Squarespace Comparison and Review

Pros:

• Extremely high quality templates
• Offers month-to-month plans in addition to annual plans
• E-commerce functionality is included
• Live chat support available
• Free one-year registration of a .com

Cons:

• Phone support not available
• You can only edit the HTML of the template by enabling "developer mode," which disconnects the template from any future bug fixes or updates

Conclusion:

Squarespace is one of the most well-known website builders on the market, offering excellent design, an easy to use interface, lots of integrations and high quality customer support via chat. Squarespace also offers a "developer" mode that can be enabled for users that want to have virtually unlimited flexibility to edit any aspect of the design. The Personal plan is their entry level product that includes up to 20 pages, the ability to sell products online and a free custom domain with an annual purchase. The biggest drawback to the service is the lack of phone support. Also, if you plan to use Squarespace for e-commerce, you'll have to pay 3% + the cost of the payment processing fee (total of around 6%) with the Personal plan. To eliminate the additional fee, you'll need to switch to one of Squarespace's "online store" plans, which start at $26/ month.

Ease of Use

Squarespace's Personal package received 4 out of 5 on Ease of Use. Squarespace's builder is very flexible and customizable with a drag & drop option, and you can edit the HTML by enabling "developer mode." However, enabling developer mode comes with a major trade-off: site's in developer mode will stop receiving bug fixes and updates, which could potentially lead to future problems or security issues. Uploading pictures and other content is not very difficult, and only requires a few clicks. Although Squarespace doesn't include a free image library, they are integrated with Getty images, which offers licenses to use their 80 million images for prices starting at $10 each. The Personal package offers over 40 extremely high quality design templates to choose from. Squarespace allows you to add meta description tags to pages and alt tags to images, which are both useful for SEO and accessibility. Basic content blocks in this website builder are Text, Markdown, Quote, Image, Video, Audio. There is also a broad variety of other content blocks available, such as gallery, social, e-commerce, etc.

Customer Support

Squarespace earned 4 out of 5 stars for their Customer support. Although phone support is not available in Squarespace's website builder, they offer high quality live chat support from 3AM to 8PM (Eastern Time) Monday-Friday. Customer support through email is available 24/7.

Squarespace offers high-quality video workshops and the searchable knowledge base is comprehensive and very helpful. They also have an active community forum which helps get answers to additional questions from other users.

Account Features

Email accounts are not included in the Personal package. However, by upgrading to the Business package you can get on free G Suite account, which includes an email address. The price difference if paying on an annual basis is only $6/ month, which is only $1/ per month more than the cost of a G Suite account, and the Business plan also includes $100 in Google Adwords credit as well other features. The Personal package has built-in native website metrics, providing detailed information about traffic overview, mobile usage, RSS subscribers, referrers, popular content, search engine queries, site search queries, activity log, and sales overview. Privacy protection (WHOIS) for domains registered within the Personal package is available for free. Privacy protection feature hides contact and personal information of a domain owner in WHOIS, which is the open database of registrants of domain names. It protects a domain registrant from spam or personal info theft. These domains also include SSL security (which turns your "http" into "https").

Pricing

Squarespace's Personal plan costs $12 per month billed annually with an upfront payment of $144. Another option is a month-to-month contract for $16/ month. The Personal package includes a 1 year of a free domain with the annual purchase that includes an SSL certificate and Who.Is privacy protection, which is great. The domain renewal rate, including those features, is $20/ year. Unfortunately, if you registered your domain elsewhere, you can't transfer it into Squarespace (though you can simply use it by pointing the DNS of the domain to your Squarespace website). The Personal plan has fully integrated online store allowing to sell physical, digital and service products and to manage inventory. Squarespace charges 3% sales transaction fee on top of the processing fee (a total of roughly 6%) with  the Personal package. You can also test their services during 14-day trial period for free.

Upgrades

Squarespace's Personal plan can be upgraded to the Business plan for $18/ month with an annual subscription or $26/month if billed month-to-month. The Business plan includes unlited pages, one Google G Suite account, which includes an email address on your custom domain (valued at $60/ year), $100 for Google Adwords. The Business plan also lowers the fee for e-commerce transactions from 3% to 2% (on top of the processing fees).

In addition to their Personal and Business "Website" plans, Squarespace offers "Online Stores" meant for e-commerce businesses. These plans are Basic, starting at $26/ month and Advanced, starting at $40/ month. These plans do not charge a transaction fee on top of the processing fee and include a variety of e-commerce specific features.