Is Squarespace the right platform for you?
If you’re looking to build a stunning and professional website for your business or personal brand, then no doubt you’ve begun the search for the best website builder. With endless amounts of information, opinions and so-called expert advice, it’s easy to become confused about what the best platform to create your own website will be for your particular business needs.
Consider your search for the best website builder complete, as we show you the power of Squarespace, and take you through the best features of Squarespace that can help your website grow with your business needs. With its intuitive interface and comprehensive features to help you optimise your site for search engines, create an e-commerce store for physical or digital products, offer subscriptions, courses and memberships, and create a beautiful mobile responsive design - Squarespace has what you need to maximise your website's performance and reach. Get ready to unlock the power of Squarespace and take your online presence to the next level.
Squarespace Explained
What is Squarespace, and how does it differ from other website builders like Wordpress, Showit, Wix or Shopify? We’re so glad you asked!
Squarespace is an all-in-one website building and hosting service designed to help individuals and businesses create beautiful, professional websites with ease. Squarespace users vary from the complete novice, who may purchase a Squarespace template or start from a blank slate, to big businesses and web developers who design unique Squarespace websites you wouldn’t know were created using the platform.
Known for its sleek, user-friendly interface, Squarespace is a WYSIWYG editor. Which is a fancy acronym that stands for ‘What You See is What You Get’. In a nutshell, it means that you can design directly on the page, using their drag and drop editor, adding images, text, video, forms and more. Since the introduction of Squarespace 7.1 and the Fluid Engine editor, Squarespace users have gained even more flexibility in design options. Fluid Engine has seen more design options for images and page layouts, more ease in changing individual elements such as colours of text blocks without needing to use custom code, and more interesting features in a page with animation and highlight effects - plus so much more.
One thing we love about Squarespace, is that since their beginnings in 2004, they’ve stayed up to date with changes in technology, listening to what their users want. Squarespace’s development team continually adds new features that would ordinarily require custom development or a third-party app. It really does make Squarespace an all-in-one website building platform that can help you create the ultimate marketing machine for your business.
But is Squarespace the right platform for you? In order to answer that, we need to delve into the key features and benefits of Squarespace, so that you can make an informed decision based on your business’ unique current and future needs.
Benefits of Squarespace
Here at The Brand Method, we’re one of only a handful of recognised Australian Squarespace Experts. So it would be fair to say that we think there are many benefits of Squarespace, especially when compared to other platforms. Before we dive into the specific features you’ll find within your Squarespace portal, we wanted to share just some of our favourite benefits with you.
It truly is an all-in-one platform
Squarespace can handle all your website requirements in one place. Unlike website platforms such as Wordpress, Squarespace hosts your site, provides access to pre-designed templates to kickstart your website creation process, and can also provide your domain. No more hunting down different log-in details to connect the important elements of your site together.Your website won’t mysteriously break, or need backing up
You don’t need to ‘backup’ your Squarespace site. Although some people choose to create a duplicate of their site to act as a ‘backup’, Squarespace is responsible for keeping a copy of your site. In our 10+ years of working with Squarespace, we’ve never had a site go missing or break.Your customers' data is secure.
Squarespace provides an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate for all domains connected to their platform, and keeps up-to-date on privacy legislations such as GDPR and Cookie display rules. You can learn more about Squarespace’s Data & Privacy Policies here.You’ll never not find an answer.
Unlike platforms such as Wordpress or Shopify, Squarespace users are all using the same technology. The code that powers each site is the same, and therefore, Squarespace’s help articles, how-to videos and forums can teach you practically everything you need to know about managing and updating your Squarespace site. Even for the least tech-savvy amongst our clients, they’re able to make edits and updates to their site, without needing to reach out to us to do so.
We could go on… or we could jump right into all the juicy features waiting for you once you start your Squarespace site.
What Are the Top Squarespace Features
User-friendly Interface
Squarespace’s user-friendly interface is designed with beginners in mind, so even if you’re new to website building, you’ll be able to navigate it with ease. The clean, organised layout offers everything you need to begin creating your website, available in the one menu so you can start adding pages, uploading your content and customising your styles without having to go searching for where these settings are all hiding.
The drag-and-drop editor allows you to add and rearrange text, images, and other elements quickly, creating custom layouts and professional-looking content in minutes. Plus, with real-time editing previews, you can see exactly how your changes will look across desktop and mobile size screens before publishing, taking the guesswork out of designing a polished and professional website.
