarespace website. That said, it’s not entirely encouraged. You are warned when doing so that:

But if you know what you’re doing with CSS, the freedom to add bespoke visual improvements to your site is definitely welcome.

Code injection

If you’d like to add scripts to the header section of a Squarespace website, you can do this via a code injection section (on the ‘Business’ plan or higher).

Mobile apps

If you want to manage your Squarespace site via a mobile device, there are three key apps available that help you do this:

All three are available for both iOS and Android.

The ‘Squarespace’ app is the main one you’ll need to use for managing your site on the move — it lets you edit pages and posts, view Squarespace analytics and manage orders using a mobile device. This has been well received by both iOS users (who rate it 4.6 stars out of 5) and Android rate it pretty highly too (at 4 out of 5).

The Squarespace scheduling apps are designed to let you facilitate or manage appointments via your site (as their name suggests, these are powered by Acuity).

The ‘Schedule Client’ app allows people to book and change appointments and the ‘Scheduling Admin’ app lets you view and manage them.

Now, what about selling stuff?

Ecommerce features in Squarespace

The ecommerce functionality in Squarespace is reasonably good — it’s easy to create, edit and manage products and product catalogs with the platform. You can definitely create an attractive online store with Squarespace — and one that’s easy to maintain.

Key ecommerce features in Squarespace include:

I particularly like the way Squarespace handles product images. Unlike some competing platforms, Squarespace allows you to automatically apply image ratios to all the products in your online store — a huge timesaver for larger ecommerce projects.

It’s also generous when it comes to product options and product variants, letting you create six of the former and 250 of the latter — this gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to presenting your goods online.

It’s worth flagging up subscription functionality (available on all plans) as another strong feature of Squarespace ecommerce — the platform makes it extremely easy for you to accept recurring payments for goods or services.

Another interesting aspect of Squarespace’s ecommerce functionality is its membership sites feature. This lets you charge users for access to a private area of your website, allowing you to sell exclusive content to your audience.

As part of this feature, you get access to Squarespace’s new ‘Courses’ functionality. As its name suggests, this lets Squarespace users sell online courses to their audience — something that’s not really possible to do in rival products like Wix, Shopify and WordPress without apps or plugins.

(You can now also add a paywall to a blog in Squarespace, which is helpful too.)

You will need to pay extra to get the most out of Squarespace’s membership feature, however — between $9 per month and $111 per month, depending on your storage requirements.

(Although a free version of this tool is technically available to ‘Personal’ plan or higher users, the storage you get for your courses is limited and the transaction fees on digital product sales are extremely high.)

So there’s a lot I like about ecommerce features in Squarespace. But there is definitely room for improvement — here are the key problems that I think need fixing when it comes to Squarespace ecommerce:

Overall, I like the Squarespace ecommerce features — they’re great for any small business that needs a simple online store and doesn’t mind selling in just one currency.

But merchants who have more sophisticated requirements would be better off looking at a dedicated online store builder like BigCommerce or Shopify — these are more fully-featured platforms that provide more professional features for running an ecommerce business. This is particularly the case if you’re interested in multi-currency selling, dropshipping or POS — Shopify is a much better solution for all three.

Creating multilingual versions of a Squarespace website

Thanks to a ‘deep’ integration with the translation tool Weglot, it’s fairly easy to create a multilingual site with Squarespace, using either machine or manual translations.

My problem with this approach is its cost. Although the Weglot integration can be used for free to create one additional site in another language, if the word count on this exceeds 2,000 words, additional — and significant — fees will apply.

As the pricing screenshot below shows, Weglot can get really expensive if you’re translating a lot of text-heavy Squarespace websites.

Integrations with other apps

Built-in integrations

Squarespace offers several built-in integrations with key web applications — you can incorporate apps and services like Amazon, Mailchimp, OpenTable and ChowNow (plus quite a few others) into your website in lots of useful ways.

You will need to be on a ‘Business’ plan or higher though to get full access to some integrations, however.

Squarespace extensions

Squarespace also provides ‘extensions’ for its platform — a range of paid-for add-ons that provide extra functionality for your website.

The number of extensions is currently small — at time of writing, there are only 43 Squarespace add-ons available. To put this in context, you’ll find 900+ similar apps and integrations available for Wix, 1,207 for BigCommerce and over 13,000 for Shopify.

That said, the extensions on offer from Squarespace are fairly useful — integrations are provided for several key admin apps including Quickbooks, Freshbooks and TaxJar.

