Squarespace vs Wordpress: I've made the decision for you

Too often I see small business owners grappling with overly complicated Wordpress websites. These types of websites are often time-consuming, difficult and costly to build, manage and update.

What happens?

Eventually, as your business evolves, you end up with an out-dated website that no longer feels or sounds like you.

This is a common narrative I hear especially from women business owners.

If you’re a small business owner, you’re likely doing a lot of things for yourself. That’s why, simplicity is key – in all areas, including your website – which is why I recommend Squarespace over Wordpress.

Here are the reasons why Squarespace is superior to Wordpress:

#1 Blending beauty and simplicity

You want a beautiful website, absolutely. But you also want a website you can control, manage and update yourself without having to rely on costly designers or developers. I get it.

If you consider yourself relatively tech savvy and enjoy tinkering away online, you can build yourself a beautiful Squarespace website very quickly, using one of the Squarespace templates. The back-end technical settings in Squarespace are intuitive and easy to understand. I reckon if you set aside a day or two you could easily have a simple website up and running in that time.

If you’re not so tech savvy (or you’ve got better things to do than sit in front of a computer screen), you might prefer to have someone setup the site on your behalf. Once they’ve done this, ask your tech guru to create a few videos for you or do a Squarespace training session on how to manage and keep your site updated. If this sounds good to you, check out my one week websites for coaches, wellness practitioners, photographers (and more!) which all come with a video knowledge library.

#2 Pages and blog posts are easy to create and update (even if you’re not tech savvy)

When your business is growing, your offerings are evolving and you want to share useful content on your blog so people connect with you, it’s incredibly important that your website supports all this easily. 

You’re already feeling challenged by all the visibility, you don’t also want to feel ‘road blocked’ by technology every time you go to make a simple change or share something on your website.

Having built websites on both Squarespace and Wordpress for my clients, what I started to see very clearly was that those on Wordpress found creating and editing pages and blog posts incredibly time-consuming and frustrating (not to mention that the pages never looked quite “right”).

On Squarespace the page editors and blog post settings are easy to understand, they are sleek, simple to use and make adding new content a breeze.

Here’s what a couple of my clients said after I moved their sites from Wordpress to Squarespace:

I’m one of the least tech savvy people I know, but Alana went out of her way to help me. The videos she provided were easy to follow and I’ve already started creating a new page on my own! I’m completely in love with my new website. ~ Lara Darlington

“I was looking for a new website that was clean, pleasing on the eye and that I could update without ending up in a crying mess (like I had been with my old Wordpress site). And, let me tell you, this gal did not disappoint! The entire process was easy, effortless and straightforward. Not once did I get into overwhelm. I am in love with my new site.” ~ Kirsten Severino

#3 NO PLUGINS (OR VERY FEW)

On Wordpress, it seems like you have to install a plugin for everything – newsletter sign up boxes, online shops, social media buttons, events, blog categorisation, instagram feeds, appointment scheduling… the list goes on.

Not in Squarespace. All this is built into the Squarespace platform for you.

Which means, you don’t need to waste time finding, learning and installing plugins and you don’t need to worry about plugin updates or the plugin breaking every time you do an update (which is SO common in Wordpress).

#4 NO updates or security concerns

If you’ve ever used Wordpress, you’ll know that there’s what feels like, a never-ending stream of updates you need to do. Updates are required for themes and plugins.

If you don’t do these updates, you can risk the security of your Wordpress site. If you do these updates, things have a tendency to break or stop working.

With Squarespace, there are no updates and there are no security concerns – this is all taken care of for you, behind the scenes by the Squarespace team.

#5 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)

It’s often argued that Wordpress is the superior platform when it comes to SEO, particularly because of the Yoast plugin.

But that’s not necessarily the case.

You can read my article over here which compares SEO in Wordpress to Squarespace.

 #6 hosting, domain and email account all under one roof

With Wordpress, it’s your responsibility to setup hosting, purchase your domain and setup an email account. I find most of my Wordpress clients have different providers for each of these things and are often very confused by it all…

That’s because it IS confusing.

With Squarespace, your hosting is managed by Squarespace (you don’t need a third-party hosting provider) and, if you so choose, your domain and email account can also be managed by Squarespace. When you’ve got one provider for everything, you can imagine how much simpler this process becomes.

It’s also pretty easy to migrate your Wordpress site over to Squarespace if you choose to.

#7 Squarespace Support

Squarespace support are onto it and I’ve never waited longer than a couple of hours for a response. The team are super helpful, very polite and always explain stuff in an easy to follow kind of way (no technical babble!). So if you ever do get stuck with your site, you know you have a team behind you who are always there to help.

If you’re looking for someone to assist you with the setup of your Squarespace website, check out my services here.