Pros and Cons of Using Squarespace for Your Blog
When I started this blog, I had minimal experience working on landing pages and in WordPress. My blog is hosted (as of this writing in July 2023) on Squarespace simply because I signed up for a course called “how to start a blog” and it included a detailed tutorial for building a site on Squarespace.
Three years later, I’m a digital marketing professional working primarily in SEO (search engine optimization) - and have built multiple websites in Squarespace and WordPress. While I love my current site and am not looking to redesign any time soon, there are some major cons to the platform I wish I had known about when I set up my blog. If you’re just starting a blog and are considering using it, these are the pros and cons of using Squarespace for your blog.
Designing with Squarespace
Pro: Squarespace Templates Look Great
One of the main reasons I will likely stick to Squarespace and continue to learn workarounds? The templates look great. You can tell when a site has been built on Squarespace, because it’s clean, has great spacing, and consistent branding. Recently, Squarespace made this even better with version 7.1 - templates are more customizable, and you can move elements around on the page with more precision.
Squarespace is a great site for beginners who want an aesthetically pleasing site right away. You can establish brand colors and fonts in one space and have a beautiful, consistent site in a fraction of the time of other sites. Finding the settings is a little more difficult than other platforms, but once you know where to look, it’s not too bad.
Con: Squarespace Isn’t Very Customizable
The downside to Squarespace’s built in brand kit and spacing? The rest of your site isn’t as customizable. Let’s take buttons, for example. All of your buttons have to be the same color, and you can’t adjust the button size or color in a blog post (though you can in pages).
In the old version of Squarespace, you couldn’t even move page elements easily! Blog post formatting, as well as some specific page types, is still somewhat rigid, but luckily the main pages are more editable than before. I hope this will continue to get better (building custom templates would be HUGE), but for now it works well.
Image via unsplash.com
Setting Up Your Business with Squarespace
Pro: Squarespace Has Tons of Helpful Business Tools
If you opt to use Squarespace to house most of your business needs, you’re in luck! You can handle the majority of your business needs directly through Squarespace. From selling and listing products, to email marketing, to basic site analytics, Squarespace has it directly within the platform.
The ability to track sales, marketing efforts, and traffic through one dashboard is an ENORMOUS time-saver. In addition, Squarespace’s backend platform is a lot smoother and easier to use than other platforms I’ve used like Constant Contact and MailChimp.
Con: Squarespace Is Picky About How it Integrates with Things
That being said, Squarespace doesn’t do absolutely everything. Therefore, you might want to use an outside service such as MailChimp. While Squarespace technically links with MailChimp (through a pretty simple process), I’ve noticed that the data transfer from one to the other has significant gaps.
Using MailChimp as an example, though my Squarespace forms are programmed to send new users to MailChimp, it’s difficult to determine the source of sign-ups later in both MailChimp and Squarespace. Why is that important? Knowing what works and what doesn’t is critically important to evaluating your marketing efforts. You can’t know what works if you don’t have complete data.
Building a Site with Squarespace
Pro: Squarespace Makes it Easy to Build an Organized Site
Building a site that can be easily navigated by users is crucial. A well-organized site ensures people will spend less time searching for what they need. It also means people will be less likely to abandon your site in frustration.
In Squarespace, you can see the layout of your site, easily in the sidebar. Blog posts and products are nested neatly within their category types. For a really really large site, Squarespace’s organizational structure could get overwhelming. But for a relatively small personal blog, I find it ideal.
Con: Squarespace Makes it Difficult to Implement Advanced SEO Tools
When I first started my blog, I knew next-to-nothing about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Utilizing SEO to the best of your ability means your blog shows up higher in search engines, which therefore makes it get more traffic online.
Squarespace has an SEO checklist you can use to implement some basic things. Some of the more advanced things, like Schema Markups aren’t quite as simple. Squarespace does not currently work with a fantastic SEO tool called Yoast that helps you determine whether your blog posts are as good for SEO as they can be.
For beginners, Squarespace is an ideal platform to build a nice website, quickly. It looks good, it’s easy to understand, and you can start implementing business tools easily. If you are a total newbie (and will never have any interest in digging into web development more) then I wholeheartedly recommend it for you.
However, if you’ve got some more advanced skills, I might consider another platform such as WordPress. Though many more advanced features are possible on Squarespace, it takes more elbow grease than other platforms. Fingers crossed that we’ll get a Yoast integration one day!
