Squarespace vs. WordPress - Which Website Platform is Better for Me?
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Links mentioned in today’s show:
Listen to Episode 142: How to Build a Website that Converts: Website Tips for Service-Based Entrepreneurs
Listen to Episode 102: From Local Experts to National Success: The Story of Two Nashville Realtors and the Home-Buying Class They Built
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Explore the ever-popular debate between Squarespace and WordPress, two giants in the web design world, as Victoria shares her personal experiences designing on both platforms! Uncover the strengths and weaknesses of each platform to help you decide which one is the right fit for your business. From ease of use to design capabilities, and from customization options to SEO effectiveness, there is no stone unturned. Whether you're a small business owner or a solopreneur, this episode will equip you with the insights needed to choose the platform that best supports your brand's online presence and growth.
Victoria will break down the costs and features of building a website on these platforms, highlighting why Squarespace might be the go-to for those seeking a streamlined, all-in-one solution, and why WordPress remains a favorite for those requiring extensive customization. The conversation also dives into the important aspects of security, maintenance, and customer support, emphasizing the critical impact these elements can have on your website's performance. With statistics, personal anecdotes, and practical advice, this episode is designed to empower you to make an informed choice that aligns with your business goals and technical expertise.
The Hot Debate in the Web Design Industry [01:17]
Squarespace versus WordPress. These two platforms are giants in the website world, each with its own set of pros and cons and each designed for a very different type of audience. The platform that you choose can significantly impact the way you show up online, which impacts your bottom line. In Episode 142, Victoria talked about building a website that converts and in the episode she shared a HubSpot study that showed that a well-optimized website can increase conversion rates by 200 to 400 percent. This proves that intentional, strategic design directly impacts your bottom line. If you choose a platform that inhibits your ability to design something with a positive user experience, that will directly impact your bottom line. On the flip side, if you select a platform based exclusively on design and you neglect to pick a platform that matches the complexity of what your business might need, that too can interfere with your user experience which will still negatively impact your bottom line.
Squarespace versus WordPress Differences [02:48]
WordPress powers over 43% of all websites on the internet, so it’s clearly the larger dog in the fight. It is highly customizable. WordPress is an open source platform, which means that users have almost limitless control over their site’s design and the features and functionality. With WordPress, if you can dream it, you can pretty much build it. Squarespace, on the other hand, only accounts for just under 3% of the market share, but this number is growing rapidly, and the percentage translates to about 5 million users around the world, so it’s still a platform to be reckoned with. Squarespace is known for its ease of use, its sleek design options and its all-in-one structure. It does hosting, security, and design. They are all handled within Squarespace, something that cannot be said for WordPress. Each of these platforms has its own niche. WordPress is often favored by developers, commercial enterprises, and those needing extensive customization. Squarespace has a reputation for being beginner friendly, user-friendly, visually appealing, and the one with the better design editor. This is why more solopreneurs and small business owners continually choose Squarespace over WordPress.
Ease of Use Winner: Squarespace [04:19]
As entrepreneurs, we wear a lot of hats, and so ease of use is exactly what we’re looking for in a platform. With Squarespace, the editing experience is very intuitive and straightforward. You use a drag and drop builder with a live preview, so you can actually see how your website looks as you’re building it. For people that aren’t tech savvy, Squarespace makes it possible to create a really beautiful website in hours, not weeks or months. They also have a pretty large template library to choose from, not to mention the endless amount of paid Squarespace template shops that you can buy from.
WordPress is a platform that requires a much steeper learning curve. Even after four years of personally using WordPress, Victoria did not feel like a professional and she was the director of websites for a previous company, at that time! WordPress’s backend is much more complex, and even though you can use visual editors like Elementor, you do still need to understand how plugins work, how to secure your site, and then sometimes, depending on how you want your site to look, you need to know how to code.
A survey by Clutch shared that only 37% of small business owners described WordPress as easy to use. Which means that 63% of the millions of WordPress users said that they did NOT find their website platform easy to use. Whereas 60% of Squarespace users say that their platform is easy to use. This is a huge reason why BrandWell chose to exclusively build on Squarespace. For BrandWell, most clients are solopreneurs or they have a small team, but very few of them will have a developer on standby to help them with their website. Now, every platform will have some sort of a learning curve, but based on statistics, Victoria’s personal experience, and the feedback from hundreds of BrandWell clients that previously used WordPress, Squarespace is far easier to use. So because of that, Squarespace is the clear winner here.
Design and Flexibility Winner: Squarespace [07:15]
Both Squarespace and WordPress websites can look phenomenal, but they get there in different ways. Squarespace is known for its high quality, professional templates that are built to be mobile responsive and they’re usually pretty beautiful right out of the box. There are a bunch of templates optimized for various types of businesses, and of course, you can hire a team like BrandWell and have a fully custom Squarespace website designed specifically for your niche and audience. If you start with their templates, you don’t need to know code, you can edit the template using their drag and drop builder.
WordPress also has thousands of themes and templates available, some free, some paid, but none of them are well-designed or optimized, which can lead to a lot of troubleshooting needing to happen. WordPress allows for so much more customization, but, because of that it usually requires a designer or a developer to get the same quality of look and feel that Squarespace templates offer.
If you’re looking for complex, highly customizable designs and features, WordPress is going to be the better platform to use. If you’re a big e-commerce shop and you need WooCommerce and more design flexibility than what Shopify has to offer, Victoria says that WordPress would be a great platform for you. If scalability is something that’s important to you, you also might need WordPress.