Design Flexibility
One of Squarespace’s standout features is its design flexibility, allowing users to create visually stunning sites without a background in web design. The easiest way to get started on Squarespace is with a professionally designed template, which offers a low-budget option that is adaptable to your brand’s colours, fonts, and style. Beyond templates, Squarespace provides advanced styling options, including customisable content blocks, section layouts, and dynamic video backgrounds, so you can add additional content to your site if needed. Whether you’re starting with a pre-designed look or building something unique, Squarespace's design tools allow you to shape a website that’s entirely your own.
Integrated Blogging Tools
No… blogging isn’t dead. In fact, we see blogging as one of the best ways to get more traffic to your site. Not only is blogging a great way to improve your SEO, you can make your blog posts instantly shareable to Pinterest, driving even more traffic to your website, with Squarespace’s built-in ‘Pin it’ buttons. Plus, you can allow readers of your blog to interact with and leave feedback on your articles by turning on comments.
You can also create paid subscriptions to your blog content, replacing the need for external content monetisation sites like Patreon.
Squarespace’s blogging tools allow you to optimise all of your blog URL’s, add images with alt text and create specific SEO descriptions and titles for each blog post, giving your content an extra power boost in search engines.
Video Capabilities
Whether you want to embed your YouTube videos on a page or blog post, upload video content into a membership area or course (more on that later), or add fancy video backgrounds throughout the design of your site – Squarespace offers it all. With every Squarespace plan, you’ll receive 30 mins of native storage to upload your videos directly into Squarespace. Or, you can choose to store your videos elsewhere and embed them as simply as adding the link into a Squarespace Video block. Videos are a great way to add engaging, interactive content across your website.
eCommerce
Whether you’re selling physical products, digital products, subscriptions, or services, Squarespace can handle it all. Getting paid is easy, with seamless payment integration through PayPal, Stripe and Square (U.S. only). Squarespace’s eCommerce functionality lets you track your customer orders, create flexible shipping options, offer discounts, add in taxes and build your mailing list database to remarket your offers to existing customers, all through the same platform the rest of your site is managed.
Stylise your checkout process and customise what your customers will see once they purchase with branded email notifications. Plus, boost sales by adding customer reviews and related products to your product pages. Customers can also see past purchase history by logging into their customer account.
Booking Software Integration
If you’re a service-based business, whether that be a beauty business, personal trainer, coach, creative or consultant, Squarespace circumvents the need for an entirely separate app (and yet another password to remember!) by having Squarespace Scheduling (previously known as Acuity Scheduling) built right into the Squarespace platform. Whilst you’ll need an add-on subscription to activate the booking functionality, using Squarespace's Scheduling feature means you can easily add your entire calendar, or specific event types to any page of your website – no code required.
Contact & Newsletter Forms
Forms are a great way to get leads for your business – whether it be through enquiry, contact or newsletter opt-in forms, Squarespace can do it all. Customise the look and feel of your forms, and send the data wherever it needs to go – no more needing to embed a third-party form like Jotform, when you create as many forms as you need all within your page editor.
Squarespace sends you a copy of the form submission, or adds your contact to your chosen storage solution (such as Mailchimp). Plus you can dive deep into your form analytics to understand which ones are performing better than others, so you can track conversions and optimise your pages maximum leads.
Membership Areas & Courses
Want to provide content to a select number of people? Whether your membership content is free, or requires payment Squarespace’s secure content areas mean you can create a more seamless client experience (not to mention easily maintain your brand aesthetic across your digital content areas).
Membership Areas offer you the ability to provide content behind a paywall, or login screen to people who sign up to a membership program. Easily manage members, collect payments and update content all within the same user-friendly Squarespace platform.
Courses are a more structured approach to content, giving you the opportunity to set your content up in modules and lessons. Students can enrol with flexible payment options, and track their progress by marking off lessons as they’re completed. Both membership and course pages use the same drag-and-drop editor as all the other pages of your Squarespace site, giving you ultimate design flexibility when it comes to the content you want to provide within your membership area or course. Stop paying for expensive course platforms such as Kajabi and Teachable, and build your content in your existing Squarespace site.
Built-In Analytics
If you already have a website, you’ve likely heard of the importance of having Google Analytics installed, so that you can begin to get data on what people are doing on your site. Whilst we’re still advocates for every website having Google Analytics installed, Squarespace’s built in analytics can provide you with a simpler view of the key analytics such as how many visits to your site are happening daily, weekly or monthly, where your traffic is coming from (i.e search, direct or social), sales analytics such as your top-selling products and how many customers are abandoning carts, and what search terms your site is being found for.
Is Squarespace good for SEO?
