Visually Stunning & Easy to Use, But Has Some Drawbacks
February 26, 2016

Visually Stunning & Easy to Use, But Has Some Drawbacks

Paul Stainton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Squarespace

I have helped small business owners develop their online presence using Squarespace. In particular, building a food/recipe site for a well-known chef who needed something professional looking while really emphasizing the imagery of the dishes he created. Squarespace is a visually stunning platform and did a great job showcasing the finished recipes.
  • Visual representation - the way Squarespace showcases imagery is excellent.
  • Flexibility - we were able to create unique pages as well as elements within pages that really showcased finished recipes.
  • SEO - The system allowed us to craft dedicated title and description tags for each page to help boost the organic traffic to the site.
  • Content Management - Trying to integrate fixed pages with a blog functionality, while maintaining a consistent look and feel, have been a challenge. The platform seems to do well as either a fixed site OR a blog site, but not one with mixed types of content.
  • Creating a Master Template - It would be nice if Squarespace allowed you to maintain a master style sheet that could be applied to other pages on the site. We created a workaround by creating a blank, unpublished, page and simply duplicating it each time a new page was being created.
  • Scheduling Content - Other platforms allow you to easily create and schedule content for publishing later, but either Squarespace doesn't have that functionality or I was not able to figure out how to use it.
  • Before implementing and updating the site, it had very little traffic (less than 2%) coming from organic search, now nearly 30% of the traffic is generated organically.
  • User traffic and engagement has increased dramatically because of the SEO implementation as well as the visual design which has brought many people into the site (and back again and again).
  • The site has received many complements on the design, imagery and content.
Squarespace is more visually appealing than the other platforms, but is not quite as well suited for large libraries of content. With some work on integrating blog-type pages and navigation into the overall template (with a similar visual style) this could easily be addressed. This may also be related to the specific theme used, which is great for the main pages and content but the blog design is not quite as well-suited.
I find that Squarespace is very well suited for a small to medium size business that wants a visually attractive site that is easy to put together. However, it takes some technical knowledge to figure out the SEO and customization options (which is not unusual). The templates are very nice and offer a great deal of flexibility in choice. However, it lacks some flexibility in creating "visual" pages with a "blog-like" navigation. You either need to decide on the blog type user experience or do a LOT of manual coding to create the user and next-page flows that a blog would provide.

Squarespace Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
8
Code quality / cleanliness
9
Admin section
9
Page templates
10
Library of website themes
8
Mobile optimization / responsive design
9
Publishing workflow
8
Form generator
Not Rated
Content taxonomy
8
SEO support
9
Bulk management
9
Availability / breadth of extensions
7
Community / comment management
7
API
Not Rated
Internationalization / multi-language
Not Rated
Not Rated
Role-based user permissions
Not Rated