From time to time we get asked whether a solution like Squarespace is better to use than WordPress.
Being a WordPress designer & developer personally, I naturally gravitate towards WordPress as I am very comfortable working with website code, servers, sftp, deployments, environments, etc…
However, in recent years I’ve literally found myself recommending Squarespace to some prospective clients over the phone and have some agency friends who have started to adopt it in certain situations. On the flip side I’ve had several scenarios where someone comes to us needing to upgrade to WordPress because their Squarespace site hit a wall.
For our website clients at Toohill Consulting, I am mostly saying we should stick with WordPress (the free, open source, self hosted version at wordpress.org) for the 3 reasons below:
#1 – Customization Depth
Squarespace is much easier and faster to setup, but most people we’ve ever talked with, including clients and other agencies, always run into some sort of limitation at some point.
For basic websites and individuals who have low website budgets, Squarespace could work.
However, as a business grows and evolves, keep in mind that a Squarespace site doesn’t have a built in button to automatically upgrade your website to WordPress or another CMS for that matter. In fact, they literally say this on one of their support articles regarding a website export:
You can export certain content from your Squarespace site into an .xml file. This is useful if you want to export content to WordPress. Not everything will export, as many features rely on our platform’s JavaScript and CSS.
Squarespace
#2 – Community & Support
As a website design company in Bloomington, Indiana, our clients are depending on us to consult them on their website options and to provide recommendations on what we feel is best for their immediate and long term business goals.
Several recent cms marketshare reports have started to show that WordPress has over 64% of the CMS marketshare, to Squarespace’s 3%.
To put it another way, 6 out of 10 websites using a CMS are using WordPress, but only 3 out of 100 websites are using Squarespace.
As a website management company, support is huge! Therefore, we have chosen to adopt WordPress primarily because of the community of support we encounter all over the web for any situation and problem that our client’s websites may face.
We’ve found amazing support at the web hosting level, the WordPress application level, as well as the hundreds and thousands of other website designers and developers out there who work with WordPress every single day. Additional help is typically a few clicks or phone call away for us to get what we need to aid our clients.
#3 – Page Building Experience
A huge feature at the onset of Squarespace was the drag and drop page building experience.
This was a huge step up from what WordPress offered at the time, which is now known more as a classic editor (almost like editing a word document) type experience. However, in recent years, WordPress has released a new page editor called Gutenberg. In this area Squarespace used to have a huge advantage but now WordPress has leveled up and surpassed them by far with their new page building tools.
Conclusion
Which is better? In our opinion, WordPress. However, there are certain situations where a business is incredibly young, needing only a very basic/informational type of presentation, or has a budget that is too low for us work with with. In these scenarios we tend to lead people towards a lower cost option such as Squarespace.
WordPress & Squarespace Comparison Table
| Which is better? | WordPress | Squarespace |
|---|---|---|
| easy to start, no developer needed | X | |
| customization depth | X | |
| community & support | X | |
| drag and drop page builder | X | X |
| free, open source | X |