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• Thousands of Easy-To-Install Add-Ons
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Squarespace vs. WordPress: Quick Summary

Squarespace and WordPress are not as similar as you might think. Namely, you can build a website with both of them, but the whole process of building and maintaining a website with each builder is quite different. On the one hand, Squarespace is an all-in-one website-building platform with which you can create, design, edit, and manage a website easily, in one place. On the other hand, WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS), so it’s quite different from Squarespace. In other words, it is an open-source platform and is highly flexible and free to use. If you want to learn which platform is better and how they differ from each other, stick with our Squarespace vs. WordPress comparison to find out!

What Is Squarespace?

As we mentioned, Squarespace is an all-in-one website building platform that offers everything you might need to create, design, host, and manage your website in one place. With Squarespace, you can easily build all kinds of high-quality and content-driven websites, including blogs, business websites, portfolios, and online stores.

Squarespace is known for its excellent designs and high-quality templates. Its templates are suitable for creating websites for all kinds of businesses and industries, but more on that later. If you want to read more about Squarespace and get a detailed rundown of everything it offers, you can check out our expert review on the builder, where we cover all of that and more.

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is an open-source Content Management System (CMS) and is one of the most popular website builders on the market. There are two different versions of WordPress that you can use – WordPress.com, which is a hosted WordPress solution, and WordPress.org, which is a self-hosted WordPress solution. For this comparison, we will be using the self-hosted WordPress solution – WordPress.org– to compare it more accurately with Squarespace.

WordPress.org is a platform that allows you to download and install WordPress for free and build a content-rich WordPress website. Since it is an open-source platform, it allows users to modify the code as much as they want and have complete freedom to create, design, and customize their websites. If you want to learn more about WordPress, you can do so by reading our expert review on the builder.

Squarespace vs. WordPress: An Insight Into the Comparison

Let’s take a quick look into what’s to come from Squarespace vs. WordPress before we dive into the Full Comparison of the two website builders:

Squarespace vs. WordPress: Full Comparison – Who Will Come Out on Top?

Value for Money (Pricing) – Which Solution Offers Better Value?

Squarespace Value for Money

Before we look at Squarespace’s prices and value for money, we would like to start by stating that the builder does not offer a free plan, but it does offer a free trial. So, you can try out its plan for free for 14 days and decide whether you like what the builder has to offer or not in the span of those 14 days.

You can choose from four different pricing plans with Squarespace that start from $19/month and go up to 65$/month. As the prices of the plans go up, so do the tools, services, and features included in them. For instance, if you go for the cheapest plan, you won’t get any eCommerce or marketing features, meaning that you won’t be able to sell products on your website. However, if you get Squarespace’s Business plan (the second-cheapest plan), you will get eCommerce functionality and marketing tools that will enable you to sell online. No matter which pricing plan you choose, you will get a free custom domain for the first year if you pay annually, a free SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, SEO features for site visibility, all of Squarespace’s templates, 24/7 customer support, and more.

Squarespace also offers some discounts to the users who decide to pay for their plans annually instead of monthly. Namely, if you choose to pay annually, you will get a 25% discount on the Personal plan, a 30% discount on the Business plan, a 25% discount on the Basic Commerce plan, and a 25% discount on the Advanced Commerce plan.

WordPress’ Value for Money

Even though WordPress.org allows you to download, install, and upgrade WordPress for free of charge, there are still some costs that you will inevitably incur if you want to build your website with this builder. Namely, since WordPress.org is self-hosted, you will need to buy web hosting and a domain name at the least. In general, web hosting costs about $7 per month, whereas a domain name costs around $9 to $15 per year. So, you will have to spend at least $16 to host your website with WordPress.org.

However, there are some other standard costs that you could incur when building a WordPress site. Some of those include paid themes ($30-$80) and WordPress plugins ($15-$50). However, you can get themes and plugins for free, meaning that you can avoid these additional costs entirely if you want.

As you can see, it is hard to estimate how much building a website with WordPress will cost since most of the costs depend on your needs and decisions. Of course, web hosting and domain costs are a must if you want to get online, but all others can be avoided because you can get free themes and plugins instead of paid ones.

