Squarespace offers 4 plans and each plan has different costs depending on whether you’re buying a year’s contract at once or paying on a monthly basis.
The major feature differences between the plans are eCommerce capabilities, customization, and advanced website analytics. The most basic plan which is the Personal plan offers an impressive lineup of features and functionalities. They include SEO optimization, a portfolio of third-party extensions, unlimited access to templates, unlimited bandwidth, and so on. The higher plans add eCommerce to those features in different ways.
Users can only get refunds if they cancel an annual subscription within 14 days of payment. However, Squarespace will not offer a refund for monthly subscriptions.
In partnership with Student Beans, Squarespace offers a special 50% discount on the first annual subscription to students from qualifying schools. The terms also allow students to get a refund if they paid without applying the discount, but only during the first billing cycle.
Squarespace performs great in the most technical areas website owners would be concerned about. The following are notable areas of performance.
One of the major concerns for website owners is the website loading or response speed. Poor site speed makes for a frustrating user experience and can discourage visitors from further interactions. Here’s what my site performance looked like shortly after creating it.
I would say it performed better than expected because I had just published the website minutes before checking. I got some pointers on what to do to improve my site performance and I’m optimistic that the next time I check my site performance it will do better than average.
The uptime of Squarespace is about 99.97%. Now that signals reliability and bodes well for users because their website has not been inaccessible even for a minute in the past three months. So far Squarespace has had about 27 minutes of downtime in the last couple of years. Personally, I think that downtime is meager and a majority of website owners may not notice it. Ever!
Apart from its clean-looking modern templates, Squarespace stands out for its seamless sync across devices and effortless integration with market-leading apps. Also, device inclusivity is hard to find in the industry. You can design, set up, and manage your Squarespace website both on your mobile and desktop.
Building with Squarespace is a solopreneur’s delight. The experience was seamless, although you might hit a few bumps along the way. Here’s what it looks like working your way through the platform.
Registering for a Squarespace website account was very easy, it took only a few minutes. Before signing up I was able to check out different templates and had a good idea of what Squarespace could offer when it came to website aesthetics. The onboarding process involved answering a few questions about the purpose of my new website and I was presented with templates to choose from.
The questions also determined what plan I would get to use for the free trial period. Noteworthy to observe that I did not need to register with my card to set up the account. Zero risk with 14 days to experience the Squarespace awesome (or its lack).
Squarespace has 100+ templates you can choose from to begin designing your website. Designers with years of experience using Squarespace may choose to begin with a blank page but if you are no expert, a template is the best place to start. Making your Squarespace template your own is not quite as intuitive as it should be, expect a learning curve even if you have used other website builders.
Text styling on Squarespace is perhaps the easiest thing to play around with. To get to the style editor you click on ‘design’, then site styles on the left edit panel or the brush icon at the top right of your screen. The text editing panel is similar to what you have on Google Docs.
You can change the text appearance by clicking one of the icons on the edit ribbon before typing, or highlighting the text and clicking your icon of choice. Squarespace has dozens of predefined fonts. You can also import any one of the 915 Google fonts.
There are two ways to create a customized form on Squarespace websites. The first is to add a new blank page and click on ‘add section’. That action reveals a drop-down from which you click on forms and you’ll be presented with form page templates. I found this useful for my contact us page.
The second way to create forms is to edit an already existing page, click on add block and select “Form.” A basic form template will appear which you can edit to your liking. You can edit the text content, add or remove form fields, enlarge the form block, realign the submit button, and rename the form.
Further customization includes post-submit actions like a “thank you” message or redirecting users to another page. You can also connect extensions like Zapier, Google Drive, or Mail Chimp to store form data if you don’t want to simply send form data to your email.
To design buttons on Squarespace, you will click on the brush icon that takes you to the site styles menu. There you’ll find the button editor.
The editor does not provide much flexibility. You can change a button’s shape or size, fill or un-fill the button field, and edit the text font or spacing. However, you can’t change button colors in isolation, the color is determined by the site-wide theme colors you are working with.
Also, the font of the button text can only be switched between the default font of the template and the font you had previously selected to use as the site-wide font. This is necessary to maintain brand uniformity.
Every great website builder can extend its functions through third-party apps. Squarespace has a handful of ‘official’ extensions that you can access through your website settings or by clicking the add block edit function. The extensions available through the settings route are more advanced than those you’ll find in the ‘add block’ dropdown. For example, you can integrate your Instagram by adding a new block but you’ll need to integrate with solid third-party apps via settings.
Adding an app integration from settings takes only a minute. Once you find the needed app on the app market, you just need to click on the ‘connect to site’ button and it’s done.
To go beyond the official apps allowed on Squarespace, you can connect to Zapeir with API keys and connect indirectly to over 5,000 apps around the world.
Squarespace has a rich library of resources to help new customers acclimatize and solve technical issues. I liked that there was so much information available because Squarespace does have a learning curve.
However, there is a lot to wade through to get the information you need and sadly Squarespace does not offer much in the way of real-time support. Users can, and often, turn to the members of the Squarespace forum for answers.
Below, I share my experiences trying out the customer support options Squarespace provides.
Squarespace does a good job of providing learning resources, but it lacks actual customer care. The platform does not offer phone support or a live chat option, which made it difficult for me to make straightforward and quick inquiries.
I found Squarespace’s blog inspiring to explore. The blog is populated with easy-to-follow guides, interview pieces with excelling business people, and business growth tips. Contributors to the blog are reputable experts in the subjects they write about.
