Squarespace Reviews

Drag and drop interface is not as intuitive as it was when it first launched. It's a bit more challenging to use than, say, Weebly.

Its ecommerce functionality isn't as robust as something like Shopify.

Setting up grids or sections isn't as easy to do as other tools.

Changing templates to see how content may look isn't seamless.

Adding more business cases for different templates

More integrations for email, social, lead gen platforms

Cheaper price on domains since they could purchased elsewhere and then forwarded to the website.

The editing experience is VERY slow. Every time you switch in or out of an editor (page content, styles, etc), Squarespace takes 3-5 seconds to load, which is not a deal-breaker, but definitely annoying.

There's still no "real" way to set a background color on a given section. You can fake it by using a background image, which works, but what if you want a light background? Squarespace automatically makes the text white for any section, regardless of how bright the background is.

It's frustrating that Squarespace hasn't implemented some sort of variable system for fonts and colors. If you decide to change fonts or colors, you have to go around and update it in 50 million different places, which is a huge pain.

I could see an experienced designer being frustrated by the limitations of Squarespace compared to an open platform like WordPress.

Sometimes it's difficult to make quick edits in the website builder because you don't know where the functionality resides. For example, you can make some edits to your nav bar by clicking on the nav bar, but you can make others by going through a series of menus. This is easily resolved by watching the tutorials, but can be frustrating for new users.

Pricing: While not too prohibitive, Squarespace hosting may be more than the average user may want to spend on hosting, especially if building their own website from scratch. However, if looking for a quick, good looking website that is easy to manage, Squarespace is the way to go.

Almost cookie-cutter Templates: when developing using the Squarespace auto-generated website builder, the templates provided look somewhat generic. If looking for a functional website that looks nice, Squarespace will do the trick. If looking for a quick, but more customized look, this might not be the way to go.

ability to duplicate blocks in builder

ability to save blocks in builder

file upload manager / Images etc

Does not support OAuth2 for federated access; this would be an extremely useful feature for company internal websites or reducing sign-up friction

Personal plan is quite pricy and limited

Templates have limited customisability

If you have a problem, customer service plays a game of keep-away! With only the option to chat or email, the contact person at Squarespace changes every time. So... everytime you have a question or response to a querie, you get a new person who doesn't have the thorough history. Squarespace says they share the information... but the representative would need to actually read the history and I don't believe they do.

If you don't auto-renew (which I don't like as I want to acknowledge this purchase every year), your account may go dead in an instant. To get things sorted out, you enter Customer keep-away and it can be days before a resolution is made.... Days!

Customer care..again... The turnaround time for a response has been no shorter than 24 hours! A ridiculous amount of time in this day and age. If you ask a question during the email thread, it will cost you another 24 hours.

The marketing for their product touts a quick and efficient response time for customer care. This is simply not true for the average, smaller client.

If one is not familiar with website developement, it can be daunting to create a site, even if you use their templates. Since there is no live person to answer immediate questions, you must watch (and re-watch) their videos. Some times there is a question they haven't answered with a video and it is hard to resolve this with only chats or email.

Interface: Sometimes I have problems with their interface not saving or working correctly. For example, the photo editor tool sometimes locks up and crashes causing me to lose work.

Picture Integration: Sometimes it is unclear how to manipulate cropping and sizing of pictures so they look right on the website.

Some layouts are difficult to customize.

The design process is a little clunky at times and takes some getting used to.

It's a little more expensive than some other web builders.

An even more basic plan would be welcomed for people looking for just a simple gallery to host w/o the bells and whistles.

I'd like to see Squarespace suggest the optimal layout/design based on my content.

Cover pages! I’d like to be able to add custom CSS

Reminders to publish new content

Higher capacity for audio

We would love to be able to add pop-up modules as a default option, without having to add additional code.

The site sometimes gets very laggy and working on the site gets slow/frustrating. We would like the option to perhaps work offline and push all edits live at once.

Being able to save versions of a particular site's design. While I like that any change you make is automatically saved, it'd be nice to be able to show clients multiple versions of a site/page design or be able to revert to a previous design later on.

The way that image galleries are handled can be a bit confusing. There's overlapping functionality between Gallery pages and image galleries inserted into a page, so I often find myself building out both to decide which works best.

It'd be nice to have a more professional way to share beta versions of websites with clients – sending them a link to an automatically generated URL (like triangle-sphere-9.squarespace.com) and having them log in as a guest is sometimes confusing. If there were a way to have that login screen say something customizable (like "Welcome to the future home of Website.com!") it'd be helpful.

I had difficulty embedding video content into it. I got it to work but it took longer than it should have.

I feel if you are purely using the website as a store then Shopify has better and more diverse options.

No Affiliate program: I think with all the designers out there that use and promote Squarespace as one of the best options, having an affiliate or reseller program would be nice.

I think there is room for improvement on the responsive design end. There is some disconnect sometimes with the way the layouts adjust depending on the screen size. For the most part it works great but I think it could be better.

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.

As a travel photographer I need my images to be front and center of every page of my website. The gallery pages are great for this, but not so with my blog. It is here where I think SquareSpace could use some improvement. I am only able to feature an image cropped in a circular fashion!

Restrictive when it comes to design. I tend not to recommend Squarespace to any organizations of more than one or two people because it is more or a temporary "fix" for not having a website, in my POV.

You never own your website, as it is stuck to Squarespace's proprietary platform.

Your website design will most likely look like everyone else's who uses the same Squarespace theme, as people who go this route tend to do very little customization.

There is still a learning curve, regardless of how easy people say it is for beginners.

It is a bit tedious to add photos to the online store.

Not all of it is intuitive, there was definitely a good bit of guess and check that I had to do which made it a bit inefficient.

Customer service is lacking, greatly.

Customization is virtually non-existent and impossible to create a customized website with specialized needs.

Transferring out a domain is an ordeal.

Has a glass ceiling, some products in this space have more extensiblility at the trade off of more maintenance.

All-in-one means you have to go with their options (which they have plenty of!)

More granular design control would be beneficial to making sites feel less templated.

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.

Sometimes the design options are scarce when we are looking to re-designed the website

While building the website, the platform can run slower than usual

There can be improvement on the frequently asked questions/help section. Some of the resolutions are generic and sometimes we need to look elsewhere for a workaround