Squarespace: the best choice for small businesses and freelancers!
February 15, 2019
Squarespace: the best choice for small businesses and freelancers!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Squarespace
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.
- I spend zero time on maintenance now. It's really nice to finish a project and feel that my client is self-sufficient.
- Revision processes are a lot easier than they are with custom-code websites because I can simply do one round of revisions, then turn the site over to my client, so they can do what they want with it.
- Visual editing means I can simply start designing in the CMS itself, which saves time by cutting out the prototyping and coding phases.
- WordPress and Contentful
Squarespace doesn't offer as much flexibility as WordPress or Contentful (paired with something like GatsbyJS), but that's perfectly fine for 95% of small businesses. They don't need all the bells and whistles of WordPress and they certainly don't need a fully custom website with a headless CMS.