Now we wouldn’t be able to talk about finding the best platform for your business, without discussing the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO). If your website is the destination, search engines are the highway your dream customers are travelling down to find you. According to Google, there are many factors that affect your search engine rankings. From keywords in your meta titles, and publishing consistent high-quality content, to your websites mobile friendliness, internal links and page speed. Although some may argue that any drag-and-drop page builder will be ‘bad for seo’, we’ve personally found that you can rank on page 1, and even in the top spot for your targeted keywords, with Squarespace and regular keyword optimised content.
Squarespace Mobile Optimisation
In 2017, Google announced that it would begin penalising websites that weren’t optimised for mobile in search results. According to Forbes, this alone could be costing you up to 30% of your leads. With more than 60% of websites being accessed from mobile devices, it’s critical that your website provides an easy, engaging experience for mobile users, so they keep coming back for more! Luckily, the mobile version of your site is just as easily edited as your desktop, allowing you to check the mobile layout on your desktop screen and quickly adjust image sizes, placement of text and buttons, to ensure your user-experience is smooth across all devices.
Adding additional features to your Squarespace website with third party plugins
It’s a common thought that Squarespace has limitations when it comes to the functionality of the site. However, we would ask those nay-sayers ‘have you really tried Squarespace?’. If you’re a novice user, Squarespace as it is will likely suit you just fine. You can upload your website copy, add your images and customise your site to your brand colours. Although the Squarespace team is working constantly at updating the platform, and including new technology in it every year (like the recent additions of courses, invoicing, and subscriptions), there does sometimes come the need to create something ultra spectacular. That’s where third-party plugins come in. These ‘plugins’ are essentially snippets of pre-built code that you can add to your website to give your site a touch of fantastical features.
Some of our favourite sites to find Squarespace plugins include:
We particularly love their Google reviews plugin for Squarespace, that allows you to showcase your Google reviews on your website, with a dynamic feed, bringing in new reviews as they’re posted. If your site needs age verification to enter, such as an alcohol brand, then you’ll likely want to opt for their Age Verification plugin that can be added directly on your Squarespace site.
There’s nothing spooky about these plugins. We love their image changing plugins, that show different images when you hover over different text. And of course, their confetti popping buttons (which you might recognise from our site). Plus, they have a bunch of free Squarespace plugins that will help you create a customised look on your site in minutes, with step-by-step instructions, even the most novice Squarespace user can handle.
One of the very first plugins we used was SQSP Themes’ Lightbox Anything plugin - and we’ve never looked back. If you’ve taken a look at our portfolio, you might see some of their top plugins popping up in many sites – that’s because we consider many of these features to be must-haves. In addition to their Lightbox Anything plugin, we love their Mega Menu Squarespace plugin for adding images and drop-down menus for sites that have lots of pages (works particularly well for eCommerce stores), and we can’t go past their Testimonial Slider Squarespace plugin as it appears on almost every site we build.
Our final Squarespace plugin store to share with you is SquareWebsites. SquareWebsites are the creators of three of our all-time favourite plugins; the Universal Filter plugin giving you the ability to create an advanced search and filtering function in your blog or shop, Interactive Maps plugin which gives you the ability to create maps that showcase locations and allow user engagement, and Lazy Loading plugin which loads more than the standard 30 posts, or product items per page as your users scroll, keeping them engaged on your site for longer.
How much will Squarespace cost you?
The final decision to make when it comes to deciding whether Squarespace is right for you, is whether it is in your budget. We see it all the time in Facebook groups, people are asking ‘what’s the best free website builder?’ – and the truth is, we’re yet to find a good website builder that is absolutely free.
We liken creating a website for your business to opening up a physical storefront. You wouldn’t expect to pay no rent to take up valuable retail space on a street, or in a shopping centre. So creating a website that’s going to work for you, have all the functions to grow with you as a business and helps streamline your sales processes is just part of the deal of running a business with an online presence.
Below we outline all of the costs involved in having a Squarespace website, and we talk more about setting a budget for your overall website build in this article. Not all websites will need or use all of these functions, but we believe in ultimate transparency, to help you decide if Squarespace is the right website platform for you.
Monthly or Annual Subscription Options
You can get started on Squarespace for as little as $16AUD/month with a Personal plan. However, if you’re looking to sell products, or add any extra features using the plugins we mention above, then you’ll need to be subscribed to a minimum of the Business plan, which is what we suggest for most of our clients.
The benefits of Squarespace’s Business plan, is that if you pay for your Squarespace subscription upfront for the year, on an annual plan, you’ll also receive a free custom domain and free professional email using your domain (through Google) for your first year. Clients of The Brand Method also receive 20% off the first year of any annual subscription, thanks to our Squarespace Circle Member status.
