Squarespace Full Review: Is it the best?

First and foremost, you’re probably wondering who it’s best for. To answer your question, it is best for anyone who wants to show their visual work online (artists, designers, photographers…). 

That’s not the only field Squarespace websites do well in. 

• Blogging: includes many built-in tools beneficial for blogging; you can even add your social media accounts.
• E-commerce: there are two E-commerce plans with many features to create the website you need. 
• Business: many small businesses use Squarespace to create their website; they have emails, SEO tools, and many more features that can make it easier for you to create a website. 
• Personal: includes many features to create your own site; whether for music, your restaurant, or photography, you’ll choose your template and do it.

There are four different plans for website building on Squarespace: 

	Personal	Business	Commerce (Basic)	Commerce (Advanced)
Storage	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Bandwidth	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Emails	NA	One Gmail and Google workspace free for the first year	One Gmail and Google workspace free for the first year	One Gmail and Google workspace free for the first year
Domains	Free for the first year	Free for the first year	Free for the first year	Free for the first year
Backup	NA	NA	NA	NA
Price per month (annually)	$12	$18	$26	$40

 

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Ease of use 

Squarespace is not the easiest web builder to use; it doesn't have the most intuitive tool.  Although it has the drag-and-drop feature, you can’t drag the elements anywhere, so it takes some time to get used to it. Eventually, you’ll get the hang of it.

Squarespace's website builder is straightforward, in other words, what you see is what you get. All you have to do is add text and images 

However, in the latest Squarespace version 7.1, you cannot change the template you choose, but you can manually create the design you want, which is time-consuming. 

If you have a question, you can contact the Squarespace team on their 24/7 email support or live chat, which is available between 4 am to 8 pm EST, from Monday to Friday. 
One disadvantage they have is the lack of phone support. Don’t worry, though. You can still contact them via social media. If you prefer to refer to their community forum and knowledge base for any information, it does come with in-depth articles, guides, and tutorials. 

Depending on your website, prices may vary between $12 and $40 if you’re taking the annual plan. To make it even better, you’ll save around 30% if you subscribe to the yearly plan and benefit from a free domain for the first year. 

The best part is, you’ll get the value of your money from the cheapest plan! 

Annual plans include unlimited bandwidth and storage, a free domain for the first year, and SSL security. You can unlock other features if you upgrade your plan. For example, the E-commerce plan comes with unlimited products, no transaction fees, and many more for online stores.

Sadly, Squarespace doesn’t include a free plan, but there’s a 14-day free trial for all its plans. You don’t even have to enter your payment details until the end of the trial. 

That’s not all; there’s a 14-day money-back guarantee, so you’ll get a refund if you cancel your plan before the first two weeks. 

 

Designing Your Website

How are you going to build your website? The answer is simple; you start by choosing a template that you can edit and personalize. Be careful while choosing your template because the latest Squarespace version, doesn't let you change it. 

You can choose the category you want; are you creating a photography website? A music website? Choose the category then choose a template. Afterward, the startup process starts by choosing who’s the website for; you create a description and a title for your website.

As I previously mentioned, editing is not the easiest on Squarespace. You have to create a page based on any template to edit. Unlike other websites, there isn’t a sidebar; instead, you have to rely on the dialog box of content items to add a new element to a specific part of your page.
Don’t worry; you’ll eventually get the hang of it. 

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While designing your site, you can add a logo and use the Style Editor to change the color, fonts, and create the website of your choice. There are many styles available. Sadly, colors and fonts only apply to content types. You can also adjust the padding and spacing for titles, images, and anything else. 

For people with modest skills and just breaking into the field of web building, Squarespace knows exactly how to make things easier for you. Their website builder is loaded with tools that can serve your website to the max. 

• Custom WYSIWYG Editor (Avoid unpleasant surprises when display)

Whether for multi-column layouts or multiple content types, you are in control using WYSIWYG Editing engine. The software allows editing content in a form that resembles how it appears when displayed as a finished product. The editor is lightweight and packaged with rich text editing tools that can handle all types of content.

• Automatically Responsive Designs

all designs work on any mobile device with different screen sizes, platforms, or orientation. As the user shifts from his laptop to mobile or iPad, the website's responsive designs should automatically switch to fit-in with resolution.

