Why I chose Squarespace
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It’s a hard thing to decide on, right? Especially if you’re not in this design/website world & don’t know the terminology or what any of it actually means.
Maybe Squarespace is a platform that you’ve never even heard of.
Maybe you have heard of it but know it’s a website thing and just blew it off because you don’t know anything about websites & assumed those ads aren’t meant for people like you.
Maybe you’ve talked to designers before about about building a website & they’re using terminology you don’t know or understand. Do you find yourself nodding along, but thinking something like:
‘I don’t know what any of this really means; how does this apply to me?’ or
‘What is hosting & a domain?’ or
‘What do you mean I’ll be able to edit my own website when you’re done with the design stuff? That sounds scary & overwhelming!’
Listing all the reasons that I prefer using Squarespace both for myself & my clients, is time consuming because the list is long. So I typed up this detailed rundown & now I can just link to it when people ask me.
And if you aren’t up to date & don’t know what a “Square Space” is, just keep reading. 😉
The key here is, I try to explain all of this in layman’s terms of how it applies to YOU and what the value is for YOU or YOUR BUSINESS.
Teaching
Like anything, there is a learning curve, but I believe it’s a small one, comparatively. Most people, my clients included, find Squarespace very easy to use.
Squarespace is built to simplify things as much as possible, and pretty much everything is where you’d expect it to be (something I hear from clients a lot, especially those who have switched from another platform).
After my part is done, if it’s possible to plan an in-person meeting with my client for a Squarespace Training session, I’ll set that up. If I’m too far away for an in-person meeting, I plan a video call walk-through or I send a link to pre-recorded video trainings I have setup online.
Value
Paying annually for Squarespace can seem expensive when Wordpress designers love shouting from the rooftops that WP.org is totally free to use. So let’s address that real quick: putting a site on Wordpress can be free, but it can also be just as ‘expensive,’ depending on:
if you use a free or paid theme,
whether you want security plugins to keep your website from getting hacked,
whether you you inexpensive hosting or more expensive hosting with #allthefeatures
whether you DIY or pay a designer
whether any of those things are subscription services or 1x payments
whether you want additional plugins for extra features that your theme doesn’t come with, such as an SEO plugin, etc.
and a lot more variables…
The reason why Squarespace charges ‘so much’ for our use of their platform is because so much is included that they handle FOR you or that is built in right into the platform.
So you don’t typically need anything else, like security plugins, paying a host somewhere else, buying a domain somewhere else, purchasing a theme or design template somewhere else, connecting a small online shop from somewhere else, integrating a blog from …you go it… somewhere else. See where I’m going with this?
Not to mention your ability to edit the site yourself in an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop platform with tons of 100% free templates to choose from, or even more 3rd party templates to use from other Squarespace designers online (such as, eh-em, my Template Shop over here 😉).
What’s included:
All of the following comes with the monthly or yearly Squarespace hosting plan fees (not in any particular order):
1. A secured website
That's a website that uses "https:" rather than "http:" in the prefix before your custom URL.
Example:
https://www.yourdomain.com
instead of
http://www.yourdomain.com
That additional letter ‘s’ in the prefix just means the data is encrypted, which makes it more safe & secure for everyone who uses your website!
2. Support
Squarespace has a fantastic support staff, should you ever need help beyond. I don’t need to use their support much, but when I have there is always someone available fairly quickly that’s super friendly and eager to answer my questions.
They’re available by email 24/7 and live chat during regular support hours (4am to 8pm EST, last I checked).
I’ve never had a poor experience with any of their representatives & that in itself is very nice!
They also have a helpful support forum where you can browse questions people have already asked or ask your own to see who responds (Squarespace Answers).
3. Unlimited Contributors
Do you have a team of people (or just more than you) that you’d want to help you keep up with your new website?
With Squarespace, your team can have their own access to the site with differing levels of permissions and you can control their access as you see fit.
That means if you want Jane to be able to add new blog posts, but not see the Billing info, that’s something you can control.
4. Online Shop
On 7.0 you can have up to 200 products listed in your shop, and on 7.1 you can have up to 10,000 products in your shop. For more on that, check out this post too, on why I recommend starting your Squarespace shop on 7.1.
You can also sell an unlimited amount of any of those products and accept donations, and on higher Squarespace commerce plans the transaction fees are less per sale.
