Last updated on June 26th, 2022 at 11:41 am
In this comparison we’re going to talk about the differences between Squarespace and WordPress and why they’re actually fairly similar. But maybe one is a little bit better than the other. We’re going to break it down right here, right now.
Let’s talk today about Squarespace vs WordPress. Which do you think is better? Which do I think is better and why do I think one is better than the other? So, let’s jump into it.
Ease of Setup
Squarespace Setup
- Dead simple to set up.
- You go to Squarespace.com, say get started, pick out a theme and boom!
- You’ve got a sub-domain.
- You’re basically ready.
- You’ve built the vast majority of your site.
- You can enter your billing information, whenever sign up for the 7-day trial. You’ve got a website.
You can always edit the theme, start tweaking things, start adding content. But in literally minutes you’re set up with a website.
WordPress Setup
- With WordPress on the other hand, you need to go and you need to download WordPress.
- You need to upload it, install it on your server and then you need to connect it to a database.
- Then you run the setup wizard and then find a theme for the website.
- And then you basically begin building your website after that.
So, Squarespace definitely wins by a long shot in terms of being easy to set up.
Themes
Now, when you actually go to set the website up, you need to find what’s called a theme. At Squarespace they have themes, at WordPress they have themes. It’s the way your website looks.
Squarespace Themes
- Squarespace has like 20 to 25 themes.
- They’re all pretty nice
- They’re all very mobile friendly, responsive, fast lightweight, easy, great.
WordPress Themes
- WordPress, on the other hand, has tens of thousands of themes.
- Some of them are really great, some of them really stink.
- Some of them are free, some of them are pay for themes. Some are very easy to set up, some are really difficult to set up.
- But you have tens of thousands of them.
So, I have to give the edge there to WordPress in the theme department.
Features
Squarespace
When it comes to features and what you can actually do with your site, Squarespace limits you a little bit. Not that much. You have dozens upon the things you can do.
- Video players
- SoundCloud integration
- Blog posts pages
- Galleries, all kinds of stuff
WordPress
- With WordPress, you can do even more.
- There’s virtually no limitation on WordPress.
But I think that’s kind of bad, because unless you’re actually a web developer and you know what you’re doing, you don’t want all those limitations. You’re going to break more things then you actually figure out and fix.
So, I’m going to give the edge when it comes to features to Squarespace. Because what they have just works. It’s simple, it’s great, it’s easy and it just works.
WordPress can get bloated. And again, unless you know the WordPress language, you’re probably going to mess things up.
So I’m going to give the edge, slight edge to Squarespace. And I could understand if you made an argument for WordPress.
Plugins
Now, when it comes to plugins, ways you can extend your website and get even a little bit more functionality. Maybe you want a specific kind of gallery or a game, or some kind of video background, or something like that on your site.
Squarespace Plugins
- Squarespace doesn’t really have any plugins.
- There are some companies that do make plugins for Squarespace you got to pay for.
WordPress Plugins
- WordPress on the other hand has tens of thousands, probably even more than that when it comes to plugins.
- The vast majority of them are free and even the plugins that you have to pay for, they’re free up into a certain point.
So, WordPress really wins this one by a wide margin when it comes to plugins.
Let’s talk about e-commerce.
eCommerce
Squarespace makes ecommerce so easy. I like to say that it takes the fear out of e-commerce. Especially if you’ve never set up a store before. You don’t know how all that payment stuff works – inventory and stock, and all of that stuff how it all works together on your website.
Squarespace
- Squarespace makes it dead simple.
- You must use Stripe.
The one thing I don’t like about Squarespace is that they force you to use a company or a payment gateway called Stripe. Which, nothing against Stripe – great company, beautiful interfaces, easy to use, but that’s all there is. There’s no choice, there’s no variety. If you can’t make Stripe work and you can’t work with it. It’s not like you can just connect your PayPal account and call it a day. You must use Stripe.
WordPress
- WordPress, on the other hand, you do have way more functionality.
- But there’s also a lot more setup.
- You got to find a plugin that works for you.
- You have to make sure you get everything set up.
- Then you have to set up your payment gateways. Everything needs to be set up. It’s a little bit more complicate ranging to much more complicated.
Squarespace is very, very easy. So, despite Stripe, edge goes to Squarespace.
