What Is Squarespace? | A Comprehensive Overview for Beginners

This article shows you all about Squarespace: its pricing, features, marketing tools, domain and security, and more.

Key Takeaways

• Squarespace is a user-friendly website builder known for its visually appealing templates and versatile features, including e-commerce and marketing tools.
• Squarespace caters to individuals, small businesses, and creative professionals seeking to showcase their work or launch an online store.

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace is a website-building platform that allows users to create, manage, and host websites without needing to know how to code. It provides pre-designed templates and drag-and-drop tools, making it easier for individuals and businesses to craft professional-looking websites, portfolios, blogs, and online stores.

It offers a variety of features such as e-commerce, blogging, analytics, domains, email marketing, and even an SSL certificate, making it a comprehensive solution for those looking to establish or enhance their online presence. For those who want to create a more engaging and profitable online store, Squarespace is an ideal choice. Lucrative Studio can enhance user experience and business growth.

While anyone can use Squarespace, it’s primarily tailored for designers, artists, photographers, and creative professionals.

To begin with Squarespace, simply create an account, pick a template, and start customizing it. The platform’s attractive design options have made it a top choice in the eCommerce realm.

Beyond just being SEO-friendly, Squarespace excels in allowing small businesses to distinctively stand out.

Squarespace offers a range of features such as:

• Award-winning website templates
• Detailed website analytics and reports
• Connections to expert services
• Ecommerce-friendly templates
• Tools for appointments
• Comprehensive checkout, payment, and tax tools
• Point of Sale extensions
• Email marketing capabilities
• Domain name registration services
• Google search engine optimization and SEO tools
• Integration with popular social media platforms
• User-friendly drag-and-drop website design and editing

Simply put, Squarespace provides everything you need to establish a robust online presence for your small business.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace has four subscription plans that vary depending on the features and functionality you need for your website, with pricing starting from $23/month to $65/month. 

If you opt for an annual subscription, you can save up to 30% on fees, bringing the cost down to $16/month to $49/month.

Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial that allows users to experience the platform’s capabilities and features without any financial commitment. During this trial period, you can experiment with Squarespace’s website-building tools, templates, and customization options.

Website builder plans

Squarespace provides two specific plans for website creation, separate from online store design. These plans focus on building and personalizing websites with few e-commerce functionalities.

• Personal: $16/month (billed annually) or $23/month (billed monthly). 

This plan offers a comprehensive set of tools for creating a robust website, complete with blogging capabilities and other essential backend features. Additionally, it allows integration with platforms like Mailchimp for email marketing and offers a vast array of template designs.

It’s ideal for individual users, providing basic features like unlimited bandwidth, ample storage, a complimentary custom domain, SSL security, SEO tools, a variety of templates, and round-the-clock customer support.

• Business: $23/month (billed annually) or $33/month (billed monthly). 

This plan offers an extensive range of added features, from promotional pop-ups to code customization and support for an unlimited number of products. While it might not be geared towards full-blown eCommerce, it’s perfectly tailored for business websites. On the other hand, for small businesses and budding entrepreneurs keen on diving into online sales and harnessing advanced tools, there’s another plan. 

This package encompasses professional emails via Google, high-end integrations, full customization using CSS and JavaScript, a $100 Google Ads credit, foundational eCommerce functions, sophisticated website analytics, and a comprehensive suite of marketing tools.

If you’re already leveraging platforms like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy for selling products, the Business plan can be a valuable addition to complement your online presence. However, it adds a little extra cost. It charges 3% extra on anything you sell or get donated on your website.

Ecommerce plans

To incorporate eCommerce features into your Squarespace website, you’ll have to opt for one of their specialized eCommerce plans. Tailored explicitly for crafting online shops, these plans might come at a higher price point, but they offer value commensurate with their cost.

• Basic Commerce: $27/month (billed annually) or $36/month (billed monthly). 

This plan is an economical choice for individuals aiming to establish an online shop, encompassing all the features found in the business plan.

For online stores requiring robust eCommerce functionalities, this plan offers features like customer accounts, domain-based checkout, point of sale, in-depth eCommerce analytics, merchandising tools, and the absence of transaction fees.

• Advanced Commerce: $49 per month (billed annually) or $65 per month (billed monthly). 

This plan stands out as the prime choice for burgeoning online stores looking to expand and tap into enhanced features. Not only does it offer tools like abandoned cart recovery, advanced shipping, and the ability to create gift cards and flexible discounts, but it also incorporates features such as subscriptions, advanced discounts, and access to commerce APIs.

