Squarespace is everywhere lately, and its promo codes are equally ubiquitous. Why shell out money for a WordPress theme, hosting, and design when you can use that sweet Squarespace discount and get everything you need to launch your site for under $20 a month? Well, we’re about to rain on your cheap website parade—Squarespace is fantastic for some purposes, but in our view, WordPress reigns supreme for most small businesses.

Here’s what you need to know when deciding between Squarespace and WordPress…

Squarespace vs. WordPress: Aesthetics

We’ve got to hand this one to Squarespace—they’ve nailed that au courant minimalist aesthetic with bold typefaces, prominent imagery, and skilled deployment of whitespace. There are hundreds of stodgy WordPress themes out there that can make a brand-new website look dated from Day 1, but you won’t run the risk of this with Squarespace. Your website will look cool, which is why Squarespace is a runaway success with artists, photographers, interior designers, and restaurants.

Squarespace does that minimalist hipster aesthetic well, but if you’re an accountant or an attorney or in another more straight-laced field and want a traditional feel, you’re kind of out of luck. WordPress wins out here. WordPress has no shortage of options designed for professionals in different niches, from dentists to landscapers and more.

Squarespace vs. WordPress: Flexibility

With approximately eleventy-billion themes, WordPress is certainly versatile on the design front. But how do WordPress and Squarespace compare otherwise in terms of flexibility?

In addition to the themes, WordPress has thousands of different plugins available that add functionality to your website. It’s not much of a stretch to say that whatever you want to do with your site, there’s a way to do it with WordPress. Squarespace is much more limited in that it has predefined options for you to choose from, but deviating from these is either difficult or not possible at all. 

If you want to build a custom website or even tweak an existing theme, you’re much better off using WordPress. A skilled WordPress developer can take any theme and make it uniquely yours, and also guide you through adding different plugins to ensure that your website does what you want and need it to. With WordPress, you simply have more control over your web presence.

Squarespace vs. WordPress: Usability

A lot of people will say Squarespace is easier to use than WordPress. This is true-ish. As the popularity of site builders like Squarespace and Wix has grown, WordPress has adopted some of these elements into their interface and others can be implemented through plugins. Love building a site block-by-block through dragging-and-dropping? You can do that with WordPress now. But if you came of age coding in the 90s, you can still type your blog posts in HTML and make manual edits to the CSS. (Count this as another point for WordPress in the versatility department, too.)

That said, out-of-the-box, Squarespace is easier for someone who has no previous experience setting up a website. You don’t have to fuss with a domain registrar, finding hosting, a cPanel, installing WordPress—it’s all done through Squarespace. There are no software upgrades, plugins to update, or security measures to take. With WordPress, if you’d rather not handle these, you’ll need to hire someone to perform ongoing maintenance of your site to prevent it from being hacked or compromised.

Squarespace vs. WordPress: Blogging and SEO

Squarespace’s blogging capabilities… woof. They’re not great. WordPress was originally conceptualized as a platform for blogging, and you can see this in the ease with which you can create blog posts. Even more important for small businesses, WordPress has plugins like Yoast SEO, which can optimize your content and take it to the next level. There’s nothing like that for Squarespace.

Still, you can find some basic SEO tools in Squarespace, which can be helpful for business owners who are just beginning to dabble in search engine optimization, but if you’re serious about SEO, you really need WordPress. Squarespace is appropriate for marketing a business when people already know where to find you, but if you’re hoping to attract potential customers to your site via Google, Squarespace doesn’t match up to WordPress.

Squarespace vs. WordPress: Cost

The cost of a WordPress website is extremely variable, so it’s hard to make a side-by-side comparison here. If you choose an inexpensive host, a free WordPress theme, and handle the design yourself, you could be looking at a few bucks a month for maintaining your website, which is less than what you’d pay with Squarespace. 

On the other hand, if you have a lot of traffic and require more bandwidth or need to hire a WordPress developer to handle your design and the maintenance of your site once it’s up and running, it’s likely that you’ll pay more. For most businesses, this added expense is probably worth it in terms of SEO functionality, control, and versatility.

The Bottom Line

Squarespace is great if you want to create a website in-house from the ground up with a minimal-to-no learning curve. It excels when it comes to design for creatives and hosting portfolios, but the über-hip aesthetic isn’t a fit for all businesses. Anyone who is serious about SEO is better off skipping Squarespace and going straight to WordPress.

WordPress has a steeper learning curve, but it also has added flexibility and functionality. It has thousands of website themes, tens of thousands of plugins, and robust blogging capabilities. WordPress is nearly universally recommended by SEO experts and consultants, so if your goal in creating a website is to draw traffic from search engines to grow your business, it makes sense to choose WordPress.

Learn About Main Street ROI WordPress Services

At Main Street ROI, we offer WordPress website services. Whether you’re setting up a new website or you’re on a different platform and you’d like to move on up to WordPress, our skilled developers can get the job done seamlessly, with minimal downtime for your business.

Interested in a new WordPress website, migration, or redesign? Click here to request a WordPress website quote.