Calling all bloggers, those who need portfolios and online stores. There are more than 100 stylish website themes to choose from, specifically optimised for tablets and phones.
OVERALL RATING: Most Stylish Website Builder
We’ve tested Squarespace’s features to see how they match up against other website builders. We have all the information you need to decide for yourself whether Squarespace is right for you and your new website.
Who is Squarespace best suited for? Bloggers, portfolios and online stores. There are more than 100 stylish themes to choose from, specifically optimised for tablets and phones.
Pros
+ Squarespace can support up to 1000 pages (unlike Wix which has a 100 page limit)
+ Building a site is fast with an intuitive front-end based layout
+ Ability to edit, publish and send marketing emails on the go using the smartphone app.
Cons
- A relatively small amount of templates against the competition.
- Autosave doesn't happen, so you need to remember to save after each edit
Squarespace is ideal for creating professional websites that really stand out from the crowd. It boasts quality designs and while it can take a little getting used to, the final results are worth your patience.
We recommend it for those who really care about their site aesthetics, or have confidence in their technical skill.
Is Squarespace right for your startup or small business? Read our impartial review to find out.
Now serving over 2 million websites, Squarespace has solidified their corner of the website building market. They offer easy to implement, stylish templates that anyone can set up and use within a couple of hours.
To flick through Squarespace’s award-winning website templates feels reminiscent of taking an (online) stroll through a modern art gallery; swathes of white space and minimalist design offset by a striking use of text and colour.
This article will review Squarespace as a website builder for individuals and those looking to set up business and eCommerce sites.
Squarespace is great for bloggers, photographers, artists, and anyone who wants their website to look as good as the content they’re showing off.
Squarespace can be an excellent option for portfolios, perhaps the best. Squarespace portfolio themes are professional and designed entirely to showcase your work in a way that really wows!
Squarespace gives users an unparalleled choice of captivating website templates from which to choose.
There are currently over 100 templates, and you can also choose from an almost endless selection of pre-made colour palettes. For the more creative website builder, you can select a bespoke colour palette or use a personal photo as a section’s background.
A word of warning, ensure your choice of photo is in high definition, as the picture will take up most of the background (all photos provided by Squarespace are optimal quality).
The customisation options are mostly intuitive, although some advanced changes require some rooting around the design menu.
The selection of fonts Squarespace offer is fantastic, with options for any background. Fonts come in many different sizes, styles and colour palettes. For those seeking a simple font option, you can choose one style and size to use throughout the website. If you prefer, a higher degree of editing is possible - you can edit the transparency of text, as well as the size of gaps between letters.
Every page on Squarespace is made up of one of two ingredients:
A section, which lays out the page’s format. You can choose from many different backgrounds including high definition photos or preset colour themes.
A content block, which contains information like text and images - the content of your site.
Since the latest update (7.10) Squarespace allows each section to have a unique background or colour. Users can now embellish new and existing sites with captivating media effortlessly.
Although the editor is mostly intuitive to use, continually saving changes is a little jarring when getting to grips with the site. However, after a few hours, this became second nature. The Squarespace team will likely fix this minor annoyance in an upcoming update.
Needless to say, anyone in a creative industry will benefit from building their website using Squarespace. A lesser-known fact is that Squarespace is also great for bloggers, content writers, and copywriters.
Traditionally, bloggers have flocked to WordPress to share their content. However, Squarespace could soon be the website builder for bloggers. Blogs hosted on Squarespace benefit from AMP support (which speeds up loading times for mobile users), geolocation tags and an option to schedule posts.
Uniquely, Squarespace bloggers can also restore deleted posts for up to 30 days. The site also allows comments, categories and content moderation, as well as multiple site contributors (on all plans above personal).
While alternative site builders like Wix also offer app support, Squarespace’s apps currently provide the most comprehensive mobile support.
There are three principal apps called Squarespace, Squarespace Commerce and Squarespace Analytics. The Squarespace app allows you to build and update your site and create and publish content while on the go. We don’t recommend using just your phone to build the website, as you can only view the site’s mobile version.
Squarespace Commerce lets you run your shop or commerce site while on the move. It includes a barcode scanner, accessible through your phone camera, which scans shipping labels, fulfils orders and updates your inventory. This app saves enormous amounts of time for businesses moving a lot of products.
Squarespace analytics offers a guide to your site’s performance metrics, such as the source and amount of web traffic. Analytics can help you see which partners are winning you the most business while tracking your conversion rate and identifying long and short term trends.
All sites built using Squarespace integrate well with 3rd party extensions and widgets. While there may not be the widest selection available, Squarespace integrates with the most popular extensions. There are plenty of compatible extensions for photo and video embedding, with support for apps like Dropbox and Youtube.
Additionally, marketing tools like Amazon affiliate tracking Google ads help you to advertise and work with 3rd parties to earn a profit. Embedded share buttons are also available, encouraging site visitors to share your content to social media platforms.
Squarespace offers 24/7 email support, live chat Monday to Friday, and online video tutorials to guide users through everyday obstacles. There are also community support platforms like forums and social media support through Twitter. On a small negative note, Squarespace doesn’t offer phone support, which can be irritating for people who prefer resolving issues over the phone.
