Squarespace Review, Pricing & Features

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace is a website building tool that has over one million paying users. Squarespace helps its customers create high-quality, design-forward websites. It offers a highly customizable website builder, a WYSIWYG blog editor, ecommerce features, SEO customizations, email marketing, and traffic, sales, and engagement dashboards. These features help you build your brand and create a visually impactful online presence.

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Table of Contents

Squarespace Review Summary

Squarespace was founded in 2003 by Anthony Casalena. Squarespace’s mission is to provide a modern platform that enables millions to build a brand, share their stories, and help their customers create an impactful online presence. Today, Squarespace has over a thousand employees and is based in Manhattan, New York.

Squarespace is a website building tool that helps its customers design and customize their websites. Squarespace offers a highly customizable website builder, ecommerce features, SEO customizations, email marketing, and traffic, sales, and engagement dashboards. Overall, Squarespace is an intuitive platform that is better for those who place an emphasis on personal website design.

Squarespace is slightly more expensive than other solutions like Wix and WordPress. It also does not offer a wide range of pricing for website building and ecommerce plans. Out of both the website and ecommerce plans, Squarespace’s most popular plan costs $26 per month.

Overall, Squarespace is a very customizable website builder that is intuitive enough for beginners and feature-rich enough for more experienced users. We also find Squarespace’s ecommerce features sufficient and not too intimidating for new ecommerce business owners.

  • If you want a highly customizable website builder that can support beginner website builders, then we recommend looking into Wix
  • If you want more control over your website’s personalization in terms of design and functionality, then we recommend looking into WordPress
  • If you want an intuitive website builder that also offers higher quality digital marketing features, then we recommend looking into GoDaddy

Squarespace Pricing & Cost

Squarespace’s pricing ranges from $16 to $54 per month. It offers website and ecommerce plans at different pricing.

Squarespace does not currently offer a free plan. However, it does offer a 14-day free trial that does not require a credit card. You can also save 30% by purchasing an annual plan upfront.

Plan TypePlan & Pricing
Website
  • Personal: $16 per month
  • Business: $26 per month
Ecommerce
  • Basic Commerce: $35 per month
  • Advanced Commerce: $54 per month
Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace Features

In our review, we will walk through the features offered by Squarespace. We’ll discuss Squarespace’s usability, customer support, and describe the major benefits and drawbacks of the software. We’ll also show real images of the software to give you an idea of what it’s like to use the tool.

Website Builder

Squarespace offers a builder that lets you customize your website and its pages. However, a disadvantage of Squarespace’s builder is that you cannot start from scratch – you have to base your website design on one of Squarespace’s templates. Overall, while Squarespace’s builder is robust and intuitive to use, your overall design is limited by the template you choose.

Squarespace Website Builder

Squarespace offers a drag & drop builder that lets you add 19 different types of page sections to your website – including a calendar, FAQs, donations, and photo gallery section. Within these sections you can add over 25 site elements to your pages – including images, videos, forms, buttons, and a search bar. A disadvantage of Squarespace’s editor is you cannot edit specifically for mobile or desktop.

Squarespace also lets you add markdown, or custom code, to your website pages – this includes HTML and CSS. However, we recommend just using the HTML and CSS feature for simpler customizations like changing a paragraph’s font color. This is because your custom code can conflict with Squarespace’s internal code.

Creating & Managing a Blog

A blog is a collection of articles that are written to demonstrate expertise or share an opinion on a specific topic. There are several reasons why blogging is beneficial for your site. This includes:

  • Driving traffic to your website
  • Converting visitors to leads and customers
  • Giving you or your company a voice

The Squarespace platform comes with three features that make it simple to build a comprehensive, and SEO-friendly blog. This includes a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) editor, commenting, and the ability to organize your posts by date.

WYSIWYG Blog Editor

A WYSIWYG editor lets you edit your content as it will appear when published. The biggest advantage of this editor is that you don’t need to have any programming knowledge in order to design your blog. Overall, Squarespace’s WYSIWYG editor is intuitive to use and operates very similarly to its website builder.

