Squarespace Website Builder Review (2023)
What is Squarespace?
Squarespace is a website builder tool that is aimed mainly at Small Business Owners, Service Based Businesses, Entrepreneurs, Bloggers, and Nonprofits as a solution to let people without web development skills build and maintain their own websites.
How many people use it?
Today, Squarespace has 3.79 million subscribers across the globe.
How Squarespace works?
Squarespace is a hosted solution, which means that it runs on its own servers and you don't need to pay for a hosting service or install software to use it.
Making a website is easy, even if you don't know how to code. You can create a website using a web browser and modify it with ease.
Squarespace's content management system (CMS) is user-friendly and allows you to choose a template, make changes to the design (such as fonts and colors), and use the style editor to customize those parts.
This simplicity is one of the reasons why Squarespace is so popular.
What are the Squarespace plans and pricing?
As with similar site builders, you don’t own a copy of Squarespace but pay an ongoing fee to use it.
There are two Squarespace pricing plans available for brochure-type websites:
Personal — $16 per month if paid annually
Business — $23 per month if paid annually
When it comes to the key differences between Squarespace pricing plans, the main things to look out for are:
Adding CSS and Scripts — the ‘Personal’ plan doesn’t let you add CSS or JavaScript to your site. This makes it difficult to add bespoke design customizations or integrate third-party services.
Contributors – the ‘Personal’ plan lets two people edit your site or add content to it; all the other plans let an unlimited number of contributors do so.
Integrations — connections to certain third-party apps and services like Opentable, ChowNow, Amazon, and Mailchimp are only available on the ‘Business’ or higher plans.
Marketing features – on the $33 per month ‘Business’ plan and higher you can use Squarespace’s promotional pop-ups and banners. These allow you to highlight particular offers on your website, or ask users to sign up to mailing lists. You can also add ‘mobile information bars’ on these plans (pictured below).
Site analytics — you don’t get access to these on the ‘Personal’ plan.
Squarespace’s mobile information bar — is a premium feature available in Business, Professional, and Premium plans., making it easier for users to access key information about your business on a smartphone.
How can I obtain a custom domain name from Squarespace?
Buying a domain with Squarespace is simple and straightforward. There are no hidden fees or ads.
Their Features Include:
Low initial cost — All Squarespace sites on an annual plan include one custom domain, free for its first year. Additional domains are between $20 and $70 per year.
Free SSL certificate — Every domain that points to a Squarespace site comes with a free SSL certificate so your visitors can see that your website is secure.
WHOIS Privacy — Squarespace takes privacy seriously. We automatically provide WHOIS privacy for all eligible domains, free of charge.
Spam-free parking page — When you register your domain with Squarespace, they’ll set up a beautiful, spam-free holding page while you finalize your website.
Easy DNS management — For most Squarespace sites, they handle DNS automatically. This means that your system connects your site’s domain name to its IP address, so visitors can find your site when they type your domain name into their browser.
If you’d like to try the Squarespace domain - Start your domain name search here.
What are the available Squarespace templates and design features?
Having quality templates is essential for creating an effective website design, especially if you don't have professional design experience. Squarespace offers a wide selection of around 155 templates, which are all visually attractive, and all the templates provided have a slick, contemporary look and feel, making them stand out from other website-building tools on the market.
Now I really like the Squarespace templates, but it has to be said that most of them work are very ‘image-centric,’ and really only work well when professional, eye-catching photography is used.
A lot of the templates are designed in a way that requires you to fill your home page with a large, full-bleed photograph (see the above screenshot for an example of what I mean here!).
So, if you are considering using Squarespace, it makes sense to invest some thought and time in getting some truly great pictures for your site before you start building it.
Usage of Stock Images in Squarespace?
A nice thing about Squarespace is that it provides you with access to all of Unsplash’s image library out of the box — this lets you browse a large number of royalty-free images that can be added directly and easily to your website.
And, if the quality of the Unsplash library doesn’t appeal, Squarespace offers you the option to buy images directly from Getty. These images cost $10 each, which is reasonable.
Typeface selection
A huge range of web fonts — from Adobe and Google — is included with Squarespace.
This is far more than provided by most competing website building platforms and makes it easier to make your website’s branding consistent with your other marketing materials.
If you want to use a font that’s not available in Squarespace, you can add it to your site via custom CSS.