Winner

WordPress takes the win in the “Value for Money” category. It is more flexible and can fit virtually all kinds of budgets. Also, you can choose which features and tools you need yourself, instead of having to pay for ones you don’t need. Thus, WordPress is the winner in this category.

Ease of Use: Which Builder Is Better for Beginners?

Squarespace Ease of Use

Since Squarespace is an all-in-one website-building solution, it is ideal for beginners and those who do not have any prior experience with website-building or coding. It requires no coding skills and comes with easy-to-use tools and features that you can use to build and design your website.

One such tool is Squarespace’s drag-and-drop website builder. With it, you can build your website by simply dragging and dropping elements on your website with a few simple clicks.

Another beginner-friendly tool that Squarespace offers is its WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get, meaning that you will be able to see the changes you make in real-time as you make them. So, everything you need will be on the page you are currently editing, and you will be able to see how your changes look immediately and decide whether you like them. All in all, building and editing a website with Squarespace is pretty straightforward and suitable for beginners.

You can also hire an expert directly from Squarespace to help you with your website or build the entire thing for you.

WordPress Ease of Use

Since WordPress is an open-source platform, it is not as suitable for beginners as Squarespace and is better for more experienced users. You will need to do a little bit of coding and use third-party plugins to build and customize your website with WordPress.

WordPress’ page editor is called Gutenberg and is nothing like Squarespace’s WYSIWYG editor. Namely, you won’t be able to see the changes you make in real-time with WordPress, so you will have to save all the changes you make if you want to preview them and see what they look like on screen.

Thus, knowing some HTML will come a long way and will help you a lot with creating and editing your WordPress site. You can also install a WordPress plugin called Elementor, which will make your page editor more like Squarespace’s. However, it still won’t make your editing process as easy as Squarespace’s, but it will make it a bit easier than the usual WordPress page-editing process.

Of course, you can hire a developer to build a WordPress website for you, but that might end up costing you thousands of dollars.

Winner

Squarespace is much easier to use and beginner-friendly compared to WordPress. Of course, you can learn the ins and outs of using WordPress if you want. However, Squarespace is much more straightforward to use and is the better choice for beginners, thanks to its intuitive drag-and-drop builder and WYSIWYG page editor. Thus, Squarespace is the winner of this category.

Templates (Design Flexibility): Which Builder Allows You to Have More Creative Freedom?

Squarespace’s Templates and Design Flexibility

Squarespace is known worldwide for its high-quality, designer-made templates. It offers some of the best quality and visually-appealing designs on the market. Each Squarespace template looks fantastic on all kinds of devices, including mobile, desktop, and tablet. Also, with Squarespace, you can choose from more than 100 templates tailor-made for all types of industries, including photography, music, fashion, professional services, food, entertainment, travel, restaurants, events, weddings, online stores, and more.

When it comes to design flexibility, Squarespace is not as flexible and does not offer complete creative freedom. However, it still provides some great design options and allows you to add slideshows, galleries, video backgrounds, change fonts, colors, and more. Also, users can apply custom code to their templates with Squarespace’s built-in CSS editor.

Thus, Squarespace offers excellent, designer-made templates but not as much creative freedom as WordPress.

WordPress’ Templates and Design Flexibility

Design flexibility and creative freedom are where WordPress truly shines. Its templates might not be as high-quality as Squarespace’s, but its template library is huge, and you can get a developer to create a custom template for your WordPress site, which is something you can’t do with Squarespace.

In addition to the template library available on the WordPress.org website, you can also get themes on other third-party marketplaces or buy templates from developers. So, the template choice is a lot better.

You can get a free or paid template for your WordPress site and choose your template based on subjects like blogs, eCommerce, education, entertainment, food & drink, news, etc. What’s more, you can choose themes based on the layout you want, including grid layout, one column, two columns, three columns, four columns, left sidebar, right-sidebar, and wide blocks.

You can do whatever you want on WordPress when it comes to customization. Namely, you can build your own blocks, and if you’re comfortable with writing code, the customization opportunities for you are endless.