On the Basic Online Store plan, these specific features are also available:
label printing with Ship Station
(print your own shipping labels in-house)accounting integration with Xero’s cloud-based platform
(only available in the US)secure checkout on your domain
(when buyers click to Check Out from your Shop, they stay on www.yourdomainexample.com, rather than being re-routed to something like www.checkout.squarespace.com)customer accounts
(allows customers to create an account on your website, so that checking out next time is simpler & you have a record of their information on file, as it pertains to their sale)connect your Squarespace shop products to your Instagram account
(allows you to add a product from your shop to an Instagram post, where viewers can click through to your shop item if they want to purchase)
5. Mobile & Tablet-friendly websites
(CLICK TO ENLARGE) You can see the individual pixels, (tiny squares) when zoomed way in. Each tiny pixel across the width of your screen is counted by your web browser, which tells Squarespace how wide your device is and it reformats the layout of your website automatically to fit the design into that size space.
First I need to explain size differences & how this works:
Desktops have a larger screen than a tablet, so there are more pixels that make up that screen image. Pixels are the tiny pieces that make up images on our screens.
The higher your screen resolution & the larger your physical screen size is, the more pixels it has to create the clear image you see there.
Tablets are smaller & have fewer pixels, and mobile devices have even less than Tablets.
With the mobile & tablet friendly versions of those sites, your device tells your browser app (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, etc.) that the screen size has fewer pixels, so Squarespace has set up the layout to adjust accordingly in order to fit all the content into that screen size’s boundaries.
The only reason the site layout can adjust is because that information is built into the template on the backend by the web developer. The info is in the code that you don’t see & don’t know is there, while you are looking at the pretty part. That code tells the computer to adjust the layout at different break points based on average device sizes (like iPhone vs. iPad vs. iMac screen sizes).
For example: a mobile break point might be no more than 480–640 pixels wide, a tablet might be 768 pixels wide (give or take), and desktop might be anything over 1240 pixels wide, ––on average.
If you’ve ever visited a website that is’t mobile-friendly, you know it right away. Everything is too small and you have to zoom in and pan around with your fingers to find the stuff you’re looking for & click on the buttons you want.
Annoying, right?
Formatting for Mobile, Desktop and Tablet is included with every template and mobile formatting is NOT a separate design, unlike with the Wix & Showit web design platforms.
As you edit your website, you can toggle on or off the Mobile, Tablet or Desktop views to see how your page layout will change on those screen sizes. That allows you to adjust your overall design so that it will look nice on all versions.
Your website’s design will automatically adjust for each size with no duplicate content or redundant processes.
6. Integrated popups & an announcement bar
Popups are annoying, …but they actually still work. Learn more about why popups aren’t dead & how to use one with your email marketing app + Squarespace over here.
So, if your business is having a promotional sale to get new customers & services are discounted, OR if your shop is having a sale & products are marked down, you can use a Pop Up to let visitors know about it!
You can also use an Announcement bar. That’s a differently colored bar across the top of your website, which appears on every single page of your site & is usually above the main navigation area. You can put text there and a link to a specific page on your site.
Example: TODAY ONLY: 50% OFF EVERYTHING! →
(and a link might be included that takes visitors to your shop page)
Another simpler use of either a Popup or Announcement bar is to draw attention to your newsletter signup or membership or your free Facebook group, –whatever– so you can get more people on your email list.
7. Online Forms
Forms can be especially useful if you get creative, and they are super easy to build on Squarespace! You can use them for things like:
a basic contact form
a booking information form
they can choose a date, pick which service they need, and give you their contact & billing address before you even talk to them!
customer surveys
send a link to your website page where you’ve placed a survey, sent out to past clients to find out how their experience was!
Form surveys allow answers on a sliding scale, so you can ask a question like, “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” and they can choose their answer from unlikely to most likely on a that sliding scale.
contest information submissions
Let’s say you need some help coming up with a new product name, build a form & send it out to your clients or customers. Give 1-3 people the opportunity to win a prize with their form submission so you can get feedback from them!
estimate requests
A place for someone to pick elements that they need so you can send them a quote/estimate.
service inquiries
A basic inquiry for your services, where you can ask guided questions to see if they are a good fit.
Frequently Asked Questions submission
Anonymous inquiries (if you don’t ask for their email address or name, you won’t know who submitted it)
and more!
You can set up any form in Squarespace to be emailed to an address you choose, and/or create a Google Sheet and add a row for each entry (columns for each question in the form) so you can keep all that data as a backup to emails, if needed. You can also link the form to a Zapier Zap for some kind of automation.