The behavior of Squarespace sites on mobile devices
All Squarespace templates are fully responsive, so your website design will appear correctly on tablets, mobile devices, and desktop computers.
Not only does this make your site more accessible to a wider range of users, but responsive design can also provide some SEO benefits.
Additionally, you can use AMP with Squarespace.
AMP — or ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages’ — Presenting your website in this format can lead to a better user experience and preferential treatment in search results (Google favors websites that load quickly).
Styling templates
You can easily adjust fonts, colors, page width, etc., to configure a Squarespace template design to your liking.
One important thing to note about the latest version of Squarespace (7.1) is that it doesn’t allow you to switch templates once you’ve selected one.
Regarding styling your template via code, so long as you’re on a ‘Business’ plan, you can add custom CSS to your website.
Squarespace Blueprint
Squarespace has recently introduced a new system for styling templates that aims to simplify the process of building a website. It’s called ‘Squarespace Blueprint’ and it’s aimed at people who are entirely new to web design.
Squarespace Blueprint is effectively a five-step wizard that
asks you for some basic information about your site
helps you build a home page
lets you define a navigation
suggests color schemes
suggests font pairings.
It’s very easy to use and you can get surprisingly usable results out of it. And the nice thing about the feature is that once you’ve created a site with it, you can still use all of Squarespace’s styling and content-editing features to edit your site.
We tried the feature out recently and were impressed with it — you can watch the video of how to use Squarespace Blueprint below.
Video backgrounds
Squarespace provides a useful video backgrounds feature — this can turn an already nice-looking Squarespace template into a stunning one. This feature lets you use a Youtube or Vimeo URL to create a looped video background for your Squarespace site; you can apply a range of filters to this and speed up or slow down playback.
You can also upload videos to be used as backgrounds — you are given 30 minutes of video storage by default on all Squarespace plans, with more storage available if you purchase a ‘Members Area’ plan.
Watch this video below on how to add a video background in Squarespace:
Content layout
When you set up a new page in Squarespace, you can choose from a range of pre-defined page layouts — for example contact pages, about pages, team pages etc. — and this can really speed the design process up.
Once you’ve decided on a page layout, you’ll find that Squarespace’s ‘Fluid Engine’ drag and drop editor is easy to use, letting you insert ‘content sections’ — blank or pre-defined content areas containing images, text, forms, videos etc. — anywhere on the page.
It’s very easy to change the position of these content sections too — it’s simply a case of grabbing an element and dragging it to another location on the page (as highlighted in the video below).
As with Squarespace’s content sections, these can easily move around the page.
The type of content blocks you can add include:
text
images
audio
galleries (in slideshow, grid, carousel, or stack format)
restaurant menus
event listings
content summaries
calendars
maps
code
markdown
As you move your blocks around the page, you’ll see a grid appear — you can use this to ‘snap’ things into the right place.
Editing the mobile version of a Squarespace web page
Now, while some users will appreciate this level of control over both their mobile and desktop sites, the problem with it is that you end up having to manage two versions of your website, which can mean more work and complexity.
Personally, I preferred the way Squarespace used to handle all aspects of your site’s mobile view on your behalf — the new approach means that if you’re not careful, you may create quite inconsistent experiences for mobile and desktop users.
And oddly, there’s no way to hide elements on the mobile version of the site.
The Squarespace content management system is very good and gives you a great set of page layouts to play with.
Blogging features
What is Squarespace like as a blogging platform?
Well, first the good stuff:
Unlike some competing platforms, you can have as many blogs as you like on your Squarespace website. This is useful because it means you can create different blogs for different types of content — news, reviews, tutorials, and so on. Or, alternatively, you can stick with one blog and use categories and tags to split out your posts in various ways (as you might do in WordPress).
You can create really stylish summary blocks of your blog and drop them into any page on your site. And you can configure these (based on things like author, topic, tag, etc.) so that the most relevant posts for that page are displayed. Anyone who is interested in creating a magazine-style layout for their site will love this.
While competing website builder tools often restrict you to using tags only, you can use categories AND tags in Squarespace — this means you can present your content in a more flexible way.
As discussed earlier, you can enable AMP on your blog posts, which means that they will load very quickly.
Squarespace blogs come with an RSS feed, meaning that you can power e-newsletters with them, or let people feature your blog content on their sites in various ways.
