When building stunning and user-friendly websites cost-efficiently, business owners turn to the two most popular site builders—WordPress and Squarespace. If you’re finding it difficult to choose between the two, then you have come to the right place. Both have their own pros and cons, but to help you with your selection, this WordPress vs. Squarespace review will be a good read.
WordPress vs Squarespace – Discover the Difference
WordPress vs Squarespace – Which is Better?
Though WordPress and Squarespace are two of the most prominent site-building platforms, there are fundamental differences between each platform. Let’s take a look at these differences to see which one outperforms the other.
Features
Ease of Use
WordPress powers approximately 1/3 of the websites worldwide, including personal blogs and websites of industry-leading companies like Sony, NBC, and the New York Post, to name a few. The reason why WordPress is massively popular is the fact that it has a user-friendly and intuitive interface. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced website builder, you’ll love the ease of use WordPress provides, thereby making it incredibly smooth and quick for you to create a site just the way you want.
You can easily install and run your WordPress website in minutes. Everything is so neat and simple that you don’t need any technical know-how or expertise to navigate your way through building your site. All that you require is a web hosting account and a domain. The dashboard is feature-rich, which gives you the power to customize site heading, layout, and create pages and posts immediately. In addition to this, WordPress comes with custom-blocks that allow you to add content elements to your site pages to build beautiful and engaging layouts with media-rich content.
While Squarespace isn’t exactly hard to navigate or use, it isn’t as user-friendly as WordPress. Squarespace uses a drag and drop approach. This makes the platform beginner-friendly, but this interface is a bit of a conundrum. We think the usability can be improved because while using it; we felt that the platform editor kept slowing us down by prompting to save changes. Compared to WordPress, it is likely to take longer for beginners, especially to understand everything that Squarespace has to offer fully.
Design and Templates
Talking about ease of use, we can’t overlook the design and template factor. Squarespace has a good spread of website templates. It offers approximately sixty-seven templates to choose from, increasing your chances of finding a template that meets your requirements. Once you select a theme, it can be tailored to your business content.
What makes these sixty-seven templates a great selection is the massive combination of design and segmented layouts that you can tailor to your needs. From single page vertical scrolling to massive multi-block option, the depth to the choices is quite impressive.
But Squarespace is compared to WordPress in terms of design and template, WordPress takes the lead. WordPress has been offering unique templates for decades, so there is practically no competition in this aspect. It provides users to choose from not hundreds but thousands of free and paid site templates. These design templates are highly customizable and feature multiple layout options, drag and drop builders, photo galleries, sliders, and much more. You can customize the design with the site logo, images, and colors to reflect your brand image and persona. Regardless of your industry, you can find countless professionally designed templates that gel beautifully with your brand and work for your business seamlessly.
Although some people may find an abundance of choices slightly overwhelming, we think it’s better to have a large variety than to have limited options to select from.
Functionality
Functionality is, hands down, one of the most significant advantages of opting for WordPress over Squarespace. With WordPress, you get a great CMS (Content Management System) and the ability to install and integrate third-party plug-ins for maximum site performance and functionality.
Let’s focus on the content management system aspect first. Squarespace, as mentioned earlier, is a drag and drop website builder, but WordPress is a highly-functional content management system that is designed for performance. WordPress CMS provides it more in-depth functions than any other site builder. Thus, you have the flexibility to scale and tailor it on a more technologically advanced level.
It offers all the elements that you need to design and develop a stunning site with specialized functions related to your website’s specific needs. To further enhance and ensure top-notch site functionality, the WordPress directory includes hundreds of plug-ins. These plug-ins are some pieces of code created to execute specific tasks. They give users the flexibility to add additional features like galleries, shopping carts, and contact forms to any WordPress site. However, what further increases functionality is that users can buy and install custom plug-ins from third parties. Furthermore, they can be activated and deactivated as needed, and as the website evolves. The functionality feature truly gives WordPress an edge over Squarespace.
Squarespace doesn’t offer third party plug-in support and extensions. This makes it hard for new users to customize the site as per their requirements. It limits them to showcase their creativity and tailor the site according to their business needs and specifications. Put simply, Squarespace offers you less control over your functionality in comparison to WordPress.
Similarly, Squarespace lacks a functional CMS like WordPress. Therefore, users can find the platform limiting in terms of editing and adding new content. Although it is easy to put in the necessary content quickly when it comes to adding new pages, launching a new blog, or editing the design or content, it can be challenging with Squarespace especially, if you’re a new user and lack technical expertise. To understand and use it to its full potential, you will need to invest a great deal of your time and energy, which can be frustrating and overwhelming with pressing deadlines.
