Squarespace vs WordPress 2024: Which One is Right for You?

A comparison of Squarespace and WordPress for the DIY-er.

11 Min Read

(*’s are affiliate links - my wine fund thanks you kindly!)

In this post:

• Squarespace Editor vs WordPress Editor

• Owning your website

• SEO

Despite WordPress being the reigning king of website builders, I have a cautionary tale. Recently I had a new client come to me asking me if by hiring me they would be able to update their site. I was confused at first until they told me they had hired someone to build them a site, but then the person they hired kept the site under lock and key from them! They couldn’t update anything on it themselves. They had to make a request to the shall-not-be-named company (honestly it doesn’t matter there are many companies like this) every time they wanted an event they were doing posted or to change their phone number. Of course, this always came with an “update” fee of $75 per update. This is on top of the $35/month they were paying for their website!

I don’t think my client was gullible in choosing this company. Everywhere you go online you see web developers talking about how you should choose WordPress over xyz builder. It’s endlessly customizable, has fast loading times, and you “own” your site. (I take issue with this last one but I’ll get into why later.)

What people who recommend WordPress don’t seem to understand, most of the time not all of the time, is that not all of us want to spend time updating our site monthly, making sure plugins are current (so that our site still works), that nothing is broken visually, and most importantly, we don’t want to touch a lick of code. We just want it to work, look good and we want to be able to update it ourselves.

To be honest, my client was a ripped off. She wanted control, she wanted to be able to do these things herself! She wasn’t techie but wasn’t that bad with it!

Now she does all those things herself. I empower my clients to be able to update their website. Of course, if they want a big revision they might need to contact me again and I am happy to help but; the beauty of Squarespace is that anyone can do basic updates.

What exactly makes Squarespace the defacto choice for the average person and especially creatives over WordPress? And why might you still want to use WordPress? (And if you want any of these things by all means choose WordPress!)

Squarespace vs WordPress: Editor

Squarespace has both the advantages and disadvantages of having one editor. It’s an advantage because it means you have one editor to learn that’s integrated with the hosting provider.

Squarespace is simple.

At the same time, it’s a disadvantage because it’s less flexible than WordPress. There’s no getting around that. If you have a specific and extremely unique vision for your site, you might want to go with WordPress. Even I, a loyal Squarespace designer, can admit that.

WordPress as an editor is hard to pin down because there are many, many, plugins and builders you can choose from. If you are interested in WordPress some of the most popular ones to check out are Elementor, Divi, and Seedprod. (I myself played around with Elementor for about 6 months before coming back to Squarespace. 😅)

These are all additional paid add-ons though, that you have to subscribe to in order to build your site. Bringing the cost difference between Squarespace and WordPress to be negligible. I was saving $100 a year and hating the headache that was updating my site. That’s roughly $8 a month. My time is definitely worth more than $8 per hour, which is what I was wasting each month trying to figure out a new update or tweak.

Squarespace vs Wordpress: Ownership

Let’s just get this out in the open. No matter which platform you choose, you may feel like you don’t “own” your site enough. Now what do I mean by that?

With WordPress, often people will say that you own your website and you only pay for hosting. If you are making the site yourself, yes, you absolutely have more control and own it more than a Squarespace site. However, consider the case of my clients: they certainly didn’t feel like they owned their site. If you hire someone to create your website, which is likely unless you're a budding web developer yourself, you’re beholden to them to make changes. In my clients’ case if they stopped paying the company their site would be deleted as well. Completely gone!

I don’t want to make it seem like WordPress is more complicated than it actually is. It is entirely possible to know nothing about web development and still deploy a good WordPress site. But if you have no experience in web development it will take significant learning > aka. time.

You have to install WordPress set up the config files, upload and connect it to your database, set … Have I lost you? This is all before even putting your title on your homepage. If this sounds like something you don’t want to jump into then I strongly suggest Squarespace.

Yes, with Squarespace you “own less”. When people say this what they mean is it is more difficult to migrate your site to another hosting platform if you wanted to in the future. Notice I said more difficult but not impossible? Here is what you can easily export to a WordPress site:

• All basic pages.

• One blog page- all blog posts will be exported as WordPress pages under ‘blog’

• Gallery pages

• Text, image, and embedded blocks.

What you would have to manually port over is:

• Product pages, album pages, and event pages

• Audio/video and product block

• Style changes and custom CSS

• Folders and index pages

• More than one blog

If this list doesn't make much sense to you that’s alright. The bottom line is you can get a skeleton of your page out of SquareSpace if you really want to in the future. I will say that if you want to have a massive online E-commerce store Squarespace is probably not for you, but neither is WordPress in that case, you’d be better off with Shopify. (Fun fact, I helped my husband build his vinyl record shop on Shopify, which you can checkout over at Resolute Records.)

A final note on owning your site. You are always going to have to pay someone whether it be for hosting or building apps like Divi or a combination. It’s less of a black-and-white question of whether you want someone else to own your site, but who and how difficult you want to be to migrate it somewhere else.

Squarespace vs Wordpress: SEO

It’s hard to talk about SEO without giving an “SEO 101 lesson” but I’m going to try to distill what Squarespace does vs what WordPress does and how if you know just a little bit about SEO optimization Squarespace is great. But if you know nothing about SEO, both have tools to help you get there. (Paid of course.)

Squarespace lets you customize:

• titles

• meta descriptions

• alt-text on images

• URLs

• create 301 redirects

• 404 error pages

All of these things contribute to ranking higher in Google.

This is great if you know keywords and how to compress and optimize images as well. (Page loading speed affects your search results and large images slows this down.)

However, Squarespace doesn't tell you exactly what you should put as your alt-text or meta descriptions so you will have to do some googling to learn the basics here if you want to optimize it yourself. I recently started using SEOspace*, and highly recommend it. It’s cheaper than hiring an SEO expert 1:1, and is great at teaching you the ropes.

Even me, a seasoned web designer who’s pretty good at SEO, was learning TONS while doing my first audit. You can also hire a professional SEO Expert, but fair warning, it will be pricey. Though it might be worth it depending on your needs if you really want to rank high and fast.

WordPress also lets you change all of the things Squarespace does BUT there are way more SEO plugins and ones that are more advanced. SEOspace is great, but it is less than a year old, so is still in it’s growth phase. WordPress plugins do cost money as well, but far less than hiring an SEO Specialist. (Yoast SEO is the big player in the WordPress SEO space.)

While you should always try to optimize your site for SEO it will matter much more in highly competitive industries. For instance, if you want to run an E-commerce store selling T-shirts your optimization is incredibly important to rank high. But if you are a bespoke seamstress who sews blue baby giraffe socks for people in Toronto, you will probably have an easier time ranking in Google searches.

That’s a Wrap!

So what should you do with all this info? To summarize…

WordPress offers extreme customization control and a higher degree of ownership over your site and plugins that can optimize your site in a myriad of ways, like SEO. The trade-off is a substantial increase in learning you will have to do if you want to manage it on your own.

Squarespace on the other hand offers less flexibility, integrated SEO (and other) features but an easier onboarding process. This is optimal if you have a simple site or business you want to get online, but not if you want to launch a robust E-commerce store for the millions.

While only YOU can decide which is best for you I highly recommend giving Squarespace a chance if you want an easy to edit, beautiful site.