8. Member Areas
Squarespace just introduced (Nov. 2020) 100% built-in exclusive Membership areas!
To learn more about the pricing & capabilities in this, check out this post going over all the Member Areas features to date.
Squarespace’s new Member Areas feature is only directly linked with their own Email Campaigns, so if you use an outside email marketing service like I do (FloDesk, learn more about that over here), you’d have to manually add new members to your email service for the members to get the email workflows you’ve set up for your members. You could potentially use a Zap with Zapier to do this though, depending on your email service & what zaps are available.
9. Basic Email Campaigns
Email marketing is now built right into Squarespace (very simplistic email marketing tools) with Squarespace Email Campaigns.
This feature will add an additional fee to your Squarespace bill, just like any other email marketing service, only this one is part of your all-in-one access pass with Squarespace.
This feature is nowhere near as robust as what you could get from apps like MailerLite, MailChimp, ConvertKit, Constant Contact, Ontraport, ActiveCampaign, or FloDesk (& many others). But if all you need are bare-bones basics, and in a simple, straightforward setup, then this could be a good start for you!
Here’s why I tried (and still love) FloDesk for new business owners.
10. Regular Updates
The Squarespace Developers team updates their templates & platform constantly, making sure any quirks are fixed (usually before we’ve noticed they even exist), security features are updated, etc.
On other platforms like Wordpress, this is something you’d need to keep track of yourself. Updating your template & plugins, and since each may be from a different company or developer, you’d also need to make sure that updating one doesn’t poorly affect the other stuff you’re using in combination on your site, or the whole thing could go down (making your site unusable & offline) until you can figure out how to fix it.
That’s not to say that Wordpress is a bad platform (not at all), but there is a steep learning curve, and it’s not for the faint of heart. If you don’t want something complex, then Wordpress won’t be a good fit for you.
11. New Features
Like their recent release of the Member Areas, before that was the new design platform (7.1), Email Campaigns, and the PopUp feature. Now recurring invoices are also a feature in the works for some higher commerce plans.
The Squarespace team is always thinking of what they can do to make their platform better, and they deliver on that pretty frequently.
What’s the difference between Squarespace version 7.0 and 7.1?
12. Facebook Pixel
If you market your business using ads on Facebook, it’s good to know that Squarespace has a very simple integration with the Facebook Pixel.
What is a Facebook Pixel? Essentially it places a tag on your site that follows your site visitors for some length of time, so you can more accurately market to them online & to other people like them.
*Disclaimer: I do not handle Facebook marketing & do not claim to be an expert in that field.
Ever look at something on Amazon then notice products like it start showing up in ads elsewhere on the web? That’s because of the Facebook Pixel and other marketing strategies like it.
The integration is easy; it’s simply a field where you paste in your Pixel ID number for your Facebook Business account (for the purposes of linking that Facebook page account to your website).
13. Analytics
Squarespace also has a built-in Analytics, feature, making your stats easy to understand. You’ll be able to see which pages are the most popular, how many people visit your site, how many total pages were viewed, and see where people are coming from (how they find you).
My favorite feature in Analytics is to see what people are searching for before they reach my site. Essentially, what are you Googling in order to find me?
Their Analytics app is very similar to (though less detailed & a bit less accurate than) Google Analytics. If that extra detail & accuracy is important to you, then you’re in luck because Squarespace integrates simply with Google Analytics too!
That Google integration is also very easy & has a similar setup process as the Facebook Pixel integration. You just paste in your Google Analytics ID number and done! No need to copy/paste a snippet of code to install it on your site. 🙌🏻
If you want to use BOTH, that’s not a problem. Using Squarespace’s Analytics doesn’t keep you from using Google’s.
One downside, Squarespace Analytics doesn’t let you download or export your analytics data, while Google does. So if you need to be able to keep a record of your stats, Google is definitely the better option here.
14. Freedom
The best part? You will have the freedom to edit, update & change nearly anything you want without waiting for your designer or developer to do it for you.
Once the design is done, I hand off-site ownership to you. That allows you to have your own login to YOUR site, and gives you full editing capabilities because you own it. I can remain an Admin on it if you want me to be able to help you with it down the road, though.
Want to add some new photos? Edit your email address on the contact page? Don’t like how your about page is worded? Change prices on your Services page or edit/add products in your shop?