Pricing Winner: Squarespace [11:07]
Squarespace offers very predictable pricing. It has subscription plans and they’re upfront with you about what you’re going to be paying for. Squarespace plans start around $16 per month for a personal website, and then $23 per month for a business site, and then it goes up from there. If you have a commerce or a membership site, you’re going to at least need the business plan which ends up being around $275 a year. At the time of recording this episode, their personal plan doesn’t allow for any sort of custom code injection or embed codes, which pretty much is used in every single one of BrandWell sites. If you’re planning on using a template and you want a cheaper plan to get started with, the personal plan may be sufficient, but if you want a customized design and plan to work with a design agency, then be prepared to pay the annual fee. This does include the hosting, design, security and SEO features, which cannot be said in WordPress’s pricing. Squarespace is all-inclusive with no surprise costs, which can be good when you’re looking to budget for the year ahead and you need to know your numbers.
WordPress is free. Often, to start, you will have to pay for hosting, buy a domain, potentially purchase a premium theme if you don’t like their free options, and most likely you’ll end up needing some paid plugins. Victoria believes that the reason why WordPress is responsible for 43% of websites across the internet is because they have a cheaper starting point. They have a lot of people that want a free place to start building their website. However, a study done by a website builder expert said that on average, small businesses end up spending between $500 and $1,000 a year to maintain their WordPress site. So even though the platform is “free”, they get you on the backend with a lot of added fees that you really weren’t expecting.
Security and Maintenance: Squarespace [13:46]
It’s easy to assume that all these web building platforms come with security, but this is a huge factor to consider. Squarespace takes care of security, hosting, and updates automatically, so you never have to worry about your site going down or dealing with malware. Squarespace includes your SSL security so that your site is secure for its visitors. An SSL certificate is a Secure Sockets Layer and it’s a digital certificate that authenticates a website’s identity and enables an encrypted connection between the website and user’s browser.SSL certificates are essential for securing these online interactions, particularly when there’s sensitive data being exchanged like passwords, credit card numbers, personal information, etc. Having an SSL is really important. You’re going to lose a lot of people if it shows that your site is not secure. With Squarespace, this is just something that they include with their hosting, whereas typically with WordPress, you’re going to have to buy your SSL from whoever you buy your domain from. It’s not difficult to do, but it’s one extra step you’ll have to take.
WordPress websites are more vulnerable to hacking. Simply because it’s a large platform with so many plugins. A report from Securi shared that 90% of infected websites in their study were running on WordPress. If you have a complex site with 20 to 50 plugins, it’s almost a daily thing to go in and update them because if you don’t then they become vulnerable to hackers and to malware. With WordPress, even if it’s necessary to host due to your business complexity needs, just know that there is another extra layer of security monitoring that you’ll have to deal with.
SEO Winner: WordPress [17:48]
When it comes to SEO, WordPress is king, no questions asked. WordPress has more SEO flexibility, especially with plugins like Yoast or Rank Math, which offers a wide range of SEO controls. But, optimizing SEO on a WordPress site can also be a lot of work if you’re not familiar with these tools.
Squarespace’s SEO is simpler, but it does offer tools that cover the basics (customizable page titles, descriptions, mobile responsiveness, clean URLs, alt text for images, etc.). Squarespace is continuing to improve their SEO capabilities. Give it a couple more years and it’s going to be really hard to make the argument that WordPress is better when it comes to SEO, however, right now it is. If SEO is your primary goal, then WordPress is the clear winner here.
Something to keep in mind though is that just because you built your website on WordPress, does not mean that it’s going to rank better on SEO. You need to be actually utilizing the tools that WordPress offers to make it a SEO-friendly website, and that requires a lot of learning and often a lot of time. Victoria shares another study done by Backlinko which showed that Squarespace’s page speed and mobile performance times are very competitive, which are both really important factors for search rankings. While WordPress is excellent for advanced SEO needs, Squarespace SEO is more than sufficient for most small business owners and most solopreneurs.
Customer Support Winner: Squarespace [21:19]
We’ve all been there when our website glitches and we need help, and we need it immediately. Squarespace does offer 24-7 customer support via chat and email. They also have a help center that is filled with tutorials and forums. Squarespace’s customer support team can answer most of your questions pretty quickly, which is a huge advantage. Victoria really loves that with Squarespace, she knows that if she needs to, she is always able to speak to a human.
WordPress also provides support, but it looks different. Since it is an open source platform, it does not have a single unified support team. You have to rely on your hosting provider, your theme developer, or the creators of the plugins you’re using, to get the support you need. This can be pretty frustrating because you might have to bounce around to get the answers you’re looking for.
Overall Thoughts [22:52]
After working in website design for more than 10 years, four of which were on WordPress, and six of which were on Squarespace, Victoria shares that Squarespace stands out as the better choice for entrepreneurs who want an affordable, easy to maintain and beautiful website that they can manage on their own. WordPress can be a wonderful and incredibly powerful platform, but it’s best suited for those who either need custom functionality that Squarespace does not offer, or it’s for people who have the resources and big budgets to hire a developer and manage the technical side that comes with WordPress. If you’re looking for a website platform that gives you freedom from maintenance, saves you from surprise expenses, and still lets you create a really eye-catching website, Squarespace is the clear winner, and that’s exactly why BrandWell exclusively designs on Squarespace.
Key Quotes
“Squarespace stands out as the better choice for entrepreneurs who want an affordable, easy to maintain and beautiful website that they can manage on their own.”
Victoria Marcouillier
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