Most people looking to build an eCommerce site will naturally gravitate towards a builder like Shopify. Squarespace isn’t primarily an eCommerce website builder, but it is still an excellent platform to build an eCommerce site. Suppose you’re looking for the best possible functionality for an eCommerce site, in that case, Shopify or another eCommerce specialist may better serve you.
But, if you’re looking for a highly functional, trendsetting site to sell the fruits of your labour, Squarespace could be the best option for your business.
Squarespace offers some SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tools to make sure your website has the chance to rank as high as possible on search engines such as Google.
Standard SEO tools included:
Meta tags, Sitemap, 301 Redirect Tool
The key reason for using Squarespace would be the templates, they are easy to implement and look great across all devices. They give just the right amount of flexibility to ensure your content looks great.
In addition the designer is simple to get to grips with and getting started is not difficult with a very low learning curve.
Finally, the mobile app’s are the best in the market. So if you want to have control over your site when you are on the move, Squarespace may be the right option for you.
Squarespace has some great themes, to maintain the quality of these the user will only have access to edit various elements on the page. This shouldn’t be a problem for most users but if you have a very specific design in mind then Wix may give you a bit more freedom.
The number of (albeit excellent) templates available is lower than other website builder out there. This may mean you can’t find the perfect template for your business however most industries and businesses will not struggle. As noted earlier in this review, what they lack in quantity, they make up for in quality.
Squarespace also doesn’t have the pedigree in e-commerce compared to Shopify, those looking to run an e-commerce business with a large product range may find the features limited although 3rd party integrations can help plug this gap.
Which features are available to use while building your site will depend on your chosen plan. We get asked a lot if Squarespace is free? Squarespace does not have a free option. However, if you don't feel like paying without trying, you can always use the available 14-day free trial.
Personal
Good to get you started if this is your first website or blog.
Business
When your site or blog becomes more popular, and you want to add contributing writers or add premium integrations or blocks, the business plan could assist you. However, sites using the business plan have to pay a 3% transaction fee on every sale.
Commerce Basic
The basic commercial plan includes all the necessary functionality to get your shop up and running, with features like customer accounts, point of sale and merchandising tools. Both commercial plans also offer 0% transaction fees.
Commerce Advanced
The advanced commercial plan includes all the basic commercial plan features. Some extras are included like subscriptions, abandoned cart recovery and real-time delivery rates for couriers like UPS or FedEx.
Overall, Squarespace offers one of the best-looking website builders available. While there are still one or two improvements needed in the editor, the templates and design features are simply second to none.
In a similar fashion to other website builders, Squarespace gives you a choice of a domain name free for the first year. Google’s G Suite easily integrates with Squarespace, so you can set up custom emails for your domain name. If you choose the Business plan or higher, Squarespace gives you one free custom email.
Suppose you don’t know where to start or haven’t the faintest idea of how you want your website to look. In that case, Squarespace has a straightforward process to get you going, which we’ve outlined below. The site asks you three questions to better understand which templates to recommend you.
The first question is “What is your site about?”, with many options to choose from: Art, Food, Restaurant or Photography, for example.
The second question is “What are your goals?”, with options to choose from such as selling products, services or memberships, or to market myself.
The last question is “Where are you in your process?”, which aims to determine whether you’re an artist or a budding startup founder looking to sell their newest product. There is an option here to help you transfer data from an existing website to Squarespace.
If you’re stuck for ideas or looking for inspiration, Squarespace’s process is quick, easy and painless to go through. Even if you decide to go with another website builder, you’ll likely get some design inspiration from flicking through the snappy templates on offer.
Squarespace website traffic is encrypted via SSL which provides a secure end to end connection for you and your visitors. This prevents hackers from impersonating your website or pinching information that customers may submit, such as email addresses or card info.
Other methods which Squarespace use to protect you include regular security scans, industry-developed and proprietary tools to guard against potential intruders, DDoS attacks, and other vulnerabilities. Basically, your site is as safe with Squarespace as any other website builder.
You can show video on your Squarespace website via two methods. First you can upload videos and host them directly on your site. Currently, this option is only available for videos pages and section backgrounds in version 7.1 sites and it's worth noting that each squarespace site can only have up to 30 minutes of uploaded video content, not ideal. So that brings us to the second (and best) option, embedding.
Embed video to your Squarespace site from YouTube or Vimeo, then use the video URL or embed code to add the video to your site.
Before you start you will need to create a Google Analytics account, which will generate a code that will need to be added to the HTML on your website.
If you have a Universal Analytics property, your code starts with UA- and is known as a tracking ID. If you have a Google Analytics 4 property, your code starts with G- and is known as a measurement ID.
Add your tracking ID and/or measurement ID to your site following the below steps:
In the Home menu, click Settings, and then click Advanced.
Click External API keys.
In the Google Analytics account number field, enter tracking ID, measurement ID, or both separated by a comma.
Click Save.
Navigate to Design and then select Custom CSS. Copy & paste the below code and click save. You will then need to refresh the page:
footer .sqs-block-html a {
background-image: none !important;
background-repeat: no-repeat !important;
text-decoration: none !important;
}
Markdown is a tool that converts plain text markup to rich HTML. Use Markdown blocks to add text to your site with the Markdown language. Markdown blocks support lists, links, bolded and italicised text, and block quotes.
Essentially, it makes it easy to style text without using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor or HTML code. It’s important to note that Markdown language is an advanced modification that falls out of the scope of Squarespace support.