Winner

When it comes to quality, Squarespace’s templates are unmatched. All of its templates are created by designers and offer a sleek and modern look. However, when it comes to design flexibility and customization, WordPress is a lot better than Squarespace. It provides complete customization freedom and thousands of templates that you can choose from for your website. Thus, WordPress is the winner in this category.  

Features and Tools: Which Builder Will Give You More?

Squarespace’s Features and Tools

Squarespace comes with many excellent and powerful built-in features. Some of its most notable and unique features include:

• Built-in SEO tools: every Squarespace website comes with excellent built-in SEO features and helpful guides that can help you rank up your website on search engines like Google, Bing, etc. Some of its advanced SEO features and tools include an SEO checklist, integration with Google Search Console, modifying SEO page titles & descriptions, hiding a page from search engines, .xml site maps, clean URLs, etc.
• Analytics tools: Squarespace offers excellent analytics tools with which you can track your website’s traffic, visitor geography, and sales. You can keep track of important metrics like revenues, units sold, orders, visits, revenue per visit, conversion rate, etc. You can also gain insight into top traffic sources, products, device types, operating systems, and browsers by visits. Also, you can see where you have the most customers or visitors and know where you should focus your marketing efforts more.
• Podcasts: You can host your own podcast directly on your Squarespace website and publish your podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Squarespace has its own app store called Squarespace Extensions. On the app market, you can find apps for many purposes, including shipping & fulfillment, finance, inventory & products, and sales & marketing. You can integrate your website with more than 20 social media platforms and sync with Dropbox.

WordPress’ Features and Tools

WordPress does not even come close to Squarespace when it comes to built-in features. However, WordPress does offer thousands of powerful plugins. The only catch is that you have to install them by yourself.

WordPress offers more than 55,000 plugins in its plugin directory. No other platform comes close to this number, making WordPress’s plugin directory the richest one. You can find all kinds of plugins in the WordPress plugin directory, including plugins for creating customizable designs, password-protected pages, image editing tools, comments management, publishing tools, SEO tools, and plugins for creating contact forms, and many more.

Since there are more than 55,000 plugins to choose from, you can rest assured that you will find the plugin that you need for your website. The plugins can be free or paid, and you can also add premium plugins from other marketplaces. WordPress also allows you to integrate your website with many other apps and tools, making it an excellent choice for those who want to add extra functionality to their websites.

Winner

Even though Squarespace is the better option when it comes to built-in features, it lags behind WordPress in the plugin and third-party integration sections. Not only does WordPress offer more than 55,000 plugins in its plugin directory, but you can also get plugins from other third-party marketplaces or individual developers. Thus, WordPress is the winner in this category.

Performance: Which Website Builder Is Faster?

Squarespace Performance

In this section of the comparison, we will test the performance of our Squarespace and WordPress websites to see which one is better. We will test both websites using the same location and the same speed testing tool to get more accurate results. Our Squarespace website had the following results:

• Performance grade C 78;
• Page size 6.6MB;
• Load time 1.27s.

As you can see, our Squarespace website had a load speed of 1.27 seconds, which is pretty fast. It also takes up 6.6MB of storage. In the photo below, you can see how our Squarespace website ranked in other metrics as well.

WordPress Performance

As we mentioned, we conducted our tests using the same speed testing tools and the same location for both of our websites. Our WordPress website received the following results:

• Performance grade C 75;
• Page size 9.9MB;
• Load time 1.20s.

As you can see, even though our WordPress website is significantly larger than our Squarespace website, it has a better loading time. A loading time of 1.20 seconds for a 9.9MB website is an excellent result. In the photo below, you can see how our WordPress website ranked in other metrics as well.

Winner

Both website builders did pretty well in our performance tests. However, WordPress did a lot better than Squarespace since it had a load time of only 1.20 seconds for a 9.9MB website with 76 requests. Thus, WordPress wins the “Performance” category of our comparison.

Help and Support: Which Builder Offers More Support to Its Users?

Squarespace Help and Support

On Squarespace’s website, you can find a Help Center filled with numerous articles and guides on many different topics, like getting started, account, billing, commerce, domains, Google Workspace & custom email, images & videos, pages & content, privacy & security, templates & design, technical issues, and more. You can also search Squarespace’s Help Center by entering a keyword in its search bar.

