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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.
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- Admin section (87)8.383%
- Page templates (88)7.070%
- Library of website themes (85)7.070%
- Mobile optimization / responsive design (84)6.767%
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For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.squarespace.com/pricing
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $12 per month
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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). Their templates are designed to be elegant and give users maximum control over the look & feel of the website. Some Squarespace templates are industry or use case-specific, such as menu builders for restaurant sites.
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 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
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 starts at $12.
Reviewers rate WYSIWYG editor and Publishing workflow and Content taxonomy highest, with a score of 9.
The most common users of Squarespace are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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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.
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January 03, 2024
Squarespace: The fast and easy website builder
As our backend for our website and some website creation. Used the templates to build the look of our site
- Easy to build templates
- Easy to adjust settings on the templates
- Easy to link documents for the public to view on your site
- Easy to build test backend pages or make those pages live with drag and drop feature
- Templates are meant not to be broken too much but that limits the variability. Some design feature restrictions could be lowered
- Sometimes its unclear whether a background page is live or not.
- Hard to run backend dns items
We use Squarespace to build the microsite for one of our signature events. It is paired with another tool for actual ticket purchases, but Squarespace drives most of the front-facing website. It was set up by an external vendor, and maintenance is jointly handled by the vendor and our internal team.
- 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.
I use Squarespace for two websites. One for me personally and another for my company. It definitely makes great websites that look fantastic on both mobile and laptops. I also use it for marketing lists and emails, for selling products with a checkout, and for analytics. I'm considering using it for memberships but haven't gotten there yet.
- 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.
May 25, 2021
A happy Squarespace user
Square space was an excellent platform that I used to display my online portfolio. It was a seamless experience from start to finish with setting up my platform. I was very pleased with the customer service that was offered and would highly recommend it to someone who was also looking for a similar system to be used.
- 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.
We have many clients that use Squarespace for their website and ecommerce solution. Squarespace offers a great starting point for SMBs to get into ecommerce and have online check out for services.
- 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
I used Squarespace to create website for Legends of Erin. I found it worked well for what I was looking for. I felt like the amount of templates and flexibility were perfect for the sort of website I was designing. I also found the templates highly customizable in the Design menue to fit the feel I was looking for.
- 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.
May 24, 2021
Create & showcase your creativity!
SquareSpace is being used by the marketing department of our Independent Research Group. They setup a marketing site to showcase our research team and the multiple projects that they are working on. We are keeping this site separate from our organization site as we want to create a unique identify for this smaller research group to gain traction for the multiple projects.
- 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.
I went through a trial to see if Squarespace would fit my business well for a website earlier this year. I wanted to tinker with the features and ease of creating the website and also see how well it would solve other SEO and tracking issues I've had over the years. While I did find it very easy to use, unfortunately, I found WordPress to work better for me overall and I went with WordPress.
- 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.
May 24, 2021
Squarespace for retail sales was great!
We used Squarespace to sell our products at the height of the COVID pandemic when our retail stores were closed. The product was easy to set up and got us selling in a flash!
- 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
May 24, 2021
Squarespace is a good tool to have
Squarespace has been used to develop a web portal for a speciality food company. It is addressing the problem of trying to get more customers to be interested in ordering speciality food online. This site was used across the entire organization and we were constantly making improvements to the site.
- 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
May 23, 2021
Easy Peasy Get Up to Speed within Minutes!
A client of mine purchased Squarespace as their website for their business. Even though a custom design website would have cost more, she elected to pursue Squarespace for the ease of drag and drop and the ideas of a future blog.
Except they found it more confusing. The learning curve wasn't confusing. They didn't have a comprehensive flair for good design, usage of typography and colors for the website. That's where I come in, and I designed a site using the Squarespace interface with ease. It's likely one of the most accessible third-party platforms I have used!
- 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!
May 14, 2021
Quick, Easy, Professional and Beautiful.
We use Squarespace for all our websites. We have multiple domains and multiple websites, some simply splash pages and others full websites with e-commerce. Squarespace allows us to quickly create clean, professional websites with very little lift. As a small business most of our organization is using Squarespace. This allows us to save time and money not just once but ongoing as it is so easy to update.
- 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.
I began using Squarespace to maintain a production blog for web series Club Swim Show, which worked very well. Squarespace provides a very versatile, customizable website building platform that was easy to update with blog posts and to keep a specific look to the overall production website for the social media and promotion department. I continue to use Squarespace for my husband's and my portfolio sites, where I can showcase portfolio work and offer an easy-to-use storefront for any merchandise we have available to sell related to our graphic design and art.
- 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.
We use Squarespace as our primary web presence for both our online store and blog. We sell digital products via Squarespace's eCommerce platform. I am the primary Squarespace user and am responsible for all content updates and edits in the store and on the blog. Squarespace enables us to create a good-looking website for our small business without additional help from a designer. It also integrates easily with our Stripe and Paypal accounts.
- 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.
May 07, 2021
Squarespace for small non-profit organizations
Our non-profit uses Squarespace as our website builder for our organization's website. We use Squarespace as a solution for our web presence and for e-commerce capabilities that has allowed us to sell merch and physical CDs. We've also used Squarespace's e-commerce to "sell" free PDF downloads with resources for teachers, which has also allowed us to collect their email addresses for further engagement. We previously used Squarespace's Donation capabilities as well, which was fantastic when we were just getting started. (We now have a Bloomerang form embedded into our Squarespace site.)
