If you’ve watched a YouTube video or listened to a podcast in the past few years, you’ve probably seen or heard an ad for Squarespace. It’s one of the major DIY website builders, a tool that lets you quickly and easily build a web presence. Not only does Squarespace have a website builder with robust capabilities and AI tools, it also supports strong e-commerce integration and community-building services. Even better, each Squarespace site receives useful extras, such as free domain registration and a free SSL certificate. Still, a few niggles prevent it from shining as brightly as Duda and Wix, our Editors’ Choice winners for website builders.Squarespace Plans and PricingSquarespace lacks a long-term, free account option as Weebly and Wix do, but you can try it free for two weeks. That said, your test site won’t be live until you pay for an account. Accounts start at $23 per month (or $16 per month, billed annually) for the Personal level, which lacks e-commerce features. The plans run up to $65 per month (or $49 per month, billed annually) for the Commerce plan, a tier that includes invoicing, the ability to sell subscriptions, and real-time shipping integration. If you want a no-cost website builder, check out our recommended free website builders.
(Credit: Squarespace/PCMag)
Between the entry-level and high-end options is the $23-per-month Business plan ($23 per month, billed annually) that lets you sell with a 3% transaction fee. Starting at the Business tier, you can import and export site data to and from Squarespace. The company also offers the $36-per-month ($28 per month, billed annually) Basic Commerce plan that removes that fee (as does the Advanced Commerce plan). These rates are relatively expensive compared with the paid, entry-level prices from 1&1 MyWebsite ($12.99 per month), Jimdo ($11 per month), Weebly ($10 per month), and Wix ($17 per month).The price includes website hosting with unlimited storage and monthly data transfers. You receive one year of free domain registration if you’re on an annual payment schedule (alternately, you can connect a domain you already own). After the first year, the domain pricing varies depending on your chosen URL’s desirability. Monthly subscribers need to pay that right off the bat.
As with nearly every site builder, Squarespace kicks things off by tasking you with picking a template. Squarespace asks you to select a general focus from preset categories, such as Food, Gaming, Marketing, and Music. Then, you choose site goals, such as announcing events, showcasing art, blogging, or selling products. The next step asks you where you are in your site creation process, ranging from “Collecting Inspiration” to replacing your existing site with a Squarespace iteration. Then, you’ll be taken to a curated set of template options. Squarespace offers dozens of attractive options, many featuring full-photo backgrounds and some offering scrolling interfaces. Each template is tagged with categories, such as Blog, Art & Design, or Media & Podcast, that let you filter your search options. You can also preview each template before starting the creation and editing process. All Squarespace 7.1 templates (the current version) share the same capabilities, including feature and style options. Consider your selected template design as a starting point, because you can now customize everything. As a result, Squarespace nixed the ability to switch templates in version 7.1 (you can still switch templates in version 7.0, though). If you’re keen on manually customizing your site, the template-switching loss won’t be a detriment. Conversely, people who simply want to push one button to receive a new website look will lament 7.1’s inability to change templates. Check out Squarespace’s version guide for more information.The editing interface is one of the most elegant ones in the space, though perhaps not the most intuitive. Your site has a preset homepage based on the template you’ve chosen. There’s a sidebar on the right with several site settings, including Pages, which lets you add new page types to your site and tweak your main navigation; Design, which lets you tweak the overall site style and make custom CSS; and Commerce, which lets you set up a storefront if your plan has the option. There’s also an assistant that pops up on the left side of the window for first-time users, guiding you through the creation process. You add pages from the side menu panel, with several choices (the number depends on your template), including Album, Blank Page, Blog, Cover Page, Events, Folder, Gallery, Link, and Products. You can move pages up and down in the navigation, but you can’t drag them onto other pages for a subordinate navigation level, as you can in Wix. Instead, you have to use the Folder type to effect nested navigation.There are prefab page layouts for things like About, Contact, and Team pages that look great, and you may not need to modify their layouts at all. To edit a layout, you simply need to double-click on the page, which takes you into the edit mode. Here, page sections and editable elements have blue highlights and text denoting what type of element they are. It’s not entirely intuitive, as it’s easy to add sections, but slightly more difficult to figure out how to add new elements—hover over an existing element and click the blue “plus” icon. There’s a learning curve to Squarespace.
