Overview
What is Squarespace?
Squarespace is a CMS platform that allows users to create a DIY blog, eCommerce store, and/or portfolio (visual art or music). Some Squarespace website and shop templates are industry or use case-specific, such as menu builders for restaurant sites.
Squarespace is the easiest way to start a website
Great tool for getting a website up quickly and efficiently
Excellent Website Builder
Squarespace delivers on its value prop, but customization can be time consuming
Try Squarespace for Improved Security, SEO and Online Sales
A happy Squarespace user
Squarespace Review
Minimal and aesthetically pleasing, simple to use CMS
Squarespace as a starter platform for ecommerce performance
Squarespace is great for Artists/ Authors & Illustrators!
Create & showcase your creativity!
Squarespace, Despite Some Limitations, Continues to Be the Best in Industry
So easy to use a kid could probably make your website.
Squarespace for retail sales was great!
Squarespace is a good tool to have
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Page templates (85)8.989%
- Mobile optimization / responsive design (81)8.686%
- Admin section (84)8.585%
- Library of website themes (83)8.282%
Pricing
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $12 per month
Features
Security
This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.
- 8.6Role-based user permissions(57) Ratings
Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration.
Platform & Infrastructure
Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.
- 7.7API(42) Ratings
An API (application programming interface) provides a standard programming interface for connecting third-party systems to the software for data creation, access, updating and/or deletion.
- 7.8Internationalization / multi-language(30) Ratings
The software supports multiple languages, countries, currencies, etc.
Web Content Creation
Features that support the creation of website content.
- 8.6WYSIWYG editor(74) Ratings
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.
- 8.7Code quality / cleanliness(66) Ratings
Code generated by WYSIWYG editor is clean and validates according to W3C standards.
- 8.5Admin section(84) Ratings
The admin page is easy to navigate and use.
- 8.9Page templates(85) Ratings
The CMS has standard webpage templates or types of web pages (e.g. homepage, article page, interior page, blog page, etc.); users can also build custom templates.
- 8.2Library of website themes(83) Ratings
A library of website frameworks or themes is available as a starting point for building a website.
- 8.6Mobile optimization / responsive design(81) Ratings
The CMS helps users build webpages that work well on mobile devices – whether m-dot pages or responsively designed pages.
- 8.5Publishing workflow(73) Ratings
The software allows users to set up a custom workflow for updating the website, including approval processes.
- 8.3Form generator(67) Ratings
Users can build website forms for visitors to fill out.
Web Content Management
Features for managing website content
- 8.4Content taxonomy(65) Ratings
Users can create multiple levels and types of content categories including tags.
- 8.4SEO support(70) Ratings
The CMS helps users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.
- 7.8Bulk management(43) Ratings
Users can change an attribute on a group of documents or sites all at once through features such as global search and replace, making bulk changes easier.
- 7.7Availability / breadth of extensions(57) Ratings
There is a broad library of extensions, plug-ins, modules or add-ons that allow users to easily customize their websites without building custom code.
- 7.8Community / comment management(57) Ratings
Users can put post/page comments through an approval process, auto-approve commenters based on their email addresses, block commenters by IP address, delete comments, etc.
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Squarespace?
Squarespace allows eCommerce users to customize not only elements like themes and fonts, but also structural elements like online store layout. Templates are optimized for mobile shopping. SEO, product galleries, and order management features are built in. Squarespace integrates with Stripe for credit card payments, and ShipStation for shipping.
Squarespace Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
---|---|
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(288)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 85)Squarespace is the easiest way to start a website
- They have auto updates so you don't have to worry about security issues
- The editor and templates are super easy to use
- Setup is quick and easy
- Minimal development experience needed to maintain.
- Solid templates that look professional with minimal work.
- Easy to manage multiple sites.
- WYSIWYG can be difficult to work with - feels like designing in Microsoft Word sometimes.
- Templates can be limiting and are generally less flexible than competitors like WordPress.
- Plugins and advanced features are mostly not an option.
Excellent Website Builder
- Easy to use
- No need to worry about hosting
- Great integration with various tools
- Mobile Responsiveness
- Not as customizable as Wordpress
- Squarespace version updates can get frustrating
- Looks incredible
- Great integration of marketing and SEO for websites
- Great integration for marketing emails
- Sites are mobile responsive without having to design a separate site
- Customizing the sites can be highly UN intuitive
- Navigation for editing the sites can be difficult and frustrating
- Squarespace has different versions and it's hard to know which version you're on. You can't switch after you start making a site with one version.
