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 Great for Big Teams but Less Great for Precision
Squarespace: The fast and easy website builder
TrustRadius Insights
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
Awards
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Popular Features
- Admin section (87)8.383%
- Page templates (88)7.070%
- Library of website themes (85)7.070%
- Mobile optimization / responsive design (84)6.767%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
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.
- 8.5Role-based user permissions(59) 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.
- 8API(44) 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.
- 8.7Internationalization / multi-language(33) Ratings
The software supports multiple languages, countries, currencies, etc.
Web Content Creation
Features that support the creation of website content.
- 9WYSIWYG editor(76) Ratings
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.
- 8Code quality / cleanliness(69) Ratings
Code generated by WYSIWYG editor is clean and validates according to W3C standards.
- 8.3Admin section(87) Ratings
The admin page is easy to navigate and use.
- 7Page templates(88) 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.
- 7Library of website themes(85) Ratings
A library of website frameworks or themes is available as a starting point for building a website.
- 6.7Mobile optimization / responsive design(84) Ratings
The CMS helps users build webpages that work well on mobile devices – whether m-dot pages or responsively designed pages.
- 9Publishing workflow(76) Ratings
The software allows users to set up a custom workflow for updating the website, including approval processes.
- 7.5Form generator(69) Ratings
Users can build website forms for visitors to fill out.
Web Content Management
Features for managing website content
- 9Content taxonomy(66) Ratings
Users can create multiple levels and types of content categories including tags.
- 7.1SEO support(71) 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.
- 8Bulk management(44) 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.
- 8Availability / breadth of extensions(58) 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.
- 8.9Community / comment management(58) 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
(296)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Squarespace has become a go-to platform for small businesses, creative professionals, and marketers looking to build and manage visually appealing websites. With its well-designed templates and extensive availability of designer fonts, Squarespace allows users to create a professional-looking website with ease. Users appreciate the platform's intuitive interface and drag-and-drop functionality, making it accessible for both beginners and design professionals. Squarespace also offers useful tools like Analytics to track website traffic and sales data, as well as an Abandoned Cart feature to follow up with potential customers. Furthermore, Squarespace's integration with payment systems like Stripe and PayPal simplifies the process of setting up e-commerce capabilities on a website. Whether it's showcasing products, maintaining portfolios, or running corporate websites, Squarespace provides a time-saving and cost-effective solution for individuals and businesses alike.
Intuitive Interface: Users have consistently praised Squarespace's intuitive interface, with many stating that it has made website creation and management effortless. Numerous reviewers have mentioned that they can easily navigate through different sections of their websites and perform tasks such as managing portfolios, blog posts, and responding to comments seamlessly. This user-friendly interface has greatly enhanced users' efficiency in managing their websites and engaging with their audience.
Wide Selection of Templates: The extensive collection of beautifully designed templates in Squarespace has received high praise from users. Many reviewers appreciate the wide variety of options available, as well as the frequent addition of new templates. These templates are seen as time-saving features for users with limited design background and coding knowledge. Thanks to the intuitive nature of these templates, users find them extremely easy to work with and customize according to their preferences.
Great Customer Support: Squarespace's customer support has been highly regarded by users for its helpfulness and responsiveness. Reviewers mention that the support team is not only friendly but also goes above and beyond to assist them whenever issues arise. Users appreciate having responsive email replies and live chat options available for support. The excellent customer service provided by Squarespace ensures that users feel supported throughout their website building journey
Cons:
- Limited customization options: Users have expressed frustration with the limited customization options in Squarespace, particularly in terms of design and layout. Several users have mentioned that the templates provided by Squarespace can look somewhat generic and lack flexibility for creating more complex websites.
- Difficulties in navigation and finding features: Some users find it difficult to navigate Squarespace's user interface and locate certain features. There is a learning curve associated with the software, making it challenging for users to find their way around and access specific functionalities.
- Lack of customer support options: Customer service being available only through email has been seen as a drawback by some users. They feel that having additional support channels, such as live chat or phone support, would be beneficial for resolving issues or seeking assistance more efficiently.