They are pricey by comparison to offerings in other platforms’ app stores, however.

Squarespace-Zapier integration

If a built-in integration or extension isn’t available to help you get Squarespace talking to a particular app, then you might find the Squarespace-Zapier integration to be a good option.

Zapier is a tool that lets different apps share data with each other based on ‘If this, then that’ (IFTTT) rules that you define — and it lets you connect Squarespace to over 1,000 other apps.

You will usually need a premium Zapier plan to connect apps effectively, though — and this costs at least $29.99 per month. You will also need to be on Squarespace’s ‘Business’ plan or higher to use the tool.

Squarespace plugins

There’s also the option of buying ‘code snippets’ to enhance the functionality of your Squarespace website from various providers.

These snippets are increasingly referred to as ‘Squarespace plugins’ — and although these add-ons are not quite as easy to install as their WordPress equivalents, they nonetheless allow you to significantly extend the functionality of your Squarespace site.

Plugins exist for a variety of applications — for example, enhancing video backgrounds, adding sidebars, creating bespoke lightboxes…and much else besides.

Integration with social media accounts

Connecting Squarespace to social media accounts is very straightforward — you simply add your accounts in your website settings and Squarespace takes care of the relevant icons and feeds (pushing content automatically to selected social networks if required).

All the most popular social media networks are catered for in Squarespace, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Data capture and forms

There are two ways to approach data capture in Squarespace. The first is to simply use code blocks to integrate an email marketing service of your choice (GetResponse, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp etc.).

This gives you a lot of flexibility — but means adding HTML forms to your Squarespace website and styling them using CSS so that they match the rest of it.

(This can be a time-consuming process — I’ve found myself spending far too much time trying to get custom-coded forms looking nice in Squarespace.)

The other way to capture data is via Squarespace’s built-in data capture options: the ‘form block‘ or the ‘newsletter block‘. These both allow you to construct bespoke forms easily.

Both the form block and the newsletter block allow you to send the data captured to:

The good news first: the forms are really easy to set up and use and they look great — if you are happy to send your data to Google Sheets and Mailchimp, or set up a ‘zap’ to another application via Zapier, you’ll love them.

You can also integrate Google’s ‘reCAPTCHA’ service into Squarespace data capture forms easily, which helps reduce spammy form submissions.

Additionally, thanks to recent improvements to Squarespace’s form builder, you can now also use Squarespace forms to accept file uploads from your customers — you simply add a file upload field to your form block, name it, and specify how many files a visitor can upload (up to a maximum of 5 files).

This functionality is extremely useful for ecommerce merchants who need to receive files from customers to fulfill orders for customized products. For instance, a pet accessories store may require customers to upload images of their pets for custom pet tags, or a stationery shop might need clients to provide personalized text for custom invitations.

There are some improvements that I’d love to see being made to forms, however.

First, although the Zapier integration is very useful, opening up Squarespace’s data capture functionality to users of well-known email marketing products, it still makes life more complicated (and expensive) for these users than it could be.

Another improvement I’d like to see made to Squarespace forms is the addition of ‘conditional logic’ — as things stand, you can’t dynamically show or hide form fields based on user responses in Squarespace.

If your data capture needs are simple, you’ll be totally fine with Squarespace — but if you need to use conditional logic, you will probably end up having to invest in a third party forms app like Wufoo Forms or Jotform, or using custom code to connect your forms to your preferred email marketing app.

And speaking of marketing…

Marketing and SEO

Email marketing functionality – ‘Squarespace Email Campaigns’

For an extra monthly fee, you can capture email addresses and send newsletters within Squarespace, thanks to its ‘Email Campaigns’ feature.

This means Squarespace can be used to manage your website AND your mailing list — arguably the two most important assets of any online business — in one place, while keeping the branding consistent across both.

Squarespace Email Campaigns comes in four flavors:

In terms of how this pricing stacks up against other email marketing products, the Starter and Core plans are cheap by comparison to the entry-level plans available from the likes of AWeber and Mailchimp; they allow you to start capturing data and creating newsletters without spending too much.

In fact, you can technically host an unlimited number of email addresses with Squarespace Email campaigns, which is very generous.

On top of that, the email templates — as you’d expect from Squarespace — are very attractive and mobile-friendly. I’ve found them pretty easy to edit too — the Email Campaigns feature provides a drag-and-drop user interface that is very similar to Squarespace’s main editor, so if you’re familiar with that, you shouldn’t have too much difficulty creating Squarespace newsletters.