Search Engine Optimization
As you may already know, your site’s searchability is the key to spearing through the competition and ranking high in the SERPs for your industry. SEO is an essential part of great website design because SEO helps to rank and index a site.
Now, if you want that, then we’d say opt for WordPress rather than Squarespace. This is because WordPress websites rank higher for their industry keywords. After all, they’re continuously being updated. In addition to this, WordPress includes numerous plug-ins and tools to optimize content for search engine optimization. These plug-ins are designed for simplicity and SEO purposes. If you’ve never used meta tags, then don’t worry about WordPress SEO plug-ins working around. It is as simple as it can be. Besides this, with WordPress, new users can also learn a lot about SEO as it provides useful information about how which phrases and words to use for search engine visibility.
On the other hand, Squarespace offers limited search engine optimization power. All that the users can do with Squarespace to ensure their site is SEO friendly is to edit the website title and its meta description. That is it. Do you know what this means?
It means that users don’t have the flexibility to tweak the content keywords or separately tag the segments. It’s very limiting.
Customer Support
Trouble-shooting is a problem that may arise at some point in time. But how you deal with it can make a big difference in the performance of your website. Thus, we decided to evaluate the customer support services offered by both website builders. After assessing the two on the customer support factor, we found out that WordPress and Squarespace offer excellent customer support to its users.
With Squarespace, you can enjoy 24/7 support services. Their representatives are available via email and live chat. If you experience some problems with your Squarespace website, you can quickly reach out to a representative and seek help. However, we feel that to provide superior customer support, Squarespace should also offer phone support. Phone support is much needed to access immediate support because sometimes live chat or response to your email ticket can take time. For a quick conversation, phone support is a must.
The good thing is that WordPress users have access to phone support. If you opt for WordPress premium or eCommerce plan, you can access their priority live chat support at no extra cost. Plus, all WordPress users have access to 24/7 phone support. Call on their toll-free number to connect with their team of experienced engineers for help.
Adaptable and Flexible
WordPress was initially created to support blogs and other related types of publishing online. However, now it also powers a variety of websites for different purposes. Thus, WordPress gives you the flexibility to find a website and tweak it as needed. Their templates are adaptable to the company’s changing needs.
But in terms of adaptability, we think Squarespace has a long way to go because it is relatively new and doesn’t offer as many options as WordPress does.
Ecommerce
Both platforms are great for eCommerce site owners. Squarespace offers eCommerce templates that allow you to smoothly integrate a shopping cart into the site or a blog with the utmost ease.
In comparison, WordPress, too, offers eCommerce site templates, but it is most certainly better because of its WooCommerce plug-in. This eCommerce plug-in has played a pivotal role in taking WordPress eCommerce sites to the next level.
It helps you monetize any WordPress website by selling products over the web. With this plug-in, you can create different types of online stores and sell products for delivery, downloadable products, and affiliate products. More importantly, it is 100 percent free.
Price Structure
Startups and small businesses often opt for site builders because they have a tight budget. That’s why we decided to compare WordPress and Squarespace on their pricing structure to see which one is more affordable.
Squarespace offers three types of plans—Personal, Business, and Advanced. Each package varies in terms of pricing and features. For starters, their lowest plan is the ‘Personal’ plan, which is priced $12 per month. The Business plan will cost you $18 per month, and the Advanced plan is $40 per month. However, they offer customers the option to get billed annually; thus, you can opt for an annual billing service if you don’t want to be charged monthly.
Likewise, WordPress also offers the option to bill annually. But in contrast to Squarespace, WordPress offers more plans and is more economical. From free service to Personal, Premium, Business, and E-commerce, they have something for everyone and every budget. Those users who are tight on the budget can get started for free. If you want more features and better flexibility, then a Personal plan is the right choice. It is available for $4 per month. However, the Premium package will cost you $8, the Business plan will cost you $25, and eCommerce will cost you $45. Overall, if you compare both site builders’ rates, you’ll see that WordPress is cheaper than Squarespace.
WordPress vs Squarespace – The Final Verdict
In a nutshell, we can say that WordPress comes out as a clear winner. In comparison to Squarespace, WordPress is cheaper, more flexible, and SEO-friendly. They offer the broadest range of design templates with easy to use interface and Content Management System. All this allows you to find the right template to customize according to your business requirements, edit and update content, install new pages as needed with flexibility and no limitation. More importantly, with WordPress, you don’t need to be a tech wizard. They keep everything simple and easy, so navigating around it is not challenging at all.