For more information about blogging in Squarespace, you can watch the video guide to the topic below.
There are, however, two significant flaws in Squarespace’s blogging setup that need to be pointed out:
There’s no autosave. This is a big omission and it can lead to lost content (for example if your browser crashes mid-sentence, or you accidentally delete part of a blog post).
There’s no revision history (i.e., an archive of older versions of posts).
Version History
Squarespace doesn’t automatically keep a history of changes to your website. This means that if you accidentally mess up a page (or permanently delete it by mistake), you can’t restore an earlier version of it.
Mobile apps
If you’d like to manage your Squarespace site via a mobile device, there are three key apps available that help you do this:
‘Squarespace’
‘Acuity Scheduling Admin’
‘Acuity Scheduling Client’
All three are available for both iOS and Android.
Integration with social media accounts
Connecting Squarespace to social media accounts is very straightforward — you simply add your accounts in your website settings and Squarespace takes care of the relevant icons and feeds (pushing content automatically to selected social networks if required).
All the most popular social media networks are catered for in Squarespace, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Form storage options in Squarespace
You can also integrate Google’s ‘reCAPTCHA’ service into Squarespace data capture forms easily, which helps reduce spammy form submissions.
There are some improvements that I’d love to see being made to forms, however.
First, although the Zapier integration is very useful, opening up Squarespace’s data capture functionality to users of well-known email marketing products, it still makes life more complicated (and expensive) for these users than it could be.
Designing a contact form in Squarespace
Another improvement I’d like to see made to Squarespace forms is file uploading functionality — as things stand, you can’t let users attach any files to form submissions in Squarespace.
The other thing I’d love to see is conditional logic being added to Squarespace forms so that you can display additional fields based on user action, or send data to particular people (or storage options) based on what the user submitted.
Email marketing – Squarespace Email Campaigns
For an extra monthly fee, you can capture email addresses and send newsletters within Squarespace, thanks to its ‘Email Campaigns’ feature.
This means Squarespace can be used to manage your website AND your mailing list — arguably the two most important assets of any online business — in one place, while keeping the branding consistent across both.
For current pricing by billing plan, visit the Email Campaigns page.
How good is Squarespace SEO?
As with any hosted solution, you don’t have full access to the inner workings of the Squarespace platform or the ability to choose a super-fast host for your site. Accordingly, this means there will always be some limitations around SEO with Squarespace.
That said, websites built with Squarespace do quite a lot of things that Google and other search engines like. They…
are secure
automatically generate a sitemap.xml file
create clean HTML markup
use responsive design, making them mobile-friendly (Google prioritizes websites that appear quickly and display correctly on mobile devices)
provide some AMP features.
Squarespace lets you tweak most of the key search engine optimization elements easily enough — page title tags, headings, meta descriptions, alt text, etc.
The platform also allows users to enable free SSL on their sites (and very easily too). This is important because sites using SSL certificates can be treated preferentially by Google in search.
And I’ve noticed that sites I’ve built in Squarespace 7.1 are starting to pass Google’s ‘Core Web Vitals‘ tests more frequently than sites I’ve built on other similar platforms. Squarespace sites often perform well in Google’s Core Web Vitals tests (The Core Web Vitals targets focus on various aspects of site performance and stability and sites that meet them can occasionally receive higher search rankings).
However, Squarespace sites could definitely load a bit faster (page speed is important for SEO). I usually use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check the speed of my website.
And unlike competing solutions, Squarespace doesn’t let you edit your robots.txt file (a file that lets you tell Google and other search engines what content you’d like it to crawl or not).
Check out this page for more information on What Squarespace does for SEO.
Ease of use
Squarespace is incredibly user-friendly. I have used many website-building platforms before, but none have had an interface as smooth and straightforward as Squarespace’s.
When I hand over a website built on Squarespace to a client for them to make their own edits, there are hardly any issues. The learning curve is minimal, making it easy to use for anyone.
Squarespace's content management system is intuitive and easy to navigate, making it one of the best options out there.
Squarespace customer support
Squarespace provides customer support via email (24/7) or live chat (4 am - 8 pm EST, Monday to Friday); you can also use Twitter or Facebook Messenger to contact the company.
Additionally, there’s a YouTube resource available — the appropriately named Squarespace Help channel — that contains a lot of good tutorials on key Squarespace topics.
