The eCommerce industry’s explosion gives us opportunities to launch an online business in a trice. For example, a hosted cart like Squarespace can create a stunning and neat site after just a few clicks, but is it worth it? This Squarespace review will address the issue.
In the following line, LitExtension – the #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert will also analyze intensively Squarespace functionalities and features to answer the following questions:
Let’s get the ball rolling!
Quick Verdict
Squarespace is an all-in-one content management system that allows users to build a website for several purposes, from blogs, portfolio, to restaurant reservation system and online businesses. With eyecatching pre-built templates and a powerful drag-and-drop website builder, even eCommerce beginners can get their store up and running in less than no time.
With respect to Squarespase limitations, you will have less customization ability, compared to open-source platforms. Plus, there are some features needed to be added to your site, such as SEO improvement, image optiomization, etc. Overall, it adds up to the total cost of a Squarespace website, making it an expensive eCommerce hosted solution.
Nonetheless, the platform is still an ideal choice for those who are new to the field. Squarespace provides beautiful templates, works great on mobile devices and handles all the technical stuffs.
Squarespace Overview: What You Need to Know First?
What is Squarespace?
Squarespace is a powerful website builder with professional-looking templates, a simplistic section-based editor, and strong eCommerce features. With Squarespace, users can use pre-built website templates and drag-and-drop elements to create web pages without knowing a single line of code.
What is Squarespace used for?
In its early days, Squarespace was developed as a blog-hosting service and published as a company in January 2004. The platform reached $1 million in revenue in 2006 and by 2021, it raised a total of $300 million in venture capital.
Currently, Squarespace positions itself as a content management system (CMS) solution to create and manage blogs, portfolio sites, and online stores. As of the writing, Squarespace market share is 5% of the top one million sites, and the platform hosts 3+ million live websites in total (Source: BuiltWith). Accordingly, it’s the third most popular hosted solution on the entire internet.
Rather than being a CMS solution, Squarespace also aims to provide eCommerce solutions. More and more eCommerce features were added to the Squarespace system, such as Stripe, Getty Images, Paypal, etc. Currently, there are 134,671 live stores using Squarespace.
In contrast to open-source eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce or Magento – churning out lines of code to construct a site, Squarespace lets businesses of all types create professional websites with the drag-and-drop interface.
Squarespace Pros and Cons
With that being said, is Squarespace good? Take a look at the table below, where we summarize all the advantages and disadvantages of Squarespace.
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Squarespace Review: All Features Analysis
In case you are in a hurry, look at the table below and have a grasp of what we will discuss in this Squarespace review.
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Squarespace pricing
Pricing is always one of the most important considerations for any online business. Fortunately, you really get what you pay for with Squarespace.
Currently, the platform offers 4 pricing plans: Personal, Business, Basic Commerce, and Advanced Commerce. Except for the Personal plan, the other three work well for online businesses.
Squarespace does not offer a free plan, yet you are still able to experience the platform with a 14-day free trial. Then, upgrade to any paid plan, and you will have access to amazing Squarespace features, such as unlimited bandwidth and storage. Your Squarespace website will also be mobile optimized and SSL enabled by default. What’s more, it’s possible to connect the Squarespace site to your custom domain.
If you plan to grow your online business for the long term, consider switching to the annual subscription. This option helps you save up to 30%. For instance, with the Basic Commerce plan, it costs $432 when you pay monthly but down to $324 for the annual option.
In the following lines, we will give out detailed Squarespace reviews on every Squarespace pricing plan.
Squarespace pricing plans
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- Personal Plan is for a simple, personal website. It doesn’t allow you to sell products.
- Business Plan is suitable for Services businesses and Small businesses. There are unlimited contributors to your website and a bunch of premium features exclusive to this plan. That said, the plan charges a 3% transaction fee and offers no customer account and no social media integration. Therefore, it’s not a good option for eCommerce stores.
- If your business brings in over $3000 per year, the Basic Commerce plan is an ideal choice. No transaction fees are applied. Plus, you will have access to voucher management, inventory tracking, and Squarespace point of sale (POS) support.
- Last but not least, the Advanced Commerce plan is ideal for large-scale businesses looking to expand. It comes with a bunch of great features, such as Abandoned Cart Recovery, Sell Subscriptions, Advanced Shipping, and Advanced Discounts.
Design and flexibility
The main power core of Squarespace is right at the initial look. Generally, Squarespace templates are super professional, eye-catching with quality stock images, and a bit section-based. Some of them won a few Webby awards for the best design.
As of the writing, Squarespace offers 110 templates divided into 14 categories. Each of them fits your business or personal purpose, such as a photography portfolio or wedding-announcement website. Nevertheless, templates that are specifically designed and fully optimized for online stores are still in a limited range.