In addition to the Help Center, Squarespace also has an excellent blog where you can find helpful documents. Also, you can join Squarespace’s online forum, where you can communicate with other Squarespace users and ask them questions. And if you don’t like reading long articles and guides, Squarespace has you covered. Namely, it has many video tutorials where it shows how to do certain things and complete specific tasks.

You can reach Squarespace’s Support Team via live chat, which is available from Monday to Friday from 4 am to 8 pm (EST). Also, you can communicate with Squarespace’s team 24/7 via Twitter and email.

WordPress Help and Support

WordPress does not offer traditional customer support like Squarespace. Namely, there is no team that you can contact when you need it, no phone support, live chat, etc.

With WordPress, you will have to rely on articles and how-to guides to get around. On WordPress.org’s website, you can find such articles and guides on its Support page. The Support pages contain guides and articles on how to get started with WordPress, how to install it, the basic usage of WordPress, basic administration, customizing, maintenance, advanced topics, troubleshooting, and security. You can also find WordPress forums on the website and join them to see what other people have to say on certain WordPress-related topics.

A helpful feature that beginners might appreciate is the “Learn WordPress” page on WordPress.org’s website. You can find workshops, access lesson plans, and view WordPress courses on that page.

Since WordPress is an open-source platform and is free to use, it has a large community online. So, if the documents on WordPress.org’s website are not enough for you, you can search for other articles online. You can also find many other WordPress forums where users discuss different topics and issues.

Winner

Squarespace offers much better and hands-on customer support compared to WordPress. Not only does it offer an excellent Help Center and blog, but it also provides 24/7 customer support via email and Twitter and live chat support that is available from Monday to Friday from 4 am to 8 pm (EST). On the other hand, WordPress does not have a Customer Support team. So, you can only learn and solve issues via written articles and guides with WordPress. Thus, Squarespace is the winner of this category.

Squarespace vs. WordPress: Final Remarks and Recommendation

Why Should You Pick Squarespace?

Squarespace is an excellent website builder that comes with everything you might need to build and maintain all kinds of websites, including online stores, business websites, blogs, portfolios, personal websites, and more. You should pick Squarespace over WordPress if:

• You have no prior coding skills or website-building experience: Squarespace is much easier to use than WordPress and requires no prior coding skills from its users. It comes with all the features and tools one needs to build and host their website and offers excellent beginner-friendly tools like its drag-and-drop builder and WYSIWYG editor.
• You want to have reliable, 24/7 support: Squarespace offers excellent support to its users and is available round-the-clock for questions and concerns.
• You are looking for an all-in-one website building solution: since Squarespace is a hosted platform, it offers everything one might need in one place, including web hosting, domain names, security measures, a website builder, a website editor, premade templates, and more. It also makes managing a website easier for users, performs all the upgrades, and maintains your website.

Why Should You Pick WordPress?

WordPress is a powerful and flexible website-building solution that allows you to have complete creative freedom over your website. You should pick WordPress over Squarespace if:

• You want to build a large, content-heavy website: WordPress is an excellent solution for those who want to create a large website with lots of content. It allows users to do whatever they like with their content. It also enables users to add all kinds of elements and features to their websites to customize and personalize them as much as possible.
• You want complete customization freedom: as we mentioned, WordPress allows users to have complete creative freedom over their websites. Users can add their own code, build their own blocks, and add all kinds of features, tools, and plugins to their websites with WordPress. Thus, the customization opportunities with this builder are endless.
• You want to have complete control over your entire website: if you want to have a more hands-on approach to running your website and do not mind tackling technical tasks like getting web hosting, setting up security measures, making frequent updates, etc., then WordPress is the ideal website builder for you.

Our Recommendation

Our Squarespace vs. WordPress comparison proved that both website builders offer excellent services and features and are some of the best builders on the market. However, the better overall platform between the two is WordPress. WordPress offers much better design flexibility and customization opportunities than Squarespace. Thus, with WordPress, you can build the website of your dreams and have complete creative and overall control over it.