However, no phone support is available.
In terms of the customer service that is available, while the staff on Squarespace’s support desk are very friendly and provide reasonably quick answers to queries (with, in my experience, the live chat option being the quickest), they tend to deal with pretty simple issues only.
One final thing to be aware of is that while Squarespace email support is available in six languages (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish), live chat support is in English only.
The Squarespace help center
In addition to phone and live chat support, you can also make use of Squarespace’s ‘help center‘ to help you solve problems.
The help center is a searchable online manual/knowledge base containing videos and articles to help you understand how Squarespace works.
It’s usually pretty good for getting a sense of the basics, but there will still be the odd occasion when you may need to get in touch with Squarespace’s customer service team for help.
How GDPR-compliant is Squarespace?
In the era of GDPR — General Data Protection Regulation — it’s important to get privacy and data protection issues right, as the fines for not doing so are considerable.
It’s easy enough to sort out some of the GDPR basics with Squarespace; the data security is robust and you can add privacy policy, website terms of use and cookie notice documents to a site without difficulty.
However, when it comes to compliance in the area of cookie consent, Squarespace presents some fairly big challenges to prospective users.
GDPR requires website owners to follow 5 key rules with regard to cookie consent:
Let site visitors know that cookies are being used.
Explain how cookies are being used and why.
Provide visitors with a means to consent to ‘non-essential’ cookies being used BEFORE they are run (non-essential cookies include Facebook pixels, Google Analytic, Adsense etc.).
Log consent of cookie usage.
Allow users to withdraw that consent (i.e., switch cookies they’ve previously activated off).
While you can meet the first two requirements with a Squarespace website easily, it’s not that easy to meet the other three.
To do so you will usually need to use a third-party paid-for tool (we generally use CookieYes) to create a GDPR-compliant banner that gives users 100% control over the cookies used on a Squarespace site.
Creating a GDPR-compliant cookie banner in Squarespace is not as straightforward as it could be.
Squarespace review: conclusion
Overall, Squarespace is an excellent option for individuals and small businesses in search of a platform to build their site or store with. Its templates and content management features are strong, its learning curve is gentle and it’s an extremely reliable website builder.
It’s worth highlighting however that Squarespace is particularly good for two main applications: running a brochure website or hosting a portfolio site.
If you are an artist, photographer or a musician — or building a website for a one-off event like a wedding — you’ll find Squarespace to be a great choice of platform for building your site (and maintaining it in future). It’s also a very good choice for restaurant websites — photographs of meals and menu layouts can look fantastic in the context of a well-chosen Squarespace template.
Squarespace review FAQ:
Is Squarespace good for beginners?
In general, yes. Squarespace is a ‘do it yourself’ website builder, which means that it’s aimed at people without coding or web design skills. Like all similar products, there is a learning curve involved, but of the website builders we’ve tested, it’s definitely one of the easiest to use.
What are the main pros and cons of Squarespace?
The main advantages of using Squarespace are its beautiful templates; its intuitive interface; its easy-to-use selling tools and its lack of transaction fees. The main disadvantages are the fact that it doesn’t facilitate multi-currency selling; its lack of revision history features; and its inadequate approach to providing GDRP-compliant cookie banners.
Which is better, Squarespace 7.0 or 7.1?
Squarespace 7.1 is the better option, because you can create faster sites with it, it contains better ecommerce features and it’s the version that’s going to be developed and supported by Squarespace in the long term.
Is Squarespace free?
No. A monthly or annual subscription fee is required to use Squarespace.
Is there a free trial available from Squarespace?
Yes. You can try the product free for 14 days. If after that time you haven’t quite finished building your site, you can avail of a 7-day extension to this trial.
Now..over to you!
Thank you for reading our Squarespace review! If you’ve got any thoughts or queries on the platform, or have any questions on what the best website builder for your project might be, do scroll down and leave a comment on this post. We read all comments and will do our best to answer any questions you may have.
Hi! I’m Priya
A Boston-based graphic designer. I’ve been building websites for years. From my freelancing days to now running my own website design and development business, it’s safe to say that websites are officially my ‘thing’!
I love helping business owners like you see the full potential of their business - and a custom Squarespace website is the perfect option for service-based businesses. So, what are you waiting for?