(Credit: Squarespace/PCMag)
Squarespace lets you navigate your site using the navigation on the preview itself, rather than making you use a separate menu, as Wix does. There’s a healthy selection of page elements, one of which lets you enter markdown, a lightweight webpage-editing language. There are, of course, all the usual elements for text, images, galleries, spacers, buttons, charts, forms, and links. But you don’t get free-form shapes as you do in Wix, and you can’t precisely place things where you like on your page.You’ll need to be proficient at using and placing the Spacer element to position elements where you want them. Some useful free integrations, such as Flickr, Instagram, and SoundCloud, or premium options, such as Amazon and OpenTable, are available, as is a new gallery of extensions that add extra functionality. At the time of this writing, there are more than 30 Squarespace Extensions, including inFlow Cloud (inventory software) and QuickBooks Online by OneSaas (automated accounting). Though we’re happy to see Squarespace offer these third-party add-ons, Weebly and Wix offer much more.On the Design tab, you can add a logo and use the Style Editor while creating your website. The latter lets you change your template’s colors and fonts to taste. Squarespace offers robust customization, letting you choose from hundreds of fonts and colors using a gradient color picker. Colors are adjustable for every type of button, header, and link, including social buttons. Note, however, that colors and fonts only apply to the content types. You can’t change fonts and colors for different instances of a header, for example. The Style Editor also lets you adjust spacing and padding for buttons, images, and titles.Squarespace lets you make broad site changes without tweaking every individual element. For example, you can apply sitewide font, color, and style changes to quickly change your site’s look and feel. You can also customize section-specific design tweaks to update any part of your site.Squarespace 7.1 users can use the Fluid Engine, a far more intuitive editing interface, when creating sites. Instead of the somewhat abstract process you go through using Squarespace’s traditional editor, the Fluid Engine lets you drag, drop, and resize whatever elements you want directly on the site. The grid helps everything stay lined up. It makes it far easier to experiment and brings Squarespace more in line with competing modern builders. To use the Fluid Engine, simply add a Blank+ section to your page in a compatible 7.1 template.Squarespace has expanded its AI tools as part of its Design Intelligence initiative. The Blueprint AI builder now lets you quickly and easily enter prompts to generate images and text. In a nice touch, AI can edit existing website text, preview different layout aesthetic options on the fly, and create a central brand identity to help AI content stay on message. These are useful features, in line with AI tools rival builders have added, but nothing replaces something crafted by humans. For tips on getting started building your site, read our primer on how to build a website.
Working With Images in SquarespaceSquarespace offers integrated online photo editing for your uploaded images, letting you change their brightness and contrast, filter them, and crop them, too. It also lets you search for, preview, and buy licenses to use Getty Images professional stock photography on your site. The licensing cost for our test images was $10—pretty reasonable. Squarespace does have a repository of your uploaded images for use elsewhere on your site(s), alongside the gallery of Getty Images and some free image options. You can add a gallery to any page, or add a gallery page, which takes its design from your template—there aren’t any customizations to the gallery’s appearance if you go the page route. On-page galleries can appear as carousels, grids, slideshows, or stacks, and they offer behavior customization choices, such as showing the title and description when the mouse is over an image, transitions, and a lightbox for the grid gallery type. You can also adjust spacing, but you don’t get the degree of control over the appearance of your galleries that some other site builders offer. This enforces good design, but at the cost of creativity.Blogging With SquarespaceSquarespace lets you add nearly any content type to a blog post that you can add to any other page you build. Squarespace also lets you save and schedule posts for publishing later—an important feature that 1&1 MyWebsite lacks. Posts include a heart icon for liking, comments, and a share icon. You can enable an RSS feed for your blog and use email to write new posts when you’re afield. iTunes podcasting integration is available, too.Making Money From Your Squarespace SiteSquarespace has robust selling options. The Business plan and both Commerce plans let you sell unlimited products. The difference is that Business accounts carry a 3 percent transaction fee, while Commerce accounts have no fee. Adding a Product page lets you start selling, whether you’re offering physical goods, digital downloads, or services. You can enter SKUs, regular and sale prices, tags, categories, dimensions, and custom options (for color and size, for example). Your site visitor gets a shopping cart, and each product has its own page, for which you can make a custom URL. You can also create a form to collect information from the product’s buyer, and you can set a stock number to keep inventory.Squarespace also has gift cards, monthly and annual subscriptions, customer account pages for users to see purchase history and save payment info, and new conversion metrics showing exactly where users engaged with your site. Both of the last two are now part of the Business, Commerce Basic, and Advanced plans.