Squarespace Blog

Squarespace’s blog editor lets you upload the same types of multimedia you can upload onto your website pages into your blog posts. Squarespace also lets you add tags to your posts – readers can use these to look for certain and related content. Tags also help search engines better understand the content on your website.

Squarespace also allows you to optimize your blog posts for SEO. Good SEO practices make your content more visible, which increase your traffic and give you more opportunities for conversions. The SEO optimizations Squarespace offers include editing the URL slug, title, and description of each blog post.

Enabling Comments on Blog Pages

Enabling comments on your blog posts has many benefits. These include:

  • Providing social proof that your content is engagement-worthy
  • Helping you understand what your readers want you to write about
  • Deepening your relationship with your readers through back-and-forth dialogue
  • Increasing the likelihood that readers will engage with your site in other ways like subscribing to an email newsletter

Squarespace offers an advanced commenting feature. Besides enabling and disabling comments, Squarespace also lets you:

  • Enable likes
  • Enable threaded comments
  • Organize comments based on time posted or likes
  • Auto-disable comments after a certain number of days
  • Moderate comments that get flagged

Displaying Your Most Recent Posts on Your Website

Displaying your recent posts on the front page of your website introduces new content to your visitors. This can help increase your blog traffic and overall page views.

Squarespace Recent Posts

Squarespace lets you customize how your recent posts are displayed. This includes letting you choose the:

  • Layout of your posts
  • Alignment of text
  • Spacing and sizing of each blog post
  • Number of posts shown per page

Ecommerce

In addition to building a website, Squarespace can be used to run an eCommerce business. Squarespace offers key ecommerce features including inventory management, order management, payments, coupons, tax calculations, abandoned cart recovery, and shipping rate calculations.

Inventory Management

Squarespace lets you add physical products, digital products, and services to your ecommerce store, and track your inventory through the Squarespace Commerce app. Overall, Squarespace’s inventory management feature is robust, but its inventory tracking feature is standard.

Squarespace Inventory1

To get started, you enter the name, description, price, and the product’s stock amount. In addition, you can:

  • Create variations of each product
  • Write SEO optimized product titles and descriptions
  • Use a one-time or subscription pricing model
  • Collect customer information when products are added to shopping carts

However, unlike other solutions, Squarespace does not offer useful filters that let you view specific groups of products. This is troublesome if you have a large inventory of products. Currently, Squarespace only offers a search bar to look for specific products.

Squarespace Inventory2

You can use Squarespace’s inventory tracking feature to track products by stock count. Squarespace also lets you send yourself "low stock" alerts if a product’s stock hits a certain number.

Order Management

Squarespace lets you manage your pending, fulfilled, and cancelled orders. Overall, this feature in Squarespace is effective. However, it does not offer some of the useful order management features found in alternatives like Wix.

Squarespace Order

As you can see above, Squarespace shows you the order number, the date the order was placed, the customer name, email address, and whether or not you have been paid. Squarespace also includes a search bar that lets you look for specific orders. A disadvantage of Squarespace’s order management feature is that it does not offer useful filters to organize your orders like by shipping regions.

Payments

Being able to accept a wide range of payments will increase your website’s conversion rate and revenue. Below are the payment options that Squarespace lets you accept from customers. It should be noted that certain payment options also come with processing fees.

Payment TypeProcessing Fee
Credit & Debit Cards
  • 3% if you are only on the Business Plan
  • 0% if you are on any Commerce plan
PayPal2.9% + $0.30
Stripe2.9% + $0.30

Tax Calculations

Squarespace lets you calculate taxes for different countries and specific regions. You can also choose whether your tax is added at checkout or included in your prices.

A disadvantage of this feature is that Squarespace does not automatically calculate taxes for the different regions you ship to. You have to input these calculations yourself.

Squarespace Tax

Shipping Rates

Calculating your shipping rates can be difficult, especially if you are new to owning an online business. Luckily, Squarespace gives you several shipping options, and automatically calculates shipping rates for FedEx, UPS, and USPS. Squarespace is one of only website building tools that automatically calculates shipping for FedEx and UPS. The shipping functionality is also more intuitive than what’s found in alternatives like WordPress.