• Automatic Image Scaling 

Another essential tool offered by SquareSpace saves the effort and time wasted on rescaling images to look right. All your images are automatically scaled using these features. 

• Automatic Text Wrapping 

Many website builders lack this precious feature; it is an essential one to make your website look catchy and as you have imagined it. With this feature in hand, you can wrap text around an image by dragging your image over a text and dropping it.

• Gallery Blocks

Add galleries of images and videos to your blog posts, individual events, or product items’ additional information. However, you can’t add a gallery block to any area with page sections, like layout pages, portfolio sub-pages, footers, or collecting landing pages.

• Archive Blocks

To navigate your website better, you can use this tool to display content by category, tag, date, or author. The cool part about it is that you don’t have to keep updating your organized lists; the blocks automatically update to make any changes.

• Menu Blocks

You must have seen websites that redirect you to PDF files with more information or lists on what you are dreading; it is called embedded.pdf menus. Many internet users should find it all in one place, so menu blocks are advantageous when building your website. You can even create multiple menus in a single menu block.

• Social Links Blocks 

You must have noticed the social media links at the footer of many websites; those links are displayed with a kick of help from social links blocks. Using it, you can add social icons with URLs that link directly to the social media account. Don’t worry about the logos. You can choose from a list of platform logos.

• Button Blocks

Call to action on your website using button blocks, all you need to do is edit a page, select button, in the text field enters a text for the button label, in the link field add a web address, choose the design, and here you go, it is all done. 

Squarespace includes many features that you can benefit from. The first feature we can look at is the SSL certificate included in every plan.  It encrypts the information entered on your website to make it secure for users, especially if they’re purchasing online. It also has built-in security to protect from viruses and DDoS Protection, which protects from malicious traffic.

Additionally, if you forget to autosave your website, you’re on the wrong page. Squarespace doesn’t include an autosave, but you can restore pages up to 30 days after deleting them. There are backup copies of your website stored in primary and secondary servers by Squarespace.

The best part is, you won’t lose your work if you edit on your phone and lose your connection. 

Don’t panic if anything is missing from the features built into their platform; they have their own app store. Squarespace Extensions include 23 third-party apps to help build the site you need and are divided into four categories: 

• Shipping and Fulfillment
• Finance
• Inventory and Products
• Sales and Marketing

The most recent feature added to Squarespace is Acuity Scheduling. This way, your clients can easily book appointments or classes, depending on your schedule. 

Barely anyone’s bothered to go to the second page of their search engine to find what they’re looking for. Therefore, if you want to be on top of the search results on Google or other search engines, Search Engine Optimization is what you’re looking for. 

There is an introduction that helps beginners; it’s recommended to take time and go through it to improve their ranking. It’s usually recommended to depend on the industry-standard tools: SEMRush or Whitespark.

Yet, Squarespace provides the necessary SEO tools; including:

• AMP Support (Accelerated Mobile Pages): Although you have to enable it, Squarespace is the only website that uses AMP, a google project that loads websites faster on mobile phones. 
• You can customize meta titles and descriptions.  It is essential to have the keyword in the title for SEO. 
• You can Custom URLs on Squarespace
• Squarespace offers a free SSL Certificate to protect your site, and it is considered when ranking your website.
• Squarespace includes Alt Tags for images 
• Squarespace includes a sitemap 
• Themes on Squarespace are mobile-friendly, which is vital for SEO according to Google

You can even use more advanced SEO features, but they require some coding. 

You can even use email as a marketing tool for campaigns and social media integration, and your site will have a better ranking.  

 

Social Media

In the modern world, social media has become an essential part of all businesses. Hence, you should integrate your website with social media. For your good luck, you can easily link your website to over 20 social media platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or anything else.  Even add social feeds feature for visitors to keep track of all your recent updates. 

You can even publish your podcast on your website and then share it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 

 

Conclusion

To conclude, Squarespace is an excellent hosting service for anyone who wants to show their visual work. Each plan comes with its own features, with a 14-day free trial and even a 14-day money-back guarantee. 

The best part? You can link your website to different social applications. If you create a podcast, you can publish it on Spotify or Apple podcasts to get a wider audience. 

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