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Squarespace is ideal for creating professional websites. It has the best quality designs and features on the market, and while it can take a little getting used to, the final results are worth your patience. We recommend it for those who care about design, or have a bit of technical skill.
Squarespace is a drag-and-drop website builder, but unlike other builders (such as Wix), you can’t just drag anything anywhere. It’s more section-based, which takes a little longer to get to grips with.
While Squarespace’s interface is modern and minimal, it can feel a little too clean at the start. It takes a few clicks to find the elements you’re looking for, and at times we wanted it to be more obvious where to find certain features.
That said, once you know what you’re doing, editing becomes fast and easy, and you’ll come to appreciate the uncluttered menus. The Squarespace editor becomes easier the more you use it – you’ll simply need a little time and patience to really get the most out of it.
Squarespace has four price plans, ranging from $12 to $40 per month (billed yearly).
All yearly plans come with unlimited storage and bandwidth, a free custom domain, and SSL Security. You unlock extra features as you upgrade, including ecommerce functions and promotional pop-ups.
The cheapest Squarespace plan is the Personal plan at $12 a month, which has website features but no ecommerce functionality. For an online store, the lowest plan is $26 a month, which includes unlimited products, no transaction fees, label printing, and more.
Building a Mobile Website
Squarespace automatically generates a mobile site from the site you built for desktop browsers. Squarespace sites look great on mobile—the whole reason its templates limit the placement and sizing of objects.
There’s one mobile-only setting: Mobile Information Bar. This is the menu that appears across the bottom of the mobile site view showing contact, location, and business hours, if you’ve enabled those. Squarespace shows buttons along the top of the editing interface that let you preview your site as it would appear on a smartphone and smartphone-sized mobile device.
Measuring Site Traffic
All Squarespace accounts include an Analytics section that shows hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly traffic statistics for visits, page views, and audience size. It also highlights mobile site activity, referrers, popular content, and search engine queries. Included is the Google Search Keywords panel, a tool that lets you view keywords, click-through rates, and search positions after connecting your account to the Google Search Console. An Activity Log shows your visitors’ IP addresses, but there’s no view of what technology—platform and web browser, for example—they are using. Commerce-level accounts get an extra Metric option—Sales Overview, which shows revenue and units sold by hour, day, week, or month.
Cool Customer Service Support
Squarespace offers 24/7 email support and live text chat support from Monday to Friday 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST. Sadly, there’s no phone support. A customer service representative fielded the question that we keyed into the chat box seconds after we hit the Enter key. Moments after that, the person on the other side of the screen linked us to the answers we sought regarding third-party extension support. The support experience is good, if lacking the comfort of speaking with a human in person. By comparison, Wix offers telephone support, even for free accounts. At the other end of the spectrum, WordPress.com offers just a knowledgebase to free users; live chat is only for paid accounts.
Uptime
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services.
We used a website-monitoring tool to track our Squarespace-hosted test site’s uptime over a 14-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings our website and sends an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least 1 minute. The testing data reveals that Weebly is incredibly stable; in fact, it didn’t go down once in the two-week testing period. So, you can trust Squarespace to act as a rock-solid foundation for your website.
There’s Nothing Square About Squarespace
Squarespace is a flexible way for individuals and small businesses to set up an online presence. It also produces great-looking, mobile-friendly sites and offers lots of commerce growth potential. That said, Squarespace’s move to the recent 7.1 build means that people using 7.0 either miss out on new features by remaining with the current version or must rebuild their sites in the new version. For better cohesiveness and cheaper subscription options, look to our Editors’ Choice picks for DIY website builders, Gator and Wix.
Site Starters was created as an education channel for people who are running a start-up website, or who are thinking of starting an online business.