Go right ahead! You can do all of that & more yourself, and there’s no coding required. Just enter edit mode, make your changes & click Save (it publishes the changes immediately).
Feel like you messed something up? No worries! With my Admin permissions to your site, I can go in (using my own account) and fix whatever you feel like you messed up at any time and you can give or rescind my Admin permissions as needed.
Accidentally delete a page? No worries. Can’t figure out how to add a link to a new button? I gotchu! 😁
During a custom project or a site refresh, I’ll typically need to remain an Admin on your site for 30 days after your site launch, so I can help quickly if we come across any unexpected issues after going live. After that, you’re free to revoke or provide Admin access to me at any time.
After the 30 day support period, and if I’m remaining as an Admin to your site for as-needed support purposes, this is how that works:
I only access your site when asked, and only bill for time worked at my hourly rate. Typically these sessions are quick fixes, but if the request takes more than an hour, I’d let you know so there are no surprises on your invoice. Bills are always due within 30 days of the work being completed, with a 10% late fee added for each month the bill is not paid.
15. Website backups
Site backups are done by Squarespace and they do this frequently, so you don’t really need to worry about losing your content if something bad happens.
That said, manual backups are possible & are always a good thing to have. Here are links that describe that process in two ways:
Should you ever choose to leave the platform & move to Wordpress, there is also an Export feature specific to the Wordpress platform.
Rest easy that your online hub is well protected & saved frequently!
16. Growing Businesses
The Squarespace platform is still okay to use, whether you’re a one-woman show, a small, fast-growing, or large-scale business, depending on what your business needs are (specifically dependent on what you use the website for).
I know of at least two different entrepreneurs I follow that make seven figures, have hundreds of thousands of visitors monthly (or more) & still uses Squarespace for their website platform.
If you intend for your website to be content-heavy (less focus on retail & shopping, with more focus on blogging, service info, events & business information), then Squarespace will be a great choice for you.
While Squarespace does offer the ability to run an online store, if you plan to make all or most of your business revenue with it, then Squarespace is not the best option for you. Not that you couldn’t use Squarespace for that, but it wouldn’t be as efficient as other options.
If you intend for your website to be retail-heavy (less focused on content like blogging & service-related info, with your online shop as your #1 goal for bringing in revenue), then Shopify may be a better platform choice for you.
Shopify is a fantastic platform for online shops (Ruggable.com uses it, and the ever entrepre-famous Jenna Kutcher shop uses it, so does my favorite legal template shop that I’m also an affiliate for, the Contract Shop*, and my favorite news podcast’s merch shop by ‘Pod Save America’), but it’s not great at content design. I’ve setup one shop on that platform to date and I can say from experience that it is easy to use, but not as design-focused as Squarespace, so picking the right Shopify designer &/or template is key to having a shop that looks good.
Their shop interface on the backend, for the shop owners, has tons of great features like automatic order confirmations and the ability to print & ship labels with an automatic shipping email going out to the customer with the tracking number. They also have easily editable product info, editing in bulk, and tons of options that “just work” better than Squarespace’s eCommerce platform.
17. Reliability
Squarespace is a very reliable platform. Since they have their own team working on making it better all the time, it rarely breaks down & when it has it’s always back up very quickly. Very rarely does a bug affect the overall website’s visibility, which means your site is very unlikely to ‘disappear’ from view if something goes wrong.
I am currently an admin on about 20 separate websites, whether for as-needed maintenance only or full setup & design and have been steadily & exclusively using the Squarespace platform since 2016.
In all that time I’ve only ever seen a site “go down” twice (become unavailable for editing or public viewing). It was only unavailable for a short time while they were fixing some security issue & whatever the problem was, it was fixed ASAP, quickly returning things to normal.
Wordpress users will always argue that WP is a more reliable platform because the designer/developer controls that him/herself. It’s also not owned by another company, so it won’t ever go out of business & disappear without notice, and thus, –your website won’t either.
Want to find out more about Squarespace-related myths like this? Check out this post too.
Squarespace has been around since 2003 they are growing fast & reliably, –and for good reason. I don’t see their platform disappearing any time soon. By the time they may be less popular, we’d need to update our websites anyway to keep up with trends & new technology.
Not to mention that if they ever were to go out of business, they’d probably tell all of their account holders to let us know in time for us to export the site contents in preparation for moving the site to a new platform.