- Security
- Customer support
- Maintenance
- Squarespace would be improved by offering options for variants for downloadable products.
A happy Squarespace user
- Streamlined appearance.
- Multiple options.
- Space for creativity and ingenuity.
- Trying to configure site options.
- Adapting a template to a site.
- Being able to move around the interface.
Squarespace Review
- Image Stacking
- Website Building
- Customization
- Drag and Drop
- Domain accessibility
- Pleasant themes
- Usability
- Customization lacking (CSS)
- Easy to navigate
- Simple to update products
- Ease of use for check out pages
- Simple platform for site management
- Low SEO value
- Hard to expand for larger scale online catalogs
- Limited check out integrations
- Templates and Designs worked well for the sort of website I was creating
- Blogging Feature was great to keep customers up to date on current events
- Great price for what your getting in the website deign
- Excellent support whenever you run into a snag. Live chat I have found was a great tool and you get responded to right away.
- I find the usability of the editor to be a little frustrating at times. I would have preferred to have an autosave feature instead of having to save every change.
- Page speed is low, which makes for a poor smartphone experience.
Create & showcase your creativity!
- Easy to set up initially
- Learning curve isn't steep to access the dashboard features
- Decent Analytics to keep track of basic traffic data that helps in making decisions.
- Needs more integrations from other web friendly platform tools.
- Not innovating fast enough - I feel their updates aren't creative enough
- Better Video & multimedia integration.
- Out-of-the-box templates make it easy for non-technical people to get started
- Easy to manage, add users, and customize administrative features
- Ability to integrate a number of other services and applications
- For those who are a bit more savvy than a typical non-customized website but not proficient coders, the tools can seem a bit limiting in ability to really adapt and tweak visuals and special content
- Doesn't always play friendly with mobile versions and different browsers and can be difficult to know, at times, how the content will look across the internet and smart phones
- Limited customization of payment/donation features requires us to use a separate platform for online payments
- Stupid simple to use. I know very creative people who cannot code and this is probably the easiest ever platform for them!
- Pretty website templates and great functionality with showing off portfolios.
- They've already figured out what are the problems that non-coding people have when creating websites and they've figured out a simple solution for all of it.
- SEO doesn't seem to crawl as well on different search engines.
- I wanted to hook up my API code to my squarespace site to see how it tracks visitors and I didn't have a way to do that.
- Website loading time felt kind of average (3-5 seconds). I like to be around 1 second or less.
Squarespace for retail sales was great!
- Fast setup
- Easy-to-understand backend
- Great customer service
- Back end does require some technical knowledge
- There is no scraping opportunity from our our website, which would have improved content speed
- Customer service was email only
Squarespace is a good tool to have
- Provides great looking templates
- Provides good online sessions to develop skills
- Provides website analytics
- The forum needs to have more users
- Help center can have more videos
- Need more templates for more industries
Easy Peasy Get Up to Speed within Minutes!
- Blogging feature - easy to set up
- A variety of templates and designs for the clients to from
- Mobile apps
- Couldn't see anything wrong. Almost makes me want to stop creating custom sites because of Squarespace!
- The sites created in Squarespace are easy for my clients to maintain.
- Updating a Squarespace site can be completed by the client
- It is easy for me to quickly design and implement a wide range of websites for my clients.
- Maintaining a Squarespace website costs more than a traditional or WordPress site.
- Building larger or more complex sites is difficult.
- Lack of 3rd party plug-ins reduces customization options.
Quick, Easy, Professional and Beautiful.
- Squarespace is very easy to use, this is a super helpful thing as small business owners we have to wear many hats and being a full blown website developer doesn't need to be one of them.
- Squarespace has quick and simple plugins.
- Squarespace allows you to easily expand as you need to.
- As a wine company it would really love it if Squarespace had an easy plugin for wine club subscriptions.
- Squarespace would be awesome if it could automatically take your photos that you upload on the site and optimize them for the web and for the website.
- I do wish we could have more than two contributors for the basic website costs.
- Squarespace makes it simple to set up your website, whether you know a lot or very little about web design. HTML coding can be used but is not necessary, thanks to the hub's large selection of templates for both overall website look and individual pages.
