Squarespace vs WordPress 2021 in-depth Review Part 2

We go on with yet another comparison. This time, it is the Squarespace vs WordPress. Last time, it was BuddyPress vs Symposium Pro. Comparing different software, ideas, plugins, themes or platforms require total understanding of the comparison items in hand and also requires a nonbiased approach.

Everything that is written in the article is from an objective view, and I also want to keep things as simple as possible.

In this case, I am all familiar with WordPress and how awesome it is for the end users. On the other hand, Squarespace is not that bad either. It is targeted at almost similar kind of audience, which in return warranted a comparison. So here I am doing a comparison between Squarespace and WordPress.

Also see:

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Squarespace vs WordPress: Which one should you choose and Why?

The two platforms does almost the same thing — to build you an online website that can help you grow the business or meet your audience of your choice. Online entrepreneurship is not new and requires careful planning on the part of the entrepreneur to create a website that brings business and interactions.

In the end, it is all about how well you understand the platform and today we will go through some key points that will make you choose the best between Squarespace and WordPress.

So, why the wait? Let’s start.

Cost

Why should I start with the cost? Well, it is one of the important factors in the online world, and when resource are scarce, it is necessary always to look for a cost-effective solution.

On the other hand, Squarespace is not free. It comes in three subscription packs, the basic one starting from $8. The personal $8 personal pack offers 20 pages, unlimited bandwidth, galleries, unlimited storage and two contributors. The downside is that you can only sell one product using the package.

On the other hand, the $18 Business pack offers product selling of up to 20 products. Other features that set it apart from the personal package is the professional email from Google, developer platform and $100 Google AdWords Credit.

The most expensive package is Commerce package that will cost you $26/month, and it has everything SquareSpace has to offer. According to me, the biggest advantage of the plugin is unlimited product hosting. So, if you are opening a business and want a platform that will take care of almost everything for you, SquareSpace is for you.

WordPress is the most impressive in this category. WordPress is a free and open source. But the free tag should not be confused. It is free in the sense of the sunlight and for producing values from the sunlight you might need a solar panel. WordPress can be used freely, but there are costs that are associated with hosting, themes, plugins and other things.

WordPress offers free themes and plugins, but hosting needs to be bought. So, if you choose a cheap hosting, it will cost you around 5$ per month.

Summary: For the first time on the internet, WordPress can be a little tricky to start. But, that’s not always true for everyone out there. With an open source tag, you eventually get the world’s best CMS in your hands — the only catch is that you have to pay for the services that revolve around the building a website.

SquareSpace, on the other hand, is a ready-made platform that offers packages. The services are maintained by the company, and all you have to focus on is building a product that can be sold to millions of users online.

With all facts ready, WordPress easily wins this round over Squarespace. I do not think that Squarespace does justice for the price you are paying.

Learning Curve and Beginner Friendly Status

The internet is the home of the many different levels of users. You can find beginners, advanced users, and there are users who are just new to the term, “Internet”, “Web” and are completely off the track.

On the other hand, Squarespace doesn’t have any terms to understand. The simple backend panel provides instant drag-and-drop features that can be used by the user to get started with their project.

WordPress, itself is a beginner friendly platform, with some learning. In jest, even if it beginner friendly, it doesn’t hold true in the case of a majority of users. There are many terms that can be alien to the new users. For example, posts, pages, categories, settings and other tons of terminology that need to be understood before properly using the WordPress platform.

This can easily slow down the progress and hence imposes a slight learning curve on the user.

Summary: There is no doubt that WordPress is very user-friendly, but it still hold a slight learning curve. Squarespace offers the easiest way to get started with online website/business. This round is won by Squarespace.

Customizability

When we evaluate different software, one thing that always needs to be accessed is the level of customizability. Customizability refers to the flexibility of the platform to morph itself according to the user requirement. On the first glance, this might not seem a big thing, but if your business grows exponentially, changes need to be maintained to make sustainable growth.

Squarespace vs WordPress Flexibility

WordPress being an open source platform provides all the customizability you can think off. The WordPress ecosystem is completely malleable, and you can easily get hundreds and thousands of themes and plugins. Moreover, the core of the WordPress platform is free, and that means you can modify the internal working of WordPress or hire a WordPress developer to do so.

There are also many notable theme sellers from where you can grab professional looking WordPress themes for a mere price ranging from 30$ – 60$.

Functionality wise, WordPress is highly customizable. The reason is plugins. Plugins provide all the additional features that you might need in your WordPress website. At the time of writing the post, there are more than 38,000+ plugins available in the WordPress plugin marketplace, which have been downloaded more than 900 million times.