I can’t say for sure how many articles are put up on the blog monthly but I did observe that over a dozen articles went up in the last month. With such volumes, I expected to be able to search through the blog posts with a search function but the Squarespace Blog didn’t have a search bar. However, the blog is organized by category, which may be helpful.
Squarespace has a community where users can ask questions and get help from their peers. To interact with other users on this forum, you need to create a forum account. This “forum account” is quite different from your Squarespace account. Must be for security reasons, I’m sure.
I love that the forum has a search button so you can easily cut through tons of threads for the information you need. I did notice that questions posted on the forum take a while to get answers, some questions have remained unattended for months. Recently, Squarespace introduced an achievements program to recognize active contributors to the forum. So, this might get the community thriving in the coming months.
Another Squarespace resource is its on-demand (pre-recorded) webinars. These webinars are about one hour long on average and talk about topics like getting started with Squarespace, taxes, and enterprise scaling among others.
I liked the question box on the webinar screen which allows you to ask questions while watching the webinar and get answers sent to your email later. I was pretty uncomfortable about the fact that there are just about 7 pre-recorded webinars available and you have to go through a registration process to access each one. But we have YouTube, don’t we?
On the Squarespace help center page, there is a ‘learn with video’ section. This section is a collection of tutorial videos that you’ll find embedded in each guide. This video learning section collects all the videos and offers you quick easy access to them. I think people who prefer to learn by watching rather than reading will appreciate the effort Squarespace put into its video library.
Written guides and how-to articles are the main content under the Squarespace help center. They are organized by product types or topics. I found it easy to navigate through with the search bar at the top of the page. I found these guides to be very detailed and simple to follow. In each guide, a video is embedded so you can watch the video for more clarity.
It is not unconventional for brands to reach customers and solve complaints via social media. It is one of the easiest and more preferred ways for customers like myself to get quick replies. Squarespace has a dedicated Twitter page for attending to customer inquiries and complaints.
I reached out to Squarespace Help on Twitter and I got a response within two minutes. In my opinion, the Twitter helpline makes up for the absence of a live chat platform on their website.
The only way to send an email to Squarespace is through the contact form. The process, in my experience, was stressful and after successfully opening a ticket via email, I got a response from Squarespace. The response came in about 23 minutes after submitting the ticket and the response was quite comprehensive. So I would say they perform nicely on email support.
Squarespace has quite a lot of features which makes it one of the best website builders. These features help users to keep marketing, web design, and management in one place. Most of Squarespace’s features can be enjoyed without third-party apps and are thus easily accessible to all users. Here’s a highlight of some standout features.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
On most website builders, standard SEO requires integrated third-party apps. That usually incurs extra costs but the SEO extension available on Squarespace is free to use. It also offers Smart SEO for eCommerce SEO needs.
Beyond integrated extensions, Squarespace has some built-in SEO features to help users improve site visibility.
During page setups, the SEO Checklist contains a list of actions to help optimize your website for search engines. Squarespace websites are directly integrated with the Google Search Console and verified websites can view keywords that their target audiences are searching.
Other SEO-related features include built-in site maps and automatic markups.
Squarespace has impressive mobile responsiveness. If you’re using the desktop version of the website editor, you can easily toggle between mobile, tablet, and desktop views. You don’t have to design a mobile screen or tablet screen differently. As you design on one interface, the website is optimized to be responsive on other interfaces.
The platform can be fully accessed on the go using a smartphone. Users can either download the Squarespace mobile app or click on the website editor access URL that is requested via the email address registered with Squarespace. The app and link access are available to both Android and iOS users.
Interestingly, you can edit your website, fully, on your phone. You can also check your website analytics, add gallery images, write blog posts and manage inventory, all from your phone.
Squarespace website builder offers extensive analytics that helps monitor business and website growth. In the Squarespace analytics suite, you’ll find tools for tracking sales, customer profiles and website traffic. Some tools offer in-depth analysis of data points like individual product performance, customer location, customer journey, and sources of website traffic. Users can check their website analytics on their phones as well.
Pre-formatted website layouts
When you click on the get started button to begin your website design process with Squarespace, you’ll have to answer some questions. The question includes what your website name will be as well as what you want to achieve with the website. The software uses these questions to pick out the most appropriate templates and themes for the purpose you had previously selected. It also preselects pages based on the same criteria.
Any Squarespace website is capable of having up to 1,000 pages regardless of the plan subscribed for. The limits are in the amount of content you can put on specific pages, for example, an events page can only hold 350 events per month. Blog pages have no content limits while some pages with no official limits have recommended content for optimum performance.
These generous page limits mean Squarespace can support very large websites. For the sake of site speed and optimal performance, the platform recommends that your website should have no more than 400 pages.
Squarespace is a great solution for those in eCommerce. They provide simple ways to sell not just products, but even services, digital content, and subscription services from your website. With a Basic or Advanced Commerce Plan, you don’t even need to pay for transaction fees.
No doubt, Squarespace is a top-tier website builder fit for modern entrepreneurs, small businesses, and even NGOs. Although it would take more than a few days of trial and error for beginners to learn to use this software, it does get easier and more intuitive with practice. However, the 14-day free trial allows you enough time to familiarize yourself with the software without making any financial commitments.
Regarding financial commitments, the price of Squarespace plans, considering industry standards, is really decent. With the dozens of plugins offered by Squarespace Extensions, you can operate a fully functional website like the big corporations for just a fraction of the cost.
Bennett O'Brien
Sonary Team
Daniel Ndukwu