Some autoresponder functionality is also included with Email Campaigns (so long as you are on a ‘Core’ plan or higher). However, the automation provided is currently pretty basic by comparison to that provided by dedicated email marketing tools like Mailchimp or GetResponse (letting you create simple ‘drip’ campaigns only).

Furthermore, you can’t segment data using custom fields or split test your mailouts using Squarespace Email Campaigns. To get these sort of features, you’ll still need a dedicated email marketing solution.

How good is Squarespace SEO?

As with any hosted solution, you don’t have full access to the inner workings of the Squarespace platform, or the ability to choose a super-fast host for your site. Accordingly, this means there will always be some limitations when it comes to SEO with Squarespace.

That said, websites built with Squarespace do quite a lot of things that Google and other search engines like. They…

Squarespace lets you edit most of the key search engine optimization elements easily enough — page title tags, headings, meta descriptions, alt text etc.

The platform also allows users to enable free SSL on their sites (and very easily too). This is important, because sites using SSL certificates can be treated preferentially by Google in search.

And I’ve noticed that sites I’ve built in Squarespace 7.1 are starting to pass Google’s ‘Core Web Vitals‘ tests more frequently than sites I’ve built on other similar platforms.

(The Core Web Vitals targets focus on various aspects of site performance and stability and sites that meet them can occasionally receive higher search rankings).

However, Squarespace sites could definitely load a bit faster (page speed is important for SEO). The ‘PageSpeed’ scores I’ve got when testing Squarespace sites in Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool have tended to be pretty mediocre.

And, unlike competing solutions, Squarespace doesn’t let you edit your robots.txt file (a file that lets you tell Google and other search engines what content you’d like it to crawl or not).

There’s also no way to add ‘nofollow’ or ‘sponsored’ attributes to links in Squarespace without coding, which is very frustrating (especially if you’re working on affiliate marketing projects).

And finally, unlike both Shopify and WordPress, Squarespace doesn’t work with the industry-standard SEO plugin Yoast. That said, there are some third-party tools available that can help here, with SEOSpace probably being the best-known of the bunch.

Squarespace GDPR compliance

It’s easy enough to sort out most of the GDPR basics with Squarespace; the data security is robust and you can add privacy policy, website terms of use and cookie notice documents to a Squarespace site without difficulty.

However, when it comes to compliance in the area of cookie consent, Squarespace presents some challenges.

GDPR requires website owners to follow 5 key rules with regard to cookie consent:

While you can meet the first two requirements with a Squarespace website easily, it’s not that easy to meet the other three.

To do so you will usually need to use a third-party paid-for tool (I generally use CookieYes) to create a GDPR-compliant banner that gives users 100% control over the cookies used on a Squarespace site.

Ultimately it’s a big ‘could do better’ here for Squarespace, because you can’t use key business tools like Google Analytics, Adwords or Facebook ads without dropping cookies.

Key competitors Wix, Shopify and BigCommerce all provide more options for making a hosted ecommerce solution GDPR-compliant, and it would be good to see Squarespace following suit.

Squarespace customer support

Squarespace provides customer support via email (24/7) or live chat (4am-8pm EST, Monday to Friday); you can also use Twitter or Facebook Messenger to contact the company.

Additionally, there’s a YouTube resource available — the appropriately named ‘Squarespace Help’ channel. This contains a lot of good tutorials on key Squarespace topics.

However, no phone support is available.

As for the quality of the support, while I’ve found the staff on Squarespace’s support desk to be very friendly, and their turnaround times on queries reasonably quick, they tend to deal with pretty simple issues only.

In essence, if you want to add some functionality or design aspects to your Squarespace website that are not provided ‘out of the box’ you won’t always get much help from Squarespace. And, as mentioned briefly above, if you add custom CSS to your site, you may not be able to get full support from Squarespace.

All that said, I have had some very positive experiences with the Squarespace support team — it’s just that it has sometimes required a bit more perseverance from my side than I might like.

One final thing to be aware of is that while Squarespace email support is available in six languages (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish), live chat support is English-only. This contrasts poorly with key competitors Shopify and Wix, which both offer support in multiple languages.

The Squarespace help center

In addition to phone and live chat support, you can also make use of Squarespace’s ‘help center.’

This is a searchable online manual / knowledge base containing videos and articles to help you understand how Squarespace works.