No doubt, the community is large and should not be compared to Squarespace community or the customizbility it offers. But, numbers are not always true. WordPress plugin directory is a mix of both excellent plugins and bad plugins and that can make your journey a little rusty. Quality and Quantity is two different things.

With no control over the WordPress plugin market, there is also an option to get premium plugins, which can add to the costs of your website.

Squarespace, on the other hand, offers in-house developed tools for their platforms. With low quantity at hand, quality is maintained.

Summary: There is no doubt that WordPress offers better customization with an array of free and premium plugins. Squarespace offers tight collection of tools for their platform. If you are not into customization then Squarespace is for you.

Support

On the other hand, Squarespace offers a tight shell of support for their customer. It also offers good documentation when compared to WordPress. WordPress also have great documentation availiable online, hosted by WordPress.org and other WordPress websites such as 85Ideas, WPBegineer and more.

Squarespace also offer 1 hour email support, live chat support and a lively community forums for making things easy for you.

Support is necessary if you are going for a long run. With good support, your website can run without any problem and hence do proper business. WordPress, due to his large community can send both good and bad signals when judged from the aspect of support. The immense number of communities can really hamper the way you look at things. There can be easily information overload, but if you know how and where to search, then the community is a big plus.

You might have to hire a WordPress support team or a developer to look the problems you are having. The main reason why

Summary: If you are willing to go into the jungle and find the information yourself, then WordPress is a great choice. WordPress market is also full of developers who can fix your problem with a small fee. With WordPress done, Squarespace provides the best support for the price you need to pay.

eCommerce

As a entrepreneur, you might be interested in creating an eCommerce website. The eCommerce website offers right set of tools for selling your products and when it comes to WordPress, eCommerce just become easy and accessible.

There are plenty of plugins you can get started with. Easy integration of payment gateways such as PayPal, Payoneer, Google Checkout makes WordPress a great choice for your next eCommerce project. There are also many affiliate plugins that can make running a shop online simple and intuitive. With no limit to the products to your WordPress website, you are the king of your shop.

Squarespace, on the other hand doesn’t provide this kind of flexibility in building the online shop. It has packages and you are bounded by the number of products that you can host on your website. Also, the lack of payment gateway integration can really harm your growth as an online eCommerce website.

The unlimited account do offer adding unlimited product is through business plan, but it is always a better choice to go with WordPress platform and VPS hosting as it provides more value for money in a long run.

Squarespace vs WordPress ecommerce
Updates and Maintenance
squarespace wordpress Updates

Updating your website can be a tough task. There is not much you can do when an update is released and it is always better to update your website with the latest patch.

WordPress is continuously updated, and new features and security updates are provided to the system. The updates have both advantage and disadvantages attached to them. The new features helps to become more productive and use them to create a much better site. The security updates, on the other hand, keeps the hackers away from exploiting any venerability. But, there is a catch here.

With the updates, many themes and plugins can start to malfunction and this can cause problems. Many plugins are updated to match the core WordPress update, but not all plugins are updated.

Squarespace is quite decent when it comes to update. Why? Everything including the platform and the tools are controlled by the team. This can really improve your user experience and create an environment where you do not have to think about incompatibility issues.

Summary: Both the platforms are competitive in this category. But, Squarespace takes the lead to a closed environment that lead to compatible working environment.

Squarespace vs WordPress? Which one to choose?

Choosing between the two platforms depends on your long term goals. If you are looking to build a website that needs customization and scalability, then WordPress platform is for you. Also, there is a lot of freedom associated with using WordPress.

Squarespace, on the other hand provides a great platform to kick start your small online business. If you aiming to sell 1-10 products, then SquareSpace can be a great option. But, there is another drawback that I have not discussed earlier in the article. If there is any need for changing platform, Squarespace doesn’t provide enough tools for easy exportation of data.

The lack of exporting features really hamper Squarespace as a platform, and this can cause many business problem when they need to move to other platform, example WordPress for customizability and scalibility.

The cost is also one of the factors that should keep you away from Squarespace. The only thing, I loved about Squarespace is the support.

With a detailed comparision done, it is upto you to decide which platform fits you better. If anyone would have told me be baised for a moment, I will choose WordPress over Squarespace anytime, but that’s just my preference. The right choice of the platform depends on your requirements and how you see your website in the future.

Editorial Staff
mail@85ideas.com

Editorial Staff at 85ideas is a team of WordPress experts led by Brian Harris. Here to share amazing tuts, guides and collections.

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