(Credit: Squarespace/PCMag)
Formerly, Stripe was your only choice of payment processor, but now you can also connect to PayPal. A simple one-tap option lets people use Apple Pay from Safari (on iOS devices or Macs) to buy your site wares processed by Stripe. You can also embed PayPal buttons and Etsy stores. In the US, Square can also be added as your point-of-sale system. You can set up express checkout, publish terms of service and privacy agreements, and set up a return policy. USPS and ShipStation integration facilitate sending your merch to buyers. Xero integration gives you accounting support starting at $9 per month.Squarespace has its own email marketing service: Squarespace Email Campaigns. This lets you automatically import your logo, social media icons, mailing lists, and other content into your email notifications. Squarespace also integrates with Facebook for site promotion, letting you sync a page and gallery on your website with your Facebook Page. Commerce-level plans can tag Instagram posts to direct viewers to their web stores.Squarespace Scheduling, an optional online assistant, works 24/7 to manage your business appointments. Starting at $15 per month, Squarespace Scheduling lets you create and sync calendars; create gift certificates, memberships, or subscriptions; and let customers book appointments. Squarespace Scheduling isn’t a standalone product, as you must have some form of Squarespace hosting to go along with it.Squarespace is an excellent e-commerce option, but Editors’ Choice winner Duda has better enterprise offerings. Duda’s highest team tiers and client management options are tailored for large web organizations. Along with that focus on SaaS, Duda’s editor is also great for solo users and is as capable as Squarespace, if not quite as attractive. Building a Mobile Website With SquarespaceSquarespace automatically generates a mobile site from the site you built for desktop browsers. Squarespace sites look great on mobile—the whole reason its templates limit the placement and sizing of objects. There’s one mobile-only setting: Mobile Information Bar. This menu appears across the bottom of the mobile site view, displaying your contact information, location, and business hours (if you’ve enabled them). Squarespace displays buttons along the top of the editing interface that lets you preview your site as it would appear on a smartphone and smartphone-sized mobile device. Squarespace has dedicated mobile apps for Android and iOS that help you build a site and manage your online business.Measuring Site Traffic With SquarespaceAll Squarespace accounts include an Analytics section that shows hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly traffic statistics for visits, page views, and audience size. It also highlights mobile site activity, referrers, popular content, geography, and search engine queries. The Google Search Keywords panel is included, a tool that lets you view keywords, click-through rates, and search positions after connecting your account to the Google Search Console. An Activity Log shows your visitors’ IP addresses. Through bars and pie charts, you also have a limited view of what technology—platform and web browser, for example—visitors are using. Commerce-level accounts get an extra Metric option: Sales Overview. It displays shows revenue and units sold by hour, day, week, or month. Squarespace offers an SEO checklist for your site and even lets you hire a Squarespace SEO expert. Cool Customer Service SupportSquarespace offers 24/7 email support and live text chat support from Monday to Friday 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST. The company lacks phone support. In testing, a customer service representative fielded the question that we keyed into the chat box seconds after we hit the Enter key. Moments later, the person on the other side of the screen linked us to the answers we sought regarding third-party extension support. It was a good experience, if lacking the comfort of speaking with a human in person. By comparison, Wix offers telephone support, even for free accounts. At the other end of the spectrum, WordPress.com offers just a knowledgebase to free users; live chat is only for paid accounts.Excellent UptimeWebsite uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. We used a website-monitoring tool to track our Squarespace-hosted test site’s uptime over 14 days. Every 15 minutes, the tool pinged our website and sent an email if it was unable to contact the site for at least 1 minute. The testing data reveals that Squarespace is incredibly stable; in fact, it didn’t go down once in the two-week testing period. So, you can trust Squarespace to act as a rock-solid foundation for your website.
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Verdict: There’s Nothing Square About SquarespaceSquarespace is a flexible way for individuals and small businesses to set up an online presence. It produces great-looking, mobile-friendly sites, and gives you strong e-commerce tools. The Fluid Engine and AI tools make site editing easy, quick, and intuitive. That said, for better cohesiveness and lower-cost subscription options, consider Duda for SaaS and Wix for a free site builder.Mike Williams contributed to this review.
Squarespace Website Builder
Pros
Beautiful, responsive designs
Fluid Engine makes designing a site more intuitive
Deep e-commerce capabilities, including digital downloads
Lets you use custom code
Blogging tool lets you schedule posts
Good help and analytics tools
Free SSL certificate
Unlimited storage and monthly data transfers with all plans
View
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The Bottom Line
Squarespace has useful traditional and AI-powered tools for building attractive websites for personal and small business use.
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About Jeffrey L. Wilson
Managing Editor, Apps and Gaming
Since 2004, I’ve penned gadget- and video game-related nerd-copy for a variety of publications, including the late, great 1UP; Laptop; Parenting; Sync; Wise Bread; and WWE. I now apply that knowledge and skillset as the Managing Editor of PCMag’s Apps & Gaming team.
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About Jordan Minor
Senior Analyst, Software
In 2013, I started my Ziff Davis career as an intern on PCMag’s Software team. Now, I’m an Analyst on the Apps and Gaming team, and I really just want to use my fancy Northwestern University journalism degree to write about video games. I host The Pop-Off, PCMag’s video game show. I was previously the Senior Editor for Geek.com. I’ve also written for The A.V. Club, Kotaku, and Paste Magazine. I’m the author of a video game history book, Video Game of the Year, and the reason why everything you know about Street Sharks is a lie.
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