SEO
Let’s talk about SEO.
Squarespace SEO
- Squarespace allows you to edit the headers of your website, obviously the content which is king when it comes to SEO.
But I’ve never gotten the SEO performance and organic reach out of Squarespace that I’ve gotten out of WordPress.
WordPress SEO
- WordPress is so finely tuned, so honed.
- There’re some amazing SEO plugins that WordPress has available for free that provide you with great guidelines and things like that.
I got to give the SEO edge to WordPress. It’s kind of not even close.
Maintenance & Security
Next up, we’ve got maintenance and security.
It’s kind of boring stuff. They both do a great job of keeping things up to date.
WordPress Maintenance and Security
- WordPress’ open source community is an amazing job.
- Updates come out fairly regularly. You can choose when to update or not.
- You can backup your server or your database.
And all of that is great.
Squarespace Maintenance and Security
- Squarespace also does a great job.
- I never had an issue with maintenance or security with either one of them.
So I’m going to call that a draw.
Community
Both Squarespace and WordPress are amazing community.
Squarespace Community
- They’ve got somewhat of a community.
- They’ve got a great system of forums.
- Their help documents are incredible.
But that’s also because it’s kind of a limited system. So most of things that can go wrong they pretty much have a lot of documentation even on things that you might think are fairly obscure problems.
Likelihood is you’ll find some kind of help doc written about it or question asked about it in one of the forums.
WordPress Community
- WordPress is a much larger system.
- There’s a lot more that can go wrong, but WordPress is community.
- WordPress is an open source software, it’s everything about it screams community.
- There’re thousands of tutorials, tens of thousands of help articles forums, all over the web.
- WordPress has an amazing community.
So, WordPress wins community.
Cost
Hands down now when it comes to cost.
Squarespace Cost
- Without getting into like crazy cost tables, you can have a Squarespace website for as little as five bucks a month
- Likelihood is you probably spent more like 15 to 20 a month on a Squarespace site.
- It’s all inclusive though when you decide what you’re going to buy everything’s included in that monthly price.
WordPress Cost
- With WordPress you need to buy or you need to make sure you have a domain you’re hosting.
- And the likelihood is you also have to buy a theme.
So, I’m going to give the cost edge to Squarespace, because I know what I’m getting into. I know what I’m buying.
Sure you can find some great hosting deals with WordPress from companies like Bluehost, InMotion Hosting and A2 Hosting. I’ve never been a fan of cheap hosting, so I’m gonna get the edge on cost of Squarespace.
You get amazing value for what you get, it’s such an easy comprehensive package.
But WordPress is pretty competitively priced. Both are pretty good.
The very slight edge goes to Squarespace.
Squarespace vs WordPress – Pros & Cons
So, finally which do I choose if somebody came to me tomorrow and said I need a website to sell my own personally designed shoes by next week.
Why Squarespace?
- I’m gonna set them up with Squarespace because it’s something they can edit.
- It’s something they can adjust, it’s something they can go in and do wholesale, redesign on.
- It’s something that they can manage e-commerce system very easily on.
- There’s not the kind of learning curve that WordPress has and there’s also not the kind of design build that you would have with WordPress.
Why WordPress?
- WordPress is amazing.
- There are virtually no limitations.
- The sky is literally the limit with WordPress.
Where Squarespace does have limitations. You eventually get to a point where you can’t do much more. There’s a developer mode where you can do a lot, but you’re limited in Squarespace. But it’s easy, it’s beautiful, it’s responsive and mobile friendly. And it’s inexpensive. You can’t go wrong with it. Especially if you’ve never designed a website before or maybe you’re setting up your first shop, something like that, go with Squarespace every time.
Go with WordPress, if you’re a little bit more web savvy or a lot more web savvy. And if you want absolute control over everything, if you want a totally unique website that looks totally different, then go with WordPress.
WordPress is great for that kind of thing, but just know it’s a bit more work.
So, that’s WordPress vs Squarespace. Tell me what you think. I would love to hear what you have to say. This is all about community, right?
So, have you used Squarespace? Have you used WordPress? Which do you prefer, which do you think is the better choice?
If you also have a couple more seconds go ahead and leave a comment. That’s cool too.
That’s it for this one and if you enjoyed this article, check my other articles and tutorials.
Cheers
