With so much information lying everywhere, it can be intimidating to find yourself in the situation of choosing between something you don’t know much about. Squarespace or WordPress happens to be just one of those situations, and we’re here to clear things up.
One of the very first things everyone thinks when thinking about setting up a website is to do it easy and quick. And, with as less money as possible, of course. Both Squarespace and WordPress are known as useful website tools that can be used in those ways, but…
There are some pros and cons whether to use one or the other and we’d like to tackle them. And, like in the previous similar articles, we’re comparing these two platforms through these categories:
- Numbers
- Flexibility
- The cost
- Support
Again, when we asked Google the same question you’re having: Squarespace or WordPress, it’s obvious what’s preferred:
To put Trends aside, here is the more detailed comparison to help you decide which platform better suits your needs.
Numbers
Squarespace, which was founded back in 2003. is serving as a SaaS (software as a service) tool for building websites. It’s being used on about 2 million websites and around 100,000 websites uses it as a commercial tool. At the same time, WordPress now powers around 30% of all websites (almost 20mill worldwide!). But, not to take it as the only thing to consider, here are few other features we compared.
Flexibility
Squarespace is a hosted website platform which means you pay a monthly fee for having an all-in-one website.
Basically, all you need to do is set up an account, choose the template and price option, and you’re good to go. Making a website with Squarespace is done by drag-and-drop block editor where you choose features you want for your site.
Templates for Squarespace come in 14 different categories, and you can change them using drag-and-drop block editor, but… There’s only so much you can do with it, giving the fact there are no third-party plugins like in WordPress. You are limited by the set of tools and built-in integrations that come with this platform. While some of them are well known – such as Dropbox, MailChimp, Xero – you cannot use them with the cheapest plan.
WordPress, on the other hand, gives you unlimited features to play with while building your website. More than 54K plugins and dozens of new free ones and premium that you can find every day. Moreover, with WordPress, you have more control over your website, and more customization features given the fact its open source and free for anyone to use and optimize.
The cost
Squarespace has four premium price options: personal, business, basic and advanced one. Each plan includes hosting, a free domain name for the first year, customer support and design.
The price you’ll pay for self-hosted WordPress website is domain name+hosting billed annually. Themes you can either find for free or pay a one-time fee for one of the thousands of premium ones like the ones we have on ThemeForest. Finally, an experienced developer if you can’t do it yourself which, in some cases, adds the price significantly.
Bottom line, in some cases WordPress can be more expensive than Squarespace, depending on your needs and wishes. But then again, the price itself shouldn’t be the only feature you consider when deciding which platform to choose.
Support
Both Squarespace and WordPress have customer support. Squarespace has email, video tutorials, workshops and live chat customer support, all which runs pretty good.
WordPress support is, when you think about it, the whole WordPress community. As the platform itself is free, and WordPress is an open source, the best way to seek help is through support forums. Other than that, with a premium theme, most often there’s professional customer support to help in any way for some time.
Conclusion
Platforms like Squarespace or Wix we explained earlier are good tools for simple websites that aren’t large or complex. And although Squarespace is easier to set up, WordPress is better in the long run. Sure, there may be a bigger learning curve and perhaps more things to overcome but one thing is certain.
Sooner or later, whether the business grows stronger or you want to have more control of your site, WordPress is the ultimate solution.
And if you, by any chance decide to go with WordPress, we offer premium quality themes for any business. Furthermore, there’s try before you buy feature where you get to work with any of our themes seven days for free.
But the fun doesn’t stop there. Once you decide which theme you want to go with, there’s a best rated WordPress team to help you every step of the way 🙂