Great news for e-commerce users – Squarespace doesn’t charge additional fees for your transactions. While Squarespace integrates seamlessly with major payment processors like PayPal and Stripe, these platforms do have their own fees. For instance, PayPal starts at 5.4%, and Stripe charges 2.9% and 30 cents per transaction. Remember to account for these when calculating your sales revenue.

Squarespace Website Builder Features

What sets Squarespace apart is its focus on delivering top-notch templates. Unlike platforms like Shopify or WordPress, with hundreds of templates, Squarespace offers just over 100 choices. But here’s the upside: Each template is crafted with precision and style. You’re getting quality rather than quantity. Plus, these templates are designed to be user-friendly and perform well.

Now, when it comes to making your site uniquely yours, Squarespace gives you plenty of flexibility. While it’s not a pure drag-and-drop builder, you can still move features and elements around. You can adjust sections, add or remove components, handle multiple pages simultaneously, and switch out images.

One thing to note about Squarespace templates is that they expect you to have high-resolution photos. These images fill various blocks within the templates, so you might face a challenge if you’re short on pictures. But don’t worry, Squarespace has a special partnership with Getty Images. You can find both free and premium images there.

And if you’re tech-savvy with HTML and CSS, you can go all out with customizing everything, from your blog pages to your shopping cart. Play with different fonts, colors, and backgrounds to make your site your own.

Other Design Elements Included With Squarespace

Squarespace offers more than just designing your homepage and website pages. It also provides tools for creating other visual elements for your online presence.

For example, some Squarespace pricing plans include access to a logo design app. While it might have some limitations in terms of logo complexity, it offers a variety of text, graphics, and symbols to help you kickstart your logo creation process.

Logo Design Tool

Squarespace’s logo app can be handy if you need a simple logo while you’re still deciding on your website’s overall look. Remember that you can’t upload your own images; you have to work with what’s available in the app.

The good news is that you don’t have to be a Squarespace user to use the logo app. You can design your logo and download it for $10.

Beyond logos and regular web pages, you can also use Squarespace’s content blocks and drag-and-drop features to create cover pages. These are like single-page websites that business leaders often use for welcome pages or campaign landing pages.

Cover pages

Squarespace’s cover pages look great, thanks to their strong focus on design. However, they may not be the best choice for certain advertising campaigns because they need the ability to add email marketing tools using code blocks. These tools are crucial if you want to collect email addresses and other information.

So, while Squarespace cover pages are excellent for showcasing content and personal portfolios, they may not be the best option for capturing leads.

Squarespace Domains and Security

When you’re using Squarespace to create your website, it’s important to think beyond just how easy it is to use and how your site looks on mobile devices. You also need to consider your domain options.

Your domain name is your web address, which people type to find your site. If you buy your domain through Squarespace and choose an annual plan, you’ll get a free domain for the first year. After that, you’ll need to renew it at the regular rate.

The process of registering your domain with Squarespace is straightforward. Just search for the domain you want and add it to your cart. Keep in mind that the price can vary depending on your choice. Specific domains like hair salons can be more expensive than basic ones like website.com.

In addition to the free domain for the first year, Squarespace also provides a free SSL certificate. SSL stands for secure sockets layer, encrypting information entered on your website. This is crucial for sites that handle payments, like online stores.

Squarespace offers other security features as well. While your options are limited with the free plan and trial versions, paid packages come with DDoS protection and tools to combat malicious traffic.

Furthermore, Squarespace has built-in solutions to keep your site safe in case of issues. You can restore deleted blog posts and pages up to 30 days after deletion. Squarespace automatically creates backup copies of your website and stores them on primary and secondary servers. You also have the option to store website files on physical off-site storage disks for added security.

Squarespace Ecommerce Features

If you’re considering Squarespace for your online store, it has some excellent e-commerce features to offer. Here are some of the useful sales-related features you’ll find

• Product Variants: Squarespace allows you to offer various product options, making it great for selling items in different sizes and colors. You can even display miniature versions of these variations for your customers to see.
• Unlimited Product Support: There’s no limit to the number of products you can sell on Squarespace. You can expand your business and reach more customers without any restrictions.
• Inventory Management: Managing your products is easy on Squarespace, even with a vast inventory. You can organize your items by name, price, or the number of items left in stock.
• Selling Digital Products: Squarespace makes it simple to sell digital products like software, eBooks, music, or downloads. You can also offer services instead of physical items.
• Sales Tax Configuration: You can configure sales tax settings to automatically apply the right tax codes for different regions, countries, and states. This helps you stay compliant with tax regulations.
• POS: Squarespace’s POS system seamlessly integrates with its online platform, providing businesses with a unified solution for both online and in-person sales. However, this feature is only available for merchants in the US.