- The backend "Dashboard" for Squarespace sites is very clean and clear — navigation is simple to get started, and if you select a wrong section, you can easily go back to the main menus.
- Commerce is very nice. I've used Shopify and a few custom store backends, and Squarespace stands out as one of the best. Because I'm a longterm user, I have certain benefits that now have a different price point, but I'd recommend their store as a very good option for most groups.
- Analytics are pretty standard, which is nice for groups who want to keep track of basic traffic and sales without needing a secondary tracker, but may not satisfy someone looking for extra robust information.
- It takes practice to get used to the editing flow for setting up pages in Squarespace: you need to both use an on-page "Page Content" tab to edit most aspects but also use a gear icon on the left-hand sidebar to finish setting up the pages with SEO, social image and metadata style descriptions.
- Because so much of your website is created through drag and drop, it can be frustrating at times when items do not move as precisely as you need. I end up having to resize columns after laying out the whole page from time to time.
- I pay for a domain through Squarespace because it keeps it simple, but the pricing is not ideal, especially if you need more than one domain. If you are bringing your own domain names, there is extra work, but it does work.
- Squarespace makes it very easy to get products listing in an eCommerce store. The interface is intuitive (they've improved in this regard quite a bit in their recent update, in my opinion) and quick to navigate.
- Squarespace is designed for fast deployment. While it sacrifices some customization, it is very simple to get your website framed up, the pages filled out with images and content, 3rd party integrations set up, and everything launched.
- The tools for building your content are easy to understand use. They've improved greatly with the functionality for inserting a content block. It used to be pretty buggy or fiddly but you can now just place your cursor in the editor where you want to insert something, see an indicator for where the new content will be inserted, click, and you're on your way.
- Solid uptime performance. I've never had problems with my website going down after two years as a customer.
- Automatic updates keep the site secured and free of malware or other problems that tend to afflict the average WordPress user.
- Design options tend to be limited unless you venture into the world of add-ons where things can get quite technical. If you're looking for a plug-and-play, you'll get it here, but you will likely have to concede some personal design preferences to fit the boundaries of their templates.
- It can be a little bit tricky at first to figure out the Pages tool and how to use it to get your navigation the way you want. I have some pages that I don't want in the primary navigation and
- This platform really needs more turnkey functionality for a membership site, recurring payments, gated content, etc. I hope that's coming at some point. Right now, you're better off using Squarespace for a more conventional eCommerce business.
- If you're a blogger and want to load up your site with ad placements, Squarespace is not for you. The platform is really unfriendly for any kind of ad network integrations, including AdSense.
Squarespace is not a great choice for ad-revenue-reliant bloggers or similar content creators. Its eCommerce tools are great for launching quickly but lack a lot of customization options without custom development. If you have the resources to go that route, however, there are some great Squarespace development shops that can do some pretty cool stuff.
- Squarespace is great because the interface is simple. Anyone can build a website in this platform.
- I love that analytics are tracked within the software itself.
- User management and editing is easy.
- Writing blog posts are easy.
- Squarespace is simple, which is a positive, but it also lacks a lot of other tools for creating further complexities.
- The templates could definitely be improved.
- Some templates are not responsive.
Squarespace for small non-profit organizations
- Design - Squarespace is like an Apple product, it just looks really nice and does what you want it to do out of the box. If you're like most young non-profits, you probably just want to put up a basic website that looks visually appealing, presents information about your work, and collects donations. Squarespace is fantastic for that purpose.
- Accessible editing - If you have folks on staff who are not tech people, they will still likely be able to make quick updates to text or replace a photo with Squarespace. The editor is very newbie-friendly, and you can easily add restricted contributor users who can make certain changes, but can't bork the whole thing. Compared to a WordPress dashboard, Squarespace is super simple.
- Landing pages - Squarespace has a feature called "Cover Pages". These are really handy for when you'd like to make a quick landing page for a specific project or take your site offline temporarily. If you set up your site and only select a cover page as your site structure, the price for monthly service also drops dramatically.
- Domain included - When you create a Squarespace site, you can register a domain name for free for the first year. Many organizations have trouble keeping track of a separate web host and domain registrar and will lose their domain name unintentionally over an unpaid bill. Having the domain and the site hosting/builder all in one package comes in handy to avoid this situation.
