The platform has four core pricing plans that cater to webmasters at different stages of their journey. The emphasis is on the features available for building websites and the usage limits associated with each feature. All plans have unlimited storage, bandwidth, and the possibility of a free domain for a year.
Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial of all plans. If you subscribe for a monthly plan then there is no refund but you can get one within 14-days if you subscribe to an annual plan. It’s more expensive than basic hosting which is due, in part, to its advanced site management and eCommerce tools.
The personal is $16/m and offers SEO tools, up to two contributors, basic site metrics, SSL certificate, and extensions to further power up your website. This plan is ideal for personal sites and smaller business sites.
The business plan comes in at $26/m. You can have unlimited contributors, the ability to edit the CSS and JavaScript, professional email from Google, multiple premium integrations, advanced site analytics, promotional website banners, fully integrated eCommerce tools, and Google Ads credits.
The Basic Commerce plan is $35/m comes with everything from the Business plan but reduces transaction fees to 0% instead of 3% and has zero transaction fees associated with payments. It ads POS functionality, customer accounts, the ability to checkout on your own domain, eCommerce analytics, Instagram products integration.
The Advanced Commerce is $54/m and incorporates all the features of previous plans. It ads abandoned cart recovery, the ability to sell subscriptions, advanced shipping, API access, and limited availability labels.
One of the reasons Squarespace is so popular is that it’s relatively simple for people to register and start using its service. You can get a free domain on registration and the SSL is automatically applied to your hosting account. Overall account settings are well-labeled and you’re not forced to click through multiple pages before you find what you’re looking for.
The website and eCommerce store builder is intuitive enough for a decent website to be created within a few hours. Of course, the advanced features need more time to master. All things considered, Squarespace is an easy-to-use platform.
Squarespace offers multiple channels for customer support. The first area to look for help is a comprehensive knowledgebase that has multiple articles, video guides, and webinars to help you make the most of Squarespace.
Additional customer support:
Community forum
The community forum helps users figure out advanced use cases.
Blog
The blog focuses on company news, development, and web design.
Squarespace is full of features that enhance the website building process. These include but aren’t limited to customizable templates, multiple content types, password lock on entire websites or specific pages, etc.
There are more than 200 TLDs available to register through Squarespace and you automatically get free WHOIS privacy. If a domain is registered through a different platform, simply update the DNS to point at Squarespace. Every domain at Squarespace automatically has an SSL certificate associated with it.
The Squarespace drag-and-drop builder gives you a lot of control over the entire design process. You can choose from professional-looking templates and customize them to your heart’s content. You can change fonts, colors, and padding, forms, etc.
Squarespace excels at providing eCommerce tools for its customers. These include basic and advanced features such as deep inventory management, selling products and services, selling subscriptions, product image zoom, flexible product variants, order management, and so much more.
Squarespace has been providing its services for nearly two decades. During that time, it gained experience when it comes to keeping websites online. It has over 99.9% uptime over a rolling 90-day period. You can check this yourself using its status page. While it offers no guarantee, you can be confident that your site won’t have constant downtime.
Squarespace moves away from the traditional cPanel that so many web hosts use. Instead, it built its own control panel from the ground up. From the dashboard screen, you’re able to access your websites, account settings, additional subscriptions, sort out billing, and more. The dashboard is intuitive and even a beginner can understand how to use it with little or no guidance.
Squarespace is an accomplished hosting solution that emphasizes simplicity and power for its users. It makes setting up and managing a website simply due to its custom administrative panel. You can manage domain registration and DNS, set up a new website, launch the website and eCommerce store builder, and much more.
Squarespace has a lot going for it but there are also quirks that you’d have to get used to such as no autosave, limited submenu options, and no refund period for monthly subscriptions. If those aren’t a deal-breaker for you then the comprehensive support and wide range of hosting features will serve you well.