Based on user reviews, users recommend using Squarespace for any level of web experience and most businesses. They find Squarespace easy to use and navigate, and highly recommend it for beginners. Users suggest exploring different templates and reaching out to support if needed. Squarespace is also recommended for small businesses, ecommerce, organizations, and artists. Users advise learning basic HTML and CSS coding for advanced features and understanding SEO for better website performance. They highly recommend Squarespace as the best website provider and recommend purchasing a domain through Squarespace for convenience. Users advise planning the site on paper before executing it in the system and recommend watching tutorials and experimenting with the program beforehand. Overall, users highly recommend using Squarespace for creating professional-looking websites with minimal effort.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-10 of 10)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.
- 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.
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!
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.
Excellent, easy-to-learn tool for beautiful basic sites
- Very robust how-to and troubleshooting guides – if you're trying to do something specific, a quick google search will lead you to a writeup by Squarespace of exactly the issue you're trying to solve. Comparing this to competitors where you're more or less on your own, Squarespace makes you feel confident that you can make any change you'd want.
- Well-designed template sites – you'd have to try very hard to create an ugly site when you've got such robust templates to work with. Plus design fundamentals like ample white space and color palettes are built in to the design process.
- Lots of options – Squarespace has beautifully-designed add-ons that clients ask for (such as adding a dynamic map to their site which shows their shop's location). These options require no jury-rigging and dovetail with the design of the site.
- Unbreakable web design – there is no way to break your site, unlike with competitors where you're trying to cobble together plug-ins to make your site function how you'd want it.
- 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.
If I'm dealing with an enterprise-level client that has more specific needs, Squarespace would not be my first choice since its customizability is limited (though well-suited for most small businesses).
Squarespace makes creating a simple website easy for people with no real web development experience. It offers a fairly clean interface featuring a visual builder WYSIWYG editor and the ability to drag and drop elements quickly.
- Fairly simple to use visual builder for front-end website development
- The cost is very low
- The setup, from purchasing a domain and certifying with SSL through building pages is relatively simple for non-coders.
- 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.
- temporary websites
- photographers
- hobby blogs
- artists
- B2B businesses
- Robust websites
- Monetized blogs
- Custom-designed websites
- Anything with even a remote amount of back end functionality
- Anyone who needs to establish significant business credibility to get clients or make sales
If Squarespace went to high school, they would have won "best all around" as their senior superlative.
Our marketing team uses the platform most consistently internally. We had formerly built our site on WordPress, which proved to be too difficult to update and maintain. We switched to Squarespace and haven't regretted it for a second. The website builder is intuitive, but also has advanced customization so our design team is happy and our marketing team can manage it.
- Intuitive User Interface: Literally anyone can create a website on Squarespace, from the experienced designer to the absolute novice.
- Customization: While Squarespace manages to be extremely user-friendly, it doesn't do so at the sacrifice of customization. You can still add custom coding if you need to, but it doesn't require coding experience to make a well-designed site.
- Functionality without hundreds of plugins: Many Squarespace competitors offer expanded functionality through plugins, which can be difficult to work with as they are third party functions that vary in quality. Squarespace has done a great job of adding features to their platform, so plugins are less necessary. They offer many integrations to major services (like Typeform and Stripe), but the experience is much better than sifting through hundreds of plugins.
- 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.
- Solopreneurs that need a pretty website fast
- Side projects
- Basic E-Commerce websites
- Anyone who needs to create a one page website quickly
- Marketing teams that lack technical skill, but are required to support the company website internally
Squarespace is least suited for:
- Companies with full design or technical teams that won't benefit from the additional structure Squarespace provides
Squarespace is simply the best. Period.
- Ease of use
- Beautifully designed on the front and back end
- Secure
- Can be cost prohibitive for some small businesses
Perfect for small business
- Easy to adjust CSS with a drag & drop interface.
- Healthy number of plugins that are ready to go as soon as you dive in - little to no configuration needed.
- Easy, drag & drop page layouts.
- Excellent security and uptime.
- There's a bit of a learning curve for how to get around the software and figure out where to find certain things.
- Sometimes the left nav disappears and I have no idea why.
- I've managed to break the top-level nav and couldn't figure out why or how to fix it.
Quick deploy those cost-sensitive websites.
- Down to earth setup and content management.
- Affordable.
- Easy updates.
- Squarespace is by design limited in flexibility.
- There is a modest learning curve, but nothing you can't tackle.