Squarespace Shipping

The different shipping rates you can calculate include:

  • Flat rate
  • By weight
  • Calculated by FedEx
  • Calculated by UPS
  • Calculated by USPS

Squarespace also lets you add the dimensions for custom containers when using automatic shipping rates. The shipping rate for these custom containers will also be automatically calculated.

Coupons

Squarespace lets you create coupons that can be applied towards your products. These help promote your products, and increase your sales.

Squarespace lets you choose whether your coupon is a percentage discount, a fixed dollar discount, or offers free shipping. Squarespace also lets you choose:

  • The name of your coupon
  • A discount code
  • The kind of orders you the coupon to apply to
  • How many times a coupon can be used
  • Whether a coupon expires or not

Abandoned Cart Recovery

Recovering abandoned carts is a surefire way to increase sales. Squarespace lets you create a custom email that you can send to customers to remind them that their cart is currently abandoned.

Squarespace Abandoned Cart

Squarespace lets you:

  • Customize the email subject line
  • Edit the text of your email
  • Add images

Squarespace Extensions

Squarespace offers extensions that you can use to enhance the functionality of your website. Extensions save you web development time and money. However, it should be noted that if you install too many extensions, it can slow down your website.

Squarespace offers less extensions compared to other solutions like WordPress and Wix. As you can see below, Squarespace does not offer extensions in certain categories.

ExtensionDoes Squarespace offer it?
SEOYes
AnalyticsYes
EcommerceYes
MalwareNo
Data BackupNo
UX & UI DesignNo

Marketing & Driving Traffic to Your Website

After you’ve created your website, you want to make sure that your content actually reaches an audience. Squarespace offers marketing features that help build relationships with readers and will drive traffic to your website. This includes social media marketing, testimonials, contact forms, and email marketing.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is one of the best methods to connect with your audience and increase brand awareness. Squarespace’s social media marketing features are simple. You can link them in the header of your website’s front page or add them as buttons anywhere on a page, and adjust the alignment, style, and size.

Squarespace lets you add links for:

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Twitter

Testimonials

Testimonials are a form of social proof that build credibility and trust with website visitors. They provide an objective point of view and humanize your brand.

Squarespace Testimonials

Squarespace does not offer a direct testimonial feature. We recommend you create a "testimonial" blog page and choose the "summary" block to display your testimonials on a website page.

Squarespace lets you customize how your testimonials are displayed. This includes letting you:

  • Choose the layout of your posts
  • Choose the alignment of text
  • Choose the spacing and sizing of each blog post
  • Choose the number of posts shown per page

Contact Forms

Contact forms are one of the easiest and most effective ways to win new subscribers and capture detailed customer information. Squarespace forms are very customizable in terms of designs and settings and can be easily integrated into your website’s pages.

Squarespace Contact Form

Squarespace lets you add 19 different form fields – including name, text, email, phone number, and date. You can also choose how you want your form submissions sent to you. You can choose to receive them by email, Mailchimp, Zapier, and Google Drive.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is another key marketing channel for website traffic and customer engagement. Overall, Squarespace’s email marketing tools are advanced and user-friendly.

Squarespace lets you create email blasts and automated trigger emails. This includes email newsletters, promotional emails, sign-up confirmations, and abandoned cart emails. You can either build an email from scratch or use one of Squarespace’s email templates.

Squarespace Email

Automated emails are sent based on customer activity. For example, you can send a welcome email when someone subscribes to your website. You can also send an email that recommends additional products after someone makes a purchase.

Analytics

Once you’ve created and marketed your website, it’s important to understand how your website is performing. Your site’s data can help you make website improvements that increase engagement. Squarespace offers dashboards for your website’s traffic, sales, and visitor engagement.

Traffic Dashboard

Squarespace offers a dashboard that lets you view the traffic your website generates. Overall this feature is standard.

Squarespace Traffic

As you can see above, Squarespace lets you view your website visits, unique visitors, and pageviews. Squarespace also shows you the percentage change in these numbers per day, week, month, and year. An advantage of Squarespace’s traffic dashboard is that it displays your information graphically.

Squarespace also lets you view your site visits by location. This information is useful for understanding the performance of your marketing campaigns.