- 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!
Squarespace is the software that my organization uses for building our website. For small non-profits like ours, Squarespace is an excellent tool. It is intuitive, easy to use, and easy to add new pages. We can't all have IT experts on our team, so this allows us to still have an awesome-looking website while requiring minimal technical knowledge.
- 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.
February 18, 2021
Squarespace is an excellent platform for simpler websites, but be aware of some e-commerce limitations
We use Squarespace as our e-commerce website and platform. It is our portal through which customers can find out about us, our products and what we do and then they are able to purchase our products on our website. It is basically like most traditional e-commerce websites. We do utilize certain other tools that Squarespace offers, like their Analytics tools to gauge the traffic to our site, traffic sources and sales data. We do also use their "Abandoned Cart feature which allows us to contact customers that added product to their shopping cart but did not complete a purchase. At this time we do not use a lot of the marketing tools that Squarespace offers as part of their Advanced Commerce plan.
- 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.
October 23, 2019
Designer Look and Feel is Ideal for Creative Businesses
I use Squarespace to build, manage and maintain websites for my small business clients who are involved in a variety of industries. Squarespace's "designer" look and feel, along with well-designed templates overall, makes it ideal for companies where creative representation is especially important. This includes graphic designers, photographers, architects, etc. The look is achieved through wide-format imagery, extensive availability of designer fonts, use of white space, etc.
- Ease of use with its drag and drop interface.
- Beautiful templates — more so than other easy to use builder tools like Weebly or Wix.
- Extensive and well-designed elements, including fonts.
- Images are presented beautifully.
- 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.
August 27, 2019
No need to be an experienced web designer!
Squarespace was used to create a local business page for a CrossFit. It was an easy to use solution instead of WordPress or another CMS platform with little to no experience of web design for the business owner. It was up and running - easily edited and template within a day. With such beautiful designs to choose from - it makes it a seamless operation for anyone who already has the content that just needs to be placed within.
- Template Website that is easy to update
- Great customer service and forum - to answer any question you have along the way
- One stop solution for purchasing domain, setting up domain, and going live with your website
- Not to worry about SEO - you can still have great search results with Squarespace
- 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.
May 22, 2019
Easy to Use with Some Limitations
Only our specific department is currently using it under my direct management (other departments also use it on their own), but the entire organization's website is not hosted on Squarespace. As the entire organization's website is proprietary and designed/developed for a Korean-speaking audience, Squarespace was our solution in allowing us to communicate with our English-speaking audience without having to go through the arduous process/task of re-coding the existing website.
- Well-designed starting templates.
- Flexibility for more advanced users who know how to customize through additional code.
- Ease of use.
- 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.
February 15, 2019
Squarespace: the best choice for small businesses and freelancers!
I've been using Squarespace off and on for years, but in the past year, I've shifted my freelance web design business completely over to Squarespace (from WordPress and GatsbyJS). For small businesses, it simply makes more sense, because there's no need for a developer or tech support longterm. This allows me to keep creating new websites and focus on the design aspect, rather than on providing maintenance services to existing clients.
- Easy to use. Literally, anyone can manage it after 30-60 minutes of training.
- It offers more design flexibility than it used to (backgrounds, more unique layouts, etc).
- There's no need for maintenance—plugin updates, security issues, etc.
- 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.
February 14, 2019
Webpage development that's as easy as it looks in the commercials.
Working as the A/V Media Coordinator for a multi-campus religious organization, we needed a user-friendly way to create a church website that provided a way to relay comprehensive information for all of our campuses, while maintaining accessibility for visitors and an easy way for non-tech users to update information on the website as needed.
- User-friendly Interface: Easy to jump in and create with no coding or design experience required.
- Free Trial (No Card Required): Designing the perfect website takes time. Squarespace allows a 14-Day Free Trial (with live access to the website) to learn the interface, input information, and tweak designs before committing to any plans.
- Multiple Tiers: Depending on the business or individual needs, Squarespace provides multiple website and commerce plans with corresponding features based on the user's goals.
- 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.
January 22, 2019
It just works
My organization uses Squarespace to host its employee handbook, with information on the code of conduct, etiquette, and role expectations. Employees can log in to view the document.
- Attractive visual interface for site building
- Fully responsive templates that adjust seamlessly to mobile
- Easy to create a website with little to no technical expertise
- 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
January 18, 2019
Squarespace plays game of Customer Keep-Away!
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I have used Squarespace to promote my graphic design business for four years now. My small organization benefits from having a web presence and Squarespace is the platform that we currently use. A web presence allows clients to see our past work to make an educated decision whether to hire us! Setting up our Squarespace site had its issues but we learned to work with the template constraints - we are designers after all so we always want to finesse design elements!
- Allows for quick site building through their templates. If you work quickly, you can build a site in about a day.
- I believe their demographic includes people just entering the web so the interface is simple (sometimes too much) and easy to learn.
- They have customization options if your business expands from a simple site to online purchasing.
- The designs are very clean and simple which allows for a professional look.
- 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.
January 18, 2019
Excellent, easy-to-learn tool for beautiful basic sites
Squarespace is used by a handful of team members – I use it primarily to create websites for clients that do not have needs that require the building of a custom website. We offer website design as an add-on service in addition to our branding and identity design services; Squarespace makes it very easy to build out websites that match the identity's look and feel and also fulfill all the customer's requirements in a cost-effective way.
- 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.