Did you start designing your website on WordPress?
Are you wondering if you made the right choice, now that web builders like Squarespace exist?
Although WordPress has been the go-to web platform for many years, it’s not always the best choice for every business.
Despite its wide usage, it’s possible that you’re missing out if you’re using WordPress.
Both WordPress and Squarespace are popular website platforms, but they differ in many ways. For instance, WordPress was originally designed for blogging and has since been adapted to support e-commerce. Squarespace, on the other hand, was designed with e-commerce in mind.
This makes the two platforms inherently different in ways that can affect your ability to manage your website and serve your customers.
Although both website platforms will get your site on the internet, there are pros and cons to each platform.[caption id="attachment_12862" align="alignnone" width="1518"]
Source: W3Techs.com -- Usage Statistics 2022[/caption]However, Squarespace is the ideal option when you need to launch your website quickly and you don't have complex needs.
When you're looking for the perfect website platform, you'll want to consider the following factors:
The importance of these factors will vary depending on your business needs and goals, but for the most part, Squarespace outdoes WordPress in most of these areas. Although WordPress is a powerful CMS, Squarespace is the ideal web builder for most businesses, and here's why.
When you build your website with Squarespace, you’ll get a simple drag-and-drop editor that makes creating and editing content a breeze. You’ll also be able to set up your site’s color scheme and basic typography without knowing a single line of code.
Technically, you can use WordPress without knowing any code, but only in limited ways and that capability isn’t inherent like it is with Squarespace. For instance, your ability to customize something as basic as your color scheme and typography will depend on your theme – it’s not built into WordPress. If your theme’s creator didn’t create a user-friendly customization option, you’ll have to know code to make changes.
Getting access to a user-friendly customization option in WordPress either requires your theme to be set up for customizations, or you’ll have to install a plugin to get the job done. However, the more plugins you add to your site, the slower it can become, not to mention the fact that plugins can be a security nightmare.
Squarespace has a built-in user-friendly interface for customizing your site’s colors, logo, and typography. You don’t have to mess with code or hire someone just to change your text color or typeface.
Sometimes when you find a good website platform, the templates are lacking. However, that’s not the case with Squarespace. Both WordPress and Squarespace have beautiful template designs available, but Squarespace templates are more user-friendly, which makes Squarespace the winner.
Even better, Squarespace themes tend to be a bit easier to customize. For instance, many themes come with an option that allows you to choose a pre-set color scheme with one click. Some WordPress themes have this feature, but not many.
On the other hand, WordPress themes often have complex admin panels that force you to know color codes to make changes, and some themes force you to style all of your elements individually. This can take too long. For instance, imagine styling all of your heading tag (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, and H7) options individually. You’ll need to manually define the following seven times:
You don’t need to change all of your heading styles, but if you don’t, your headings could become messed up. For instance, say your theme sets your H5 font size to 14px. You can change this to 16px, but if your H4 tag is set to 16px, both H5 and H6 headings will look the same. To fix this, you’ll need to bump all of your heading tags up by 2px to compensate for your change, which means you still have to manually adjust all of your heading tags.
This predicament won’t happen with Squarespace. If you’re looking for a simple, beautiful design that you can customize without knowing code, Squarespace is the better choice.
There’s no way around the steep learning curve required to use WordPress. There are a multitude of settings to define in your main installation, and when you install a theme, you’ll have even more work to do. Not to mention, adding plugins further increases the amount of work you’ll need to perform just to have a working website.
And if you forget to uncheck the box to allow search engines to crawl your website, you might end up spending a ton of money on search engine optimization (SEO) for nothing.
With Squarespace, you don’t have to worry about any of that. There are fewer settings to work with, which is actually a good thing. Unless you have a massive website that requires intense customization, you probably don’t need most of the settings made available through WordPress. If your site is simple, you’ll have all the settings you need through Squarespace.
Perhaps the best reason to choose Squarespace is that it’s a hosted website platform. This means you don’t need to get a Squarespace account, a hosting account, and a domain name. Squarespace is your web host. Since Squarespace is your webhost, you don’t need to install the software – it’s already installed on your account for your use.
You will need to edit two CNAME records and four A records with your domain registrar, but Squarespace has detailed documentation to walk you through this process.
On the other hand, WordPress is free, open-source software that you must install yourself on your web server. If your web host uses cPanel, you can use Quick Install software to get the job done fast, but that’s not the most secure method and you’ll still have plenty of work to get the job done.
Installing WordPress manually isn’t impossible, but you will need to know how to do the following:
So, WordPress is free, but it’s going to cost you money to hire a developer to set it up for you. Squarespace comes with a monthly fee, but everything is taken care of for you.
Since WordPress is an open-source project, the only things you can count on from the developers are important updates and announcements, and the release of new versions and patches. There is no official WordPress support forum. The only way to get support is to search for third-party support.
You can find tutorials on YouTube and other WordPress websites to help you with just about anything you might need, but it’s still going to be complicated in some cases. For instance, if you’re using a WordPress theme that omits the code that allows you to add widgets to your sidebar, it won’t be easy to enable sidebar widgets on your own. You will need to hire a developer. However, you probably won’t come to this conclusion until you’ve followed several widget tutorials that don’t work.
With Squarespace, you get full support and that’s a large part of what makes the monthly fee worth paying. For example, Squarespace has a massive collection of officially-approved support documentation, videos, webinars, and community forums where you can ask for specific help from other users and developers. However, if you have a website developer who specializes in Squarespace development, they can handle everything for you.
With WordPress, you need to install multiple plugins to give it functionality beyond a basic blogging platform. If you want to build an e-commerce website, you’ll be required to install at least one plugin, if not a few.
Squarespace, on the other hand, is built to be an e-commerce platform and comes with all the functionality you need to get your store running. You can still get plugins to add functionality, but all your basic needs are already covered. The benefit is that having fewer plugins means your site is less of a security risk. Unsecured plugins are an open invitation for hackers to take over your site.
Some WordPress plugins have known vulnerabilities, including popular e-commerce plugins. Unfortunately, many WordPress plugins also end up abandoned by the developer, which makes them unsecure. If you build your website on WordPress and come to depend on plugins that are unsupported in the future, you’ll need to find replacement plugins and do much of your work all over.
To keep your site secure, you’ll want to use as few plugins as possible, which makes Squarespace the better choice for security.
Getting WordPress set up for e-commerce requires adding plugins and making sure you’re using a child theme so none of your customizations get lost. You might like the plugins that are available, and they can run an e-commerce store pretty well. However, you’ll have to spend some serious time messing with your settings just to get to the point where you can start entering your products.
With Squarespace, e-commerce capability is built into the platform. You can start setting up your products and services right away.
If you’ve been using WordPress for a while and you know your way around, you probably haven’t considered switching platforms. If you’ve already gone through the learning curve it might seem pointless to switch to Squarespace. However, you’d be surprised to see how much easier it is to use Squarespace. You might know how to do everything with WordPress, but you’re still working harder than you would if your website was built with Squarespace.
If you need a website quickly, we can help you get your site online fast. Our team of professional website developers are experts at building websites on the Squarespace platform and can have you up and running fast.
Need a specific design? We can customize an existing theme or build you a beautiful, professional theme from scratch. Whatever you need, reach out to our Squarespace developers today to learn more about what we can do for you.
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