Sales Dashboard

If you create an ecommerce store with Squarespace, you can view your sales information in a dashboard. This feature in Squarespace is robust and includes important KPIs needed to effectively track your sales.

Squarespace Sales

As you can see above, Squarespace lets you view your:

  • Total revenue – factors in shipping fees, taxes, and discounts
  • Units sold
  • Orders
  • Conversion rate
  • Average order value
  • Revenue per visit

Squarespace also shows you the percentage change of these numbers over days, weeks, months, and years. You can also view this information graphically in a line chart or bar graph.

Visitor Engagement

Squarespace offers dashboards for different forms of engagement. These dashboards include detailed information that you can use to understand visitor behavior and brainstorm optimization experiments.

The engagement dashboards Squarespace offers are:

Engagement DashboardDescription
Activity LogThis is a searchable list of every time a visitor accessed a URL on your website. It includes key information like the date, time, the geographic location of each IP address, and shows how the visitors found your website.
Form & Button ConversionsThis measures how many views, submissions, and clicks your forms and buttons receive. This information is useful if you want visitors to take a specific action, like sign up for a newsletter, or book an appointment.
Popular ContentThis shows your top content by pageviews. This helps you understand the topics your visitors find most interesting, and is useful for content strategy. .
Site Search KeywordsThis displays the keywords that visitors use to search internally on your website. With this, you can see how well your content matches their search terms and find ways to improve search results through headers, categories, tags, and product descriptions.

Mobile

Squarespace offers Android and iOS mobile applications that you can use to manage and edit your website. Overall, the apps are robust and intuitive.

Squarespace Mobile

Unlike other solutions, Squarespace’s mobile app lets you edit the pages of your websites. You can also view different analytics including your sales and traffic information, form submissions, button clicks, and abandoned carts.

Legal & Security

Having proper website and data security is essential in protecting your site from DDoS attacks, which can temporarily make your website unavailable to visitors. Strong security also protects against malware and prevents perpetrators from gaining access to your and your visitors’ confidential information.

The legal and security standards that Squarespace offers are below.

FeatureOffered by Squarespace
SSL CertificateYes
Two-factor AuthenticationYes
International CompliancesYes (GDPR)
FirewallYes (WAF)
PCI ComplianceYes

Squarespace Customer Support

Overall, we found Squarespace’s customer support to be slightly above average. The customer support team responded quickly to live chats, and Squarespace offers a wide range of customer support outlets.

Squarespace’s help articles are very informative and are written in an easily digestible format. They also include helpful graphics and videos.

Customer Support ChannelsLive chat, Email, Chatbot
Customer Support Availability
  • Live chat: Monday to Friday 4 AM to 8 PM EST
  • Email: 24/7
Other Support ResourcesForum, FAQs, Knowledge Base, Webinars
Platform Update NotificationsNo
Application Status PageYes

Squarespace vs. Competitors

In terms of usability and feature functionality, Squarespace is most similar to Wix, however, Wix is more user-friendly. Compared to WordPress and GoDaddy, Squarespace is superior in design and usability.

The top Squarespace competitors are:

Is Squarespace Right For You?

Overall, Squarespace is a very customizable website builder that is intuitive enough for beginners and feature-rich enough for more experienced users. We also find Squarespace’s ecommerce features sufficient and not too intimidating for new ecommerce business owners.

  • If you want a highly customizable website builder that can support beginner website builders, then we recommend looking into Wix
  • If you want more control over your website’s personalization in terms of design and functionality, then we recommend looking into WordPress
  • If you want an intuitive website builder that also offers higher quality digital marketing features, then we recommend looking into GoDaddy

If you are interested in trying Squarespace, sign up for a 14-day free trial.

Amy Yang

Amy Yang is a Junior Research Analyst at SoftwarePundit, where she conducts in-depth analyses on software markets and products. Amy has expertise in content production and managing digital and social platforms. She has a Bachelor of Science in Communication & Media, and a Minor in Web Programming and Applications from NYU. You can connect with Amy on LinkedIn.

Amy is an expert in several software categories including:

  • Course creation software
  • Electronic signature software
  • Social media software
  • Website builder software