It’s worth noting that since the Squarespace 7.1 version, templates are just variations of a “Family template” and share the same features and style options. What’s more, it’s not possible to change the template, but you can modify it thanks to the Page Section and Design Panel.
- Page Section: allows you to add as many sections as you want (content, block, gallery, etc) into your starting page and changes section style to fit your needs. However, the Page section is only available in certain templates.
- Design Panel: permits you to add and change fonts, colors, animations, etc., or make bulk changes to your site, giving your site a unique look.
You can even go the extra mile by going to the developer platform. This allows you to access template files behind your Squarespace website and edit them using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Since the Squarespace version 7.1, you can freely add as many elements as you want and make your site distinguishable from others.
Out of the box, Squarespace integrates with Unsplash and Getty. These integrations allow you to free images like Unsplash and paid (Getty) stock images from the huge libraries to your site.
Ease of use
Following up with the Squarespace review, we’ll move to discuss the Squarespace ease of use.
Since most people want to get rid of the “technical burden,” Squarespace aims for convenience and ease of use. The platform makes it super easy to start. All you need to do is go to Squarespace.com, pick a template that best fits your business, and click on “Start to Design.”
The editing system is quite straightforward. You can add texts, images, logos, and the appearance of your front store will be the same when you publish as it is when you modify.
Nonetheless, Squarespace website builder comes with a longer learning curve in comparison to other builders like Wix, Weebly, and Shopify. It’s more section-based: you can’t drag and drop anything anywhere you want, and slows down a bit in the autosave mode. However, these help your website to be more structural and uncluttered.
eCommerce features
Let’s move on to the next part of this Squarespace review. Here, we take a look at all the outstanding features that Squarespace offers to boost your online business.
Reporting and analytics
Squarespace offers a decent range of reporting tools. The hosted solution brings you a real-time overview and detailed analytics of key factors such as visitors, orders, revenue, and so on.
Some of the best features of the analytics system of Squarespace include:
- Abandoned Cart: This function helps you to get insight into every abandoned cart and the success of your Abandoned Checkout Recovery email campaign.
- Traffic Source: See where visitors come from when they visit your site by channel. If you’re on the Commerce Basic or Advanced Plan, you can see how much revenue each channel – like social, email, and direct traffic – drives to your business.
- Activity Log: See a searchable list of every time a visitor accessed a URL on your site in the past seven days. Includes IP addresses.
Inventory management
The Squarespace Inventory panel is quite easy to use. From here, you can control your inventory, find your item by search, add new products, edit stock levels, or bulk edit your product.
You can view products in two places: On their individual product pages and in the Inventory panel. The Inventory panel shows all products on your site, while a Products Page only displays the particular products added to that page.
Squarespace lets you import products from your existing Etsy, Shopify, or Big Cartel store via a .csv file. Nonetheless, customers, orders, and other pieces of data can also be imported manually. You can easily add a product picture, set prices, and description for your item. Squarespace allows you to add all kinds of products, from physical to digital products, services, or even gift cards
Payment gateways
Squarespace offers a limited amount of payment gateways, including Paypal, Stripe, and Square.
Although just a few methods, it does cover most of the customer’s payment needs. Paypal and Stripe are both popular international payments that let customers pay with debit and credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover (US) ) without creating or logging into an account. Additionally, Square allows merchants to use the Squarespace Point Of Sale to process in-person cash and card payments.
Apps and add-ons
Besides the core functionality, Squarespace also adds a growing ecosystem of third-party apps and extensions. However, this seems to be a disadvantage compared to its competitors.
Currently, there are only 21 paid apps related to eCommerce and accounting available. Including Shipping and Fulfillment (7), Finance (6), Inventory and Products (3), and Sales and Marketing (4).
SEO & Marketing features
Squarespace SEO Features
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the most important elements when it comes to choosing a site builder. Especially since Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan like other hosted platform competitors, paying customers definitely expect more from their SEO tools.
In the following line of the Squarespace review, let’s demonstrate all the cons and pros of Squarespace SEO!
Pros:
- Security: according to Google, the HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) mode of Squarespace, which is a ranking signal, helps to improve the security of your site.
- Sitemap.xml file: a table of contents that will let search engines know what pages your site has. Squarespace automatically generates and links with your sitemap, which lists all the URLs and image information (name, publication date…) on your site with proper priority for perfect indexing.
- Clean HTML Markup: Google and other search engines look at your heading tags to understand the content on your site and how to display it in search results. Squarespace allows your site to automatically create headings with HTML heading tags.
- Built-in mobile optimization: Google considers this as an element to rank your page higher. Squarespace makes your content and template automatically resize based on the size of the browser window viewing your site.