In summary, this argument made by Wordpress users is not something that keeps me up at night. #sorrynotsorry
18. Calendar
The built-in Calendar system allows you to post new events like posting a new blog. You can also schedule an event ahead of time, and tell the Squarespace platform when to publish that event posting, so that it’s only live (& viewable by site visitors) when you want it to be.
For example:
If you have an event coming up in 8 months, but you aren’t quite ready to let people know about it yet, schedule the event to post 3 months ahead of time, instead of right when you create the event post.
It’s super easy to keep up with & they also allow categorization & tagging, for organizational purposes. This also allows them to be searchable within your website.
For example:
– If you tag all events that are Kid-Friendly with a Kid-Friendly tag, then someone can search your website for kid-friendly and see the list of events filtering only those which are kid-friendly. A nice touch!
– If you have events where alcohol is served, you can tag those events or categorize them as such, so that viewers can search for things like alcohol, beer, wine, etc., and get a filtered list of events that serve those things.
You can also add images, content (information about the event itself), and list the day/time/place, including the addition of adding the physical address so people can click to get directions to it.
The time/day even allows viewers to add the event to their personal calendar via Google Calendar or Apple’s iCal format.
And on top of that, you can tell Squarespace to “push” that post to your social media pages, like Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter and it does so for you (in a limited format - no custom captions per post; sorry!).
19. Scheduling
Squarespace bought Acuity Scheduling & so now Acuity is even more directly integrated into the Squarespace platform because it (‘Scheduling’) shows up in your home menu when you’re logged into your website.
Acuity is a great platform for online scheduling, which also allows you to match your branding colors & use similar fonts, build basic forms that ask each person that schedules questions related to the appointment type, allow different appointment types & lengths, take payments when scheduling, send automatic appointment reminders, and even allow people to cancel or reschedule without even involving you directly in that process.
What’s more is the scheduler can be embedded on your website via a simple block, just like any other block you can add to a page or a link to your separate scheduler page, where people can schedule appointments.
How cool is that! Viewers never have to leave your site to make an appointment!
How is this different than using Squarespace’s Forms feature?
Acuity takes the appointment & actually puts it in your calendar, blocking off those times so that no one else can schedule during that appointment. It also automatically handles lots of things related to the scheduling process.
If you use Squarespace forms to schedule appointments, the information submitted in the form will either be emailed to you or added to a Google Sheets document, where you will have to implement that data yourself. Nothing is automatic there. You will have to enter the appointment in your calendar; you will have to send your own reminder email, no payments can be taken at the exact time of scheduling, etc.
• To learn more about Acuity, visit their site here.
• To see what’s included in their paid plans, click here.
20. Blogging
These work much like the Calendar system, with most of the same features, like scheduling ahead, adding customized content to each post (images, text, links, buttons, videos, etc.), tagging & categorization, and of course “pushing” the post link to your social media pages (if you want).
The one downside to blogging on Squarespace (which is easily fixed during the design setup), is that Squarespace’s home blog page (the main landing page for your website’s blog) is lackluster with little design customizability on version 7.0.
I fix that 7.0 problem by creating a new page, which I design like an Archives page so that users can search through the content by category, title, or thumbnail image. If that’s something I do for your project, no one would have the direct link to that original un-designed blog page, and it wouldn’t be linked in any of your navigation, so very few people would use it. I would instead link to the designed blog page (as my main navigation does), so we can control which version viewers are seeing.
On version 7.1 the blog section still isn’t extremely customizable (but more so than most 7.0 templates, Brine being the exception), but you can add additional sections to the whole page either above or below the blog section, which gives it a more customizable look & more effective usability.
To see why businesses should blog, you can read all about why Google likes blogging here.
20. How to get 20% OFF your 1st year of Squarespace
If you work with a Squarespace designer that is a Squarespace Circle member, like me, you automatically get 20% off your first annual payment to Squarespace!
I design your website on a free trial that is up to 6 months long. That gives us plenty of time to complete the design before you’d need to pay to publish & make your website live.
Because the site started as a free trial on my own account, when I transfer ownership to you, the discount will apply automatically, no coupon code needed. Easy peasy!
21. How to get 10% OFF Squarespace if you’re DIY-ing
Click here to get 10% OFF your first year of Squarespace*, whether you work with me or not!
*Yes, that’s an affiliate link! If you click through & purchase, I’ll get a small commission at no extra cost to you; my reading fund thanks you!
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