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It is important that you gave ample attention while choosing your website builder since not doing it properly will make things complicated for you in the future. Thus, you have to keep in mind the future plans you have for your website or online store while making the choice.
It seems you have done the research and have narrowed your options down to Squarespace and WordPress. If so, this article will guide you in the right direction by pointing to you the major differences WordPress and Squarespace has in terms of ease of use, flexibility, user support, eCommerce functionalities, SEO, and cost, etc.
Ease of Use
You can’t compromise with this factor while choosing your website builder. The easier it is to use the less time consuming would be the building and maintenance of your website.
WordPress
WordPress provides unlimited options for building a great website if you know how to code. Coding helps you get the most out of WordPress. Thus, if you are not skilled in coding WordPress will not be able to meet the higher expectations you have towards your website.
Recommended Reading: Best 10 Free WordPress Themes
Squarespace
Squarespace, on the other hand, doesn’t require any coding skills. You can easily build your site using the drag-and-drop editing tools that Squarespace offers. It previews the changes as you make them which makes it so easy for you to work on it. Although it has a certain advantage over WordPress in terms of its usability it is difficult than Wix in that particular area.
Design Flexibility and Customization Options
Design flexibility and customization options should go hand in hand for any content management system. Limited customization options and greater flexibility or vice versa will not be helpful in creating an engaging website. Here is how both Squarespace and WordPress differ in providing customization options and design flexibility.
WordPress
WordPress offers a plethora of free themes to choose from for your website. If you are not content with those, you even have the option to go for paid themes that offer greater flexibility and customization options compared to free themes.
On the downside, WordPress requires you to rely on code and plugins for customization. For unleashing the creative genius in you, you must be a skilled person in coding too.
Squarespace
This is the website builder you are looking for if you want your website to have a killer design. Squarespace offers over 60 high-quality designs for you to choose ranging from online stores to fashion sites.
When it comes to customization, there are unlimited options available with this website builder. With Squarespace, you will be able to get a preview of all the changes you make and it is easy to add galleries, slideshows, and video backgrounds, etc to your website. Besides all this, if you wish to change your chosen template Squarespace makes it an easy enough task, unlike WordPress. For further customization, you can make use of the built-in custom CSS editor.
User Support
It is quite common to run into issues both mundane and serious while building a website or running it. During these situations having a ready to help support team would be of great comfort.
WordPress
Although WordPress doesn’t provide a dedicated support team, with tons of tutorials and blogs available online, there will not be any scarcity for resources. But, the real challenge is going to be tracking the right source of information that will help you solve the issue you are facing.
Squarespace
Squarespace provides excellent support to its users. They have an official support team who provides you with personal email and even live chat support to quickly get your queries answered.
E-Commerce Functionality
It is important for any website builder to include E-Commerce functionality in it especially when the number of online stores is on the rise. Here is how e-commerce features differ in both Squarespace and WordPress.
WordPress
WordPress is one of the best website building platforms available for building a fully functional online store with the help of an eCommerce solution(Shopify, Bigcommerce, or WooCommerce).
Also Read: Best 3 Premium Stripe Plugins for WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the most popular plugin among the three owing to the possibilities it offers to grow your business. WooCommerce supports a huge number of plugins that provide great flexibility to your store. Over a hundred payment methods including popular payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, etc are supported by WooCommerce which in itself a huge plus point for setting up your online store.
Squarespace
Squarespace compared to WordPress offers limited functionalities if you are building a huge online store. Thus, its simple online shopping platform is best suited for small stores. With Squarespace, you can even integrate your shopping platform with products such as MailChimp and Xero for mailing lists and accounting respectively.
One of the major drawbacks of Squarespace is that it doesn’t support PayPal which is one of the most popular payment methods currently. Thus, customers will be left with only Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discovery (for US merchants only) to make payment for their purchase.
SEO- Support
If you are running a business whether online or offline competitors are going to be around you. Thus, surviving competition is essential for ensuring the growth of your online store. Good SEO will definitely help your store to stand out among the rest. Let’s take a look at who provides better SEO, WordPress or Squarespace.
WordPress
Although WordPress offers only limited options for better search engine optimization you can enhance it by using plugins or by tweaking the HTML manually. There are a huge number of plugins both free and paid available for this purpose in WordPress.
Yoast SEO is an example of one such plugin. It provides you with features like real-time page analysis, image titles, optimization options, and XML sitemaps.
Also Read: How to Write an SEO-Friendly Article – Beginner’s Guide
Squarespace
Squarespace lets you implement better practices for improving your website’s SEO without the help of any additional tools. With Squarespace, you will be able to edit title tags, meta description, custom URL’s and even create 301 redirects.
But, if you are running a blog or e-commerce store you will not be able to modify the title tags and meta description tags, thereby making it hard to serve for such websites.
Cost
Cost is indeed an inevitable factor that has to be compared to make a final choice on which website builder to go for. A costly website builder will add an extra burden on the maintenance of your website.
WordPress
With WordPress, you will not be able to estimate a fixed cost as the total cost consists of hosting plan, the price for the theme, and for additional plugins, etc. Thus, the cost could range from $4 per month(if you do not care about your website’s speed) to a huge sum depending on the various features required for your website.
Squarespace
Squarespace, on the contrary, comes with fixed price plans. Thus, you will be able to calculate and put aside a fixed amount to pay on a monthly or yearly basis. Its plans include $12/month for your personal website, $18/month for your business website, and $26/month for your online shop.
Bottom line
So the bottom line is that you should be well thought and aware of the needs your website or online store will have in the future to make a fair choice between Squarespace and WordPress.
Squarespace would be a good choice for the kind of websites with only minimal needs. Thus, if you are looking forward to creating a blogging/informational site, you do not have to think twice about settling with Squarespace.
But, if you are on to become the big player in the market you might need bigger plans for your website/eCommerce store that can only be met with website builders like WordPress.
Also read: Drupal v/s WordPress: Choosing the Right Website Builder