It’s usually pretty good for getting a sense of the basics, but there will still be the odd occasion when you may need to get in touch with Squarespace’s customer service team for help.

Squarespace review: verdict

Overall, Squarespace is an excellent option for individuals and small businesses in search of a platform to build their site or store with. Its templates and content management features are strong, its learning curve is gentle and it’s an extremely reliable platform.

It’s worth highlighting however that Squarespace is particularly good for two main applications: running a brochure website or hosting a portfolio site.

If you are an artist, photographer or a musician — or building a website for a one-off event like a wedding — you’ll find Squarespace to be a great choice of platform for building your site (and maintaining it in future). It’s also a very good choice for restaurant websites — photographs of meals and menu layouts can look fantastic in the context of a well-chosen Squarespace template.

Thanks to its easy-to-use ecommerce features, businesses needing a simple online store or shopping cart system may also find Squarespace a good solution — and because it’s a hosted solution, using Squarespace doesn’t require you to worry about things like server updates or security (other than taking the usual precautions around passwords).

Squarespace does require some significant improvements to its ecommerce functionality however. Its lack of multi-currency selling features and limited point of sale functionality would nudge me in the direction of a more dedicated ecommerce platform like Shopify if I was working on a project for a corporate entity, or needed more advanced features for my online store.

GDPR is another one of my concerns — although you can make a Squarespace website GDPR compliant, it involves a bit more work than you might like (and usually a third-party app).

The good thing is that — as with a lot of hosted solutions — you can try Squarespace out before committing to it. Accordingly, I’d strongly advise making the most of its free trial.

So, I hope this Squarespace review has helped you make your mind up on the platform! Below you’ll find a summary of the key Squarespace pros and cons. Feel free to ask any questions or feedback you may have about the platform in the comments section below — we read them all and will do our best to help.

Pros and cons of Squarespace

Squarespace alternatives

Squarespace isn’t your only option when it comes to creating a website — there are lots of competing website builder products on the market, including Wix, Big Cartel, Jimdo, GoDaddy Website Builder, Moonfruit and Weebly.

Like Squarespace, these are all ‘hosted’ solutions that involve an ongoing fee and are products that are chiefly aimed at users who are starting a brand new business but lacking in technical web design skills.

If content management is a key concern, then self-hosted WordPress is an obvious alternative to Squarespace, but the two platforms are rather different tools.

Self-hosted WordPress is a much more powerful platform, but one that usually involves a more manual setup and customization of elements — Squarespace is more of a ‘click and point to change something’ solution. I’d suggest reading our Squarespace vs WordPress article to get an in-depth comparison of these two platforms, along with our WooCommerce vs Shopify comparison (WooCommerce is the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress).

You could also look at hosted WordPress, which is a site builder that works in a similar way to Squarespace. However, it delivers more sophisticated options when it comes to blogging (not least an autosave feature!).

If high-quality design is something you’re particularly interested in, then Webflow is a potentially good alternative for you – this platform places a huge emphasis on template design and custom animations. For more information about it, check out our Webflow review or our Squarespace vs Webflow comparison.

If your needs are simple, and you don’t need ecommerce features, you could do worse than check out Canva — although best known for its image and video editing features, it actually contains a basic web design tool too. You can learn more about the platform in our Canva review.

As far as selling online goes, the best website builders for ‘pure’ ecommerce that I’ve tried out to date are Shopify and BigCommerce.

Although the Squarespace template designs are arguably better than the ones you get with both of these tools, the ecommerce functionality provided by both Shopify and BigCommerce is a lot stronger. For more information check out our Shopify vs Squarespace post and our Squarespace vs BigCommerce comparison.

If your business is likely to need point-of-sale functionality then Square is worth a look, as it gives you a pretty strong store building platform that integrates neatly with a wide range of POS hardware and features (many of which are geared towards restaurants). You can learn more about this platform in our Square vs Shopify comparison.

Using an existing online marketplace like Amazon, eBay or Etsy as your ecommerce solution is also an option — these bring the advantage of large, ready-made customer bases to tap into. Read our Shopify vs Amazon, Shopify vs eBay and our Shopify vs Etsy comparisons for more details.

And finally, Wix is worth a look — the product provides a similar ecommerce feature set to Squarespace. A free Wix plan is also available (it’s basic, but good for some applications). You can learn more about this platform in our Wix review, our Wix vs Squarespace comparison and our Wix vs Shopify vs Squarespace shootout.