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.
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