Squarespace

Pluspunten

I have been designing websites professionally for over 15 years and it's very rare that I don't design on Squarespace for clients. It's easy to use, the templates are beautiful, and there are so many features and endless flexibility.

Minpunten

I wish custom code injection was available on the basic/personal levels. As of right now, you need to upgrade to the business account to inject any code in the header or footer.

Pluspunten

Squarespace is clean, sophisticated, modern, easy to use, and has built-in features such as domain purchasing, email marketing, scheduling, and e-commerce that make it easy to run a business. With Squarespace, I can trust that my clients will be able to manage their website 100% by themselves once I finish designing it for them. With other platforms (like Wordpress), I cannot guarantee the same. I also like how transparent Squarespace's pricing and plans are. It's so easy to upgrade or downgrade as your needs change. In Squarespace, I can design a high-quality website extremely fast and share the draft with my clients easily.

Minpunten

Squarespace is the least flexible of all the web design platforms that I work with in terms of design customization. There are a lot of different types of widgets and ways to display content that simply aren't available on Squarespace because the platform limits what you can change in the design (probably to prevent websites from turning out bad). I've also noticed that Squarespace websites typically load slower than some of the websites I've built on other platforms like Webflow and Duda.

Pluspunten

Squarespace makes it easy to get websites up quickly -- we've built three, and all went from zero to launch within three days. If you just need some standard startup landing pages, Squarespace is for you.

Their customer support is great if about the basic blocks.

Minpunten

Squarespace has some gotchas that make for substantial challenges beyond the first few months of business unless you're willing to either pay for external plugins or write code, and that comes with several major caveats, such as:

* weird things such as sliders for images simply don't exist
* custom CSS only applies at the site and not the page level
* spacing is somewhat odd with no fine-grain control
* certain JS plugins simply don't work on the site
* there is NO undo of any unkind except plaintext
* there is NO copy/paste or page templating

Perhaps the biggest issue is that it feels like Squarespace is trying to straddle the fence between being the leading CMS and the leading ecommerce platform and as a result it is neither. Frankly, the basic site experience is such that we'd be very reticent to ever deploy the ecommerce capability for a client, and so we use it for customers with mostly static content who blog a couple of times / week or less.

The lack of premium support for code issues further hampers their market share -- adding that as an option might provide more revenue for them and a way forward, as few other platforms do.

Pluspunten

When I started using square space it was a bit intimidating but after getting my site set up it was fine and I felt confident. I left it a while and came back and now feel lost. I don’t feel confident changing much.

Minpunten

I feel it has become more developer friendly and less novice friendly. I used to be able to navigate fairly well.

Pluspunten

The aesthetic. Squarespace's design templates are fresh, current, and appealing to begin with, which provides a lot of options for customization.

Minpunten

It's not the most intuitive interface ever, but that said, they provide outstanding how-to articles and videos and infinitely patient customer support, so it's not hard to figure out how to do what you want to do, even if you have no coding experience.