- Uptime site loading: Google will penalize you if your site is down so many times. Squarespace is on top of the CMS Page Speed Performance Ranking Both Desktop And Mobile due to its great server system and AMP (creates lightweight versions of web pages to help them load faster on a mobile device).
- Both Google Analytics and Google Console are available so you can keep tracking your SEO issues.
Cons:
- Alt tag: Squarespace does provide ways to add an Alt tag. However, it’s too complicated because how you add alt text to an Image Block depends on the layout. Check it out here.
- 301,302 redirect: this function is available for Squarespace’s users to install, but it’s not automatic.
- No SEO checking tool: SEO checking tools such as Yoast SEO (a WordPress plugin that helps adjust the SEO point of view for your page) are not available in Squarespace.
- No rich snippets function: There is no built-in tool for creating rich snippets. You have to do it manually.
In conclusion, Squarespace has 90% of the SEO options that your site needs though there is still room for improvement. All in all, using a hosted platform like Squarespace could help to reduce lots of work due to its user-friendly system.
Squarespace marketing features
Email marketing
Squarespace email campaign allows you to craft email campaigns as per your wish. It also allows you to easily keep track of your campaign and make necessary adjustments by tracking email campaign analytics.
No need to worry about finding an email template for your campaign. You can choose one of the available email themes or create one from scratch.
Social integration
There’s no doubt that social media is a big part when it comes to marketing your business. With Squarespace, you can link your accounts with over 20 social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Sync with Dropbox for simple access to photo collections, or import content straight to your site from Instagram, Twitter, and more.
Additionally, you can encourage your customers to share your content more by enabling the “Share Button.”
Creating Ads
Advertising might be one of the best ways to bring your business to customers around the world. Squarespace provides you with some of the best ways to make the best use of your Ads campaign with the integration of Instagram, Facebook Pixel, Facebook Dynamic Ads, and so on.
You can make your Instagram tag, track your campaign using Facebook Pixel, automatically create Ads for your product with Facebook Dynamic Ads, or place Ads on your site with Google AdSense. Moreover, you can even redeem your Google Ads credit when you spend a given amount and use this credit to create ads for your site.
Security
Squarespace is inherently secure, all plans come with free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates. When it comes to payment, Squarespace also offers PCI-DSS compliance for all payment methods.
Additionally, Squarespace also provides two-factor authentication, sometimes shortened to 2FA. This adds an extra layer of security to your account and website. Moreover, Verifying your account ownership will be applied whenever you contact Customer Support; this helps protect your privacy and content.
Support
In general, Squarespace offers a great support system compared to other platforms. These include Knowledgebase, Email, live chat support, Webinar, Forum, Guides, and videos, plus a Developer Center.
The strength of Squarespace lies in supporting its detail. They always provide in-depth answers or articles on the knowledge page. One more plus is that their live chat is pretty responsive. Additionally, they even provide a Developer Center for those who have an advanced understanding of web design, CSS, and HTML… to create fully custom sites or build everything from scratch and integrate with third-party tools.
That said, there are still some Squarespace limitations. There is no phone support, long response time (especially at peak time), and live chat is not always available.
Let’s see some honest Squarespace reviews from real customers (Source: Capterra).
Customer service has no phone, they use email, I needed to receive a refund as I did not initially apply my Edu discount. They responded within 24 hours and was very informative. They responded immediately after each email and was able to help me resolve my issue. My refund has been issued back to my account as promised.
I didn’t need to contact Support during the building phase but I did need help setting up my domain. Responses are quite slow (at least a day) which is why I’ve removed one star, but the replies are always helpful. The support pages on the Squarespace website are excellent
Should You Choose Squarespace?
To sum up this Squarespace review, here are our thoughts about this hosted platform.
Squarespace is a powerful website builder and eCommerce platform. It comes with a wealthy set of valuable features: a beautiful, flexible template design and a great mobile app. However, the platform does need a lot of improvements, such as phone support, applying more payment gateways, SEO features, and extensions.
The platform also offers a wide range of plans and features for all kinds of businesses. However, for a large-scale company, it limits the customization possibility due to the hosted essence. That said, it still makes the best fit for small to medium businesses.
Squarespace Review: FAQs
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Squarespace Review: Final Words
I hope this Squarespace review can help you to decide whether you should open or migrate your site to Squarespace.
If you intend to move to Squarespace, we offer a great migration service that helps you transfer your data from the current eCommerce platform to a new one accurately and safely. LitExtension currently supports more than 140 shopping carts available in the market and has performed 280,000+ successful migrations.
Feel free to contact us for more information! Join our Facebook Community or browse our Retailer Blog to get more eCommerce tips and news.