Squarespace Marketing Tools

SEO

Squarespace excels in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It integrates seamlessly with various marketing tools, including blogging, Mailchimp email marketing, and pop-ups, to boost your website’s conversion rates.

Squarespace ensures good SEO practices by:

• Providing clean HTML markup.
• Offering mobile-friendly design.
• Ensuring responsive web pages.
• Ensuring fast-loading pages, which Google favors.
• Additionally, Squarespace allows you to enable SSL on your site for free, enhancing security for your visitors, which is another factor that Google considers.

However, Squarespace has room for improvement in managing alt tags. Alt tags are essential for search engine indexing, but adding them in Squarespace can be cumbersome. You need to add an image, give it a caption, and choose not to display the caption.

While Squarespace enhances back-end SEO, it lacks plugins or tools for automatic blogging and back-end checks, unlike WordPress with its Yoast plugin. You could consider using third-party SEO checking tools.

Email Marketing

If your business strategy includes email campaigns and customer nurturing, Squarespace’s Email Campaigns feature is worth considering.

With the Email Campaigns feature (available for an additional fee), you can:

• Capture email addresses.
• Send dedicated newsletters directly from your Squarespace interface, similar to Wix.

There are four pricing options for email campaigns with monthly prices:

• Starter plan: $7/month (3 email newsletters, 500 messages per month).
• Core plan: $14/month (5 newsletters, 5,000 messages).
• Pro plan: $30/month (20 newsletters, 50,000 messages).
• Max plan: $68/month (unlimited newsletters, 250,000 messages).

You can save 29% if you opt for an annual subscription.

The Starter and Core plans offer competitive pricing for email marketing, especially compared to services like GetResponse and AWeber. They allow you to start building your email list without breaking the bank.

Squarespace’s integrated email campaigns make it easier to maintain consistent branding across all channels. The email templates are well-designed and offer a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface. Basic autoresponder technology is also included for automating parts of your marketing strategy, suitable for beginners.

Squarespace email campaigns promote the double opt-in approach for subscribers, resulting in a cleaner email list by filtering out disinterested parties and spambots.

Social Media

Squarespace lets you link your website to over 20 social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. You can even add Twitter cards to your site’s cover page. This makes it convenient to manage and share your social content from one place.

You can easily add custom buttons to your site, allowing visitors to share your blog posts or their recent purchases. This interactive feature enhances your Squarespace site’s engagement.

Squarespace Customer Support

Finally, while it’s essential to consider e-commerce capabilities, an affordable personal plan, and the ability to create gift cards when designing an effective website, don’t underestimate the value of reliable support.

When you encounter challenges with Squarespace design, having access to good customer support is crucial. While some website builders reserve top-tier support for their highest-paying customers, Squarespace takes a different approach. Although phone support is not available, there are various support options to choose from, including:

• Email support
• Social media support via Twitter
• A comprehensive knowledge base
• Video tutorials
• A community forum
• Live chat during the week

Even without phone support, you’re likely to find a suitable solution on the Squarespace website to address any questions you have about functionality. Moreover, the Squarespace knowledge base is exceptionally thorough, providing articles, guides, video tutorials, and more. It’s a reliable and comprehensive resource for DIY support. You might discover that you won’t even need to use the email or live chat support options.

Who Should Use Squarespace?

Squarespace is suitable for anyone who wants a simple and easy-to-use website builder with basic or advanced ecommerce functionalities. Squarespace is especially ideal for

• Visual artists, photographers, designers, and other creative professionals who want to showcase their high-quality images and portfolios.
• Small business owners, solopreneurs, bloggers, coaches, authors, and others who want to promote their brands, services, or products online.
• Non-technical people who don’t have much experience or knowledge in web development or coding.

Squarespace offers various templates, features, and tools that help you design, customize, and manage your website according to your needs and goals. You can start a 14-day free trial with Squarespace today, no credit card is required. Then, you can pick the plan that works best for your website.

Final Thought

In summary, Squarespace is a user-friendly website builder that appeals to many, including artists and businesses. It provides stylish templates and robust e-commerce tools. Though it has some minor SEO and support issues, its design and features make it a top choice in the website builder market. Overall, Squarespace stands out because of its balance of beauty and function.

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