- Pricing - I haven't done a lot of shopping around, but the price points for getting to e-commerce functionality seem fairly steep. It's worth doing the math on your expected sales to see if you should choose the commerce plan with transaction fees (less expensive monthly) or without. It's also challenging to compare with other solutions, because Squarespace is all inclusive while another product like WooCommerce will cost money as you go along in the build and can be hard to predict.
- Store Products are rigid - Squarespace uses Product objects for e-commerce, and they are created by the page. In other words, if you start building a store page and add 10 products, those products will not be accessible on other store pages across your site. If you're working with a large inventory, this can be a nightmare.
- E-commerce add ons - We were looking to create a popup that encouraged customers to donate to our organization, and this isn't natively available inside Squarespace. It was frustrating that we had to do a lot of searching for a third party company and pay $50 to get this done. It would be nice if Squarespace could offer a marketplace of approved vendors if they aren't interested in building out these types of standard e-commerce behaviors. I had to trust the $50 code would do what we wanted it to do without any backing from Squarespace. Luckily, it worked beautifully!
You can also purchase a Google Workspace account via Squarespace and keep billing for website, domain, and professional (@your domain) email in a central place. It's a great way to put everything together for your online portion of the organization.
If you're running a larger e-commerce operation beyond maybe a dozen products, Squarespace might not be the right choice for you simple because the inventory management piece will end up costing time in labor and agita.
- It is intuitive. I have little IT knowledge but easily picked it up.
- It integrates well with other software. This allows us to seamlessly host our Donate page and scheduling system.
- Honestly I have yet to see a drawback, at least for my organization.
Squarespace is an excellent platform for simpler websites, but be aware of some e-commerce limitations
- Getting started with Squarespace is incredibly easy. Their templates make getting an early design for your website set up and published quick and simple. There are plenty of advanced features that can be utilized to tweak the design indefinitely but getting up and running smoothly and quickly is key and Squarespace does that beautifully.
- The Squarespace Analytics tools are incredibly helpful. They are quite detailed yet very easy to understand and parse through. If you've ever tried to understand all of your Google Analytics data, you can feel like you need to get a new degree to comprehend it all. Squarespace Analytics are intuitive and easy to understand allowing you have an easier time making decisions based not eh data you re provided.
- Squarespace makes integrations with other platforms very easy as well. Email service providers (like MailChimp or Contant Contact), or integrating with outside fulfillment centers for orders of your products is very easy to set up. The back end design and control makes navigating through these things very easy (with the right instructions, of course).
- My biggest complaint about Squarespace is particularly about the shipping rates controls in the Commerce plans. Squarespace does not allow you to assign different shipping costs to different products. You can set up different costs for different levels of shipping (for example, Ground, Express, Overnight, etc.). But if you have two different products that are different sizes and weights you cannot independently assign each of them a different cost for Ground shipping. All products have to have the same price for Ground, the same price for expedited, etc. It is incredibly frustrating. This one deficiency alone has actually been enough to have prompted me into looking for alternative platforms for my e-commerce site. If you sell multiple products of varying sizes and weights and you intend to charge you customers shipping, then be aware of this beforehand. If you only sell digital products, or products that don't vary much in size or weight, or you intend to offer free shipping on everything then this will not be as big a deal for you.
- Squarespace offers excellent help services via live chat, but in the years that I've used it I get the sense that recommendations from users are taken seriously. I've made numerous recommendations for enhancements and fixes over the years and I know other people that have as well. However what I continue to see from Squarespace is development of new product offerings that aren't necessarily in line with their core product offering, and not much in the way of making what they already offer much better. There are certain things that should be prioritized by their development team but I don't get the sense that these are taken seriously. Of course this is just my guess as I don't work there but it's important to remember that perception is reality to those who are perceiving.
- As much as Squarespace makes integrations easy, they still have along way to go with regards to being recognized by many other platforms as integration worthy. Very often I come across services that offer integrations with web design platforms and Squarespace is not one of them. I'm not sure why this is but I wish Squarespace would do a better job of working with these other companies to have integrations with them.
Squarespace: website creation made easy
- It's easy to design a bold, colorful and eye-catching website.
- There are multiple avenues for creation and maintenance - web and app.
- The user interface is easy to understand and requires very little learning and/or trial and error.
- The mobile app lacks certain customization and editing options are native in the web app.
- It would be nice to log-in and automatically be routed to your domain, instead of having to select it.
- While it's easy to use, certain tasks take multiple clicks - it would be nice if there as a "Favorites" option to quickly access the areas you use most.