Squarespace is a powerful drag-and-drop website builder known for its attractive templates and flexible design tools. While the design process takes some time, you can build a very unique website with Squarespace.
The platform also offers a huge range of features for e-commerce. You can sell products, subscriptions, downloads, and more, plus build your brand with integrated marketing and SEO tools.
Hosting : Yes
Marketing functionality: Yes
SEO/Google: Yes
Design: Yes
E-commerce : Yes
WordPress: No
Squarespace is a popular website builder that boasts more than 4 million users. It’s best known for its stunning website templates, which offer a wide range of customization options using a drag-and-drop site editing tool. Squarespace has a steeper learning curve than some other site builders, but its flexibility makes it the platform of choice for businesses wanting their website to stand out.
Squarespace also has outstanding e-commerce tools for businesses selling online. You can sell physical products, digital downloads, subscriptions, and more. In addition, there are comprehensive marketing features, including options for merchandising products on your site, integrating with social media channels, and building email marketing campaigns.
Overall, Squarespace is a very powerful website builder that supports everything from single-page sites to massive e-commerce stores.
Squarespace offers more than 140 professionally-designed templates to help you start building your website. You can customize many aspects of your template including fonts, colors, and element spacing, among others. Squarespace also supports custom CSS code so that you can modify your template beyond the standard customization options.
A drag-and-drop site editor lets you add content to your site and move it around the page. There are tons of content blocks for text, image galleries, videos, social media links, maps, products, and more. While you’re limited to moving and resizing elements within a grid, the gridlines are tightly spaced, so you still have a lot of freedom to lay out your site content.
Squarespace is suitable for a very wide variety of users.
Small businesses that are getting online for the first time can use Squarespace to build a basic but attractive website. The customization options also enable you to differentiate your site without the need for coding.
Squarespace is even better for businesses that want to scale their online presence and grow their audience. The platform includes tools for email marketing, SEO, and creating and editing videos.
Businesses that use both physical and digital sales channels will find many useful tools within Squarespace. You can schedule appointments or accept reservations online, manage your entire inventory through Squarespace, and offer local pickup for online orders.
Bloggers can also use Squarespace, but this platform may not be the best choice for their needs. There’s no free plan and the basic Personal plan includes only a limited traffic analytics dashboard. You can monetize a blog using Squarespace’s Google AdSense integration, but there are no other integrations for adding ads to posts.
All Squarespace plans include unlimited storage and bandwidth. Note that your site will be hosted on Squarespace’s servers, and you cannot transfer it to another hosting provider.
Squarespace offers a built-in email marketing dashboard. You can create a new campaign using dozens of templates and a drag-and-drop email editor that works similarly to the site editor. You can also segment customers into lists and analyze your email open and conversion rates.
Squarespace enables you to sell physical goods, digital downloads, subscriptions, online courses, gift cards, and more.
It also offers tools for shipping, including calculating shipping rates and generating shipping labels. The platform integrates with 3rd-party shipping services like Shippo, EasyShip, and AfterShip.
Customer profiles let you see a customer’s entire order history. You can also monitor all of your open and shipped orders from a single dashboard.
The Squarespace Video Studio mobile app (iOS only) enables you to quickly create an on-brand video with your logo, colors, and fonts. You can use the app to record product videos, then upload them to your website and share them on social media.
Squarespace offers 4 plans: Personal, Business, Basic Commerce, and Advanced Commerce. There’s no free plan, but you can try out any premium plan free for 14 days.
The Personal plan includes all of Squarespace’s design features but does not allow you to sell products.
The Business plan unlocks Squarespace’s e-commerce features as well as an advanced traffic analytics dashboard. You’ll pay a 3% transaction fee on every sale.
The Basic Commerce plan eliminates the transaction fee on online sales. It also unlocks merchandising features such as the ability to advertise related products or label items as being low in stock.
The Advanced Commerce plan enables you to sell subscriptions and offers advanced settings for calculating shipping rates. It also gives you more ways to offer discounts on products.
|
|
Personal |
Business |
Basic Commerce |
Advanced Commerce |
|
Price per month |
$23 |
$33 |
$36 |
$65 |
|
Annual price |
$192 |
$276 |
$324 |
$588 |
|
Website design tools |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
|
Advanced trafgic analytics |
X |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
|
E-commerce |
X |
3% transaction fee |
✓ |
✓ |
|
Advanced shipping controls |
X |
X |
X |
✓ |
All annual Squarespace plans include a free custom domain for 1 year.
All Squarespace plans include a 99.9% uptime guarantee. All websites come with automated security scans and protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. You can further protect your Squarespace account by enabling 2-factor authentication. All e-commerce transactions are Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant.
Squarespace uses its own network of servers to host your website. These are all located in the United States in Tier III data centers, which typically experience less than 2 hours of downtime per year. Squarespace also backs up your data to multiple data centers to provide redundancy in case of a major failure.
Squarespace can take longer to get to grips with than many other website builders. This is the price you pay for flexibility and the many customization options that the platform offers.
If you don’t want to customize your template very much and just need a simple website, it takes around 30-60 minutes to create a site with Squarespace. However, more complex sites can take several days of work.
Once your site is up and running, though, there’s very little required to maintain it. Squarespace handles all template and security updates behind the scenes.
Squarespace offers customer support by email, Twitter, and Facebook Messenger 24/7. The support team typically responds to messages within a few hours. Live chat support is available 4am-8pm (ET), Monday-Friday.
Squarespace also has a very thorough online documentation center. There are dozens of videos to help new users get started, as well as detailed answers to specific design questions.
Squarespace is a powerful and flexible website builder that works particularly well for businesses that want to sell online. The platform’s templates are outstanding, and you get more customization options than most other site builders offer. Squarespace enables you to combine physical and digital sales channels, plus it supports a wide range of e-commerce integrations.
Overall, Squarespace is a great choice for businesses that want to get online for the first time or scale up their digital presence.