If you can afford to, signing up annually for your first year is well worth it, as you’ll not only get these bonuses for free, you’ll also save between 14-28% of your subscription costs.
Domains
If you sign up and take advantage of the first year free for your domain, or choose to pay for your Squarespace website subscription monthly instead, your domain will cost you between $20-$70 each year. There are some limitations as to what domains you can register with Squarespace, which you can read more about here. However, should you not be able to register your chosen domain with Squarespace, you can choose to register it with a domain provider such as GoDaddy and link this domain to your Squarespace site for free.
Payment Processing
When you’re selling through Squarespace, you’ll pay both a platform fee and a payment processor (Stripe/Paypal) fee. Squarespace charge 3% on all transactions for physical products/services (on the Business plan) on top of your chosen payment processor’s fee, which is generally around 2-3% of your transaction.
If you’re running an eCommerce store through Squarespace, it can be worth upgrading to Squarespace’s Basic eCommerce plan if you are paying more than $9/month in Squarespace transaction fees. On both the Basic and Advanced eCommerce plans you’ll only pay the payment processing fee, not the Squarespace transaction fee. These plans also come with added features, such as the ability to create product waitlists, upsell product add-ons and offer subscriptions to your products (advanced plan only).
Selling Digital Products
Memberships, courses and video-on-demand content are a great way to add a new stream of income to your business. Whether you’re teaching someone how to distil their own gin, offering on-demand Pilates classes online, or providing access to a library of recipes – Squarespace can help you turn your knowledge into income. Whilst access to these functionalities is available on all Squarespace plans, you will pay a 9% transaction fee (+ payment processor fees) on each purchase.
If you’re selling enough quantity, it’s worth upgrading to a monthly ‘Digital Products Add-On’ subscription to your existing Business or Commerce plan. You can lower your transaction to 7% on the Starter add-on plan, 3% with Core add-on plan, or 0% with Pro. Plus, these plans also come with additional video storage.
Invoicing
Don’t have any external invoicing software? Keep track of client projects and payments with the help of Squarespace invoicing. Squarespace invoicing is included for free on all Squarespace plans – you’ll just pay the payment processing fee for your chosen payment method (Stripe/Paypal).
eMail Marketing
There are many mailing list platforms to choose from, but why not make one less tech-hassle for yourself and utilise Squarespace’s inbuilt eMail marketing solution, build your email list, send out monthly emails to your subscribers and create email automations based on what they’ve signed up to or purchased. Creating an email list of unlimited subscribers comes free in every Squarespace website plan. You’ll also receive 3 free regular (i.e. not automated) emails to send to these subscribers, to test out the platform. After your free 3 emails, you’ll need to sign up to a plan, which costs between $10/month - $91/month (if paid month-to-month, you’ll save 30% by signing up to an annual plan).
Your choice of plan will determine the number of email campaigns you can send each month, and the total emails that can be sent. For example, if you have 200 subscribers and send 4 emails a month to all subscribers, you’ll need the Core plan, as your total email send would be 800 emails.
Scheduling
When it comes to deciding whether Squarespace Scheduling is right for you, we have one simple question we ask clients – how much is your time worth to you? Squarespace Scheduling allows you to set up specific appointment types, set your availability and even integrate your booking platform with your calendar, so you’ll never double-book an appointment again. You can choose to run group classes, sell packages and create discounts, accepting full-payment, partial payment or simply storing credit card details to charge later. Clients can reschedule appointments, within parameters you set, and you can create custom confirmation and reminder emails to ensure clients are on-time and know what to expect prior to their booking time.
All of this takes the hassle out of having to find the right time, chase up payments and back-and-forth of client communications. So again… how much is your time worth to you?
You can get started with Squarespace Scheduling for just $20/month, and prices increase from there, depending on the features you’d like to have. If you accept payments through your Scheduling setup, your payment processor (Stripe/Paypal) fees will be deducted from the total cost of your booking, before they are deposited into your bank/Paypal account.
Squarespace offers a robust, all-in-one solution for building a professional and versatile website, whether you're an entrepreneur, creative, or small business owner. Its user-friendly interface, powerful features, and regular updates make it an attractive choice for many. However, the best platform for your specific needs depends on various factors unique to your business. To help you determine if Squarespace is the right fit, we invite you to take our free website quiz. In just a few minutes, you'll gain personalised insights and discover the ideal website platform tailored to your requirements. Click here to take the quiz and embark on your journey to a perfect online presence!
