Squarespace Review: Can Limitless Storage Space Square with the Cost?

Scoring a smashing 4.8/5 in our in-depth testing, Squarespace is an affordable tool for creating a stylish business website without HTML or JavaScript. High levels of design flexibility and limitless data make Squarespace a serious contender against rival website builder Wix.

We’re back again with the latest round of research on can’t-code-but-need-a-website tools. If, like us, you prefer click-and-drag over C:\DOS\RUN, then Squarespace is a time-efficient route to a classy website.

In this review, we’ll examine the core features of Squarespace, its value for money, ease of use, customer support, and how it stacks up to competitor products. Here’s a snappy summary of our test results:

Now we’ll get a quick overview of pricing, before going on to weigh up its pros and cons. We’ll examine key features of Squarespace, who should use it, and what its customer reviews say.

That’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started.

How much does Squarespace cost?

The cost of Squarespace has gone up this year, as it has with all website builders, reflecting wider trends in the tech industry (and the cost of running a business more broadly).

These are the four price plans you can choose between:

As far as value for money is concerned, Squarespace is a fairly good option for a drag-and-drop website builder tool. Scoring 4/5 in our assessment of its pricing versus features, Squarespace is better than Wix, Shopify and Weebly, but not as good as GoDaddy, Jimdo or WordPress.com.

For that reason, we wouldn’t recommend choosing Squarespace based on price alone. Now let’s look at Squarespace’s best and worst attributes.

The pros and cons of Squarespace

✅ Stunning templates

Squarespace drafted in top industry talent to create its website templates. And the results. Are. Beautiful. All you need to do is add your own photos (or stock imagery) to bring these world-class designs to life.

✅ Quick and easy to get started

For those with little to no interest in computer programming, Squarespace is a straightforward route to running your own website. In a similar vein to Wix and Shopify, starting with Squarespace means answering a few tick box questions such as “What’s your site about?” and “What are your top goals?”.

From there you’ll select a template from a range of recommendations, based on the answers you gave. We found this a refreshingly simple process of getting started with website creation, though it isn’t unique in the market.

✅ Unlimited storage space

If you were going to build a website the old-fashioned way, you’d need to run some numbers on the amount of memory you’ll need, the reason being that this affects the type of hosting you’d need to configure (and pay for).

Thankfully, you won’t have to think about any of that, because all Squarespace subscriptions include free unlimited storage and bandwidth. That’s not the case with competitor website builders such as Wix and IONOS, which only provide the same after a certain price point.

✅ Intuitive editing

Squarespace is a cut above the rest with its common sense design tools. Text and image editing works as you would expect it to: double-click to edit or remove an image. Ctrl+I to italicise text. Drag and drop to move sections, and so on. You can even press Ctrl+Z to undo the last edit you made, a feature we absolutely love.

These simple edit features might sound like an obvious baseline, but it’s startling how many mainstream website builder products get this so badly wrong. We found Wix much trickier to get to grips with, for instance.

❌ No POS hardware integration

Although you can sell products and services online with Squarespace, there’s surprisingly no in-person sales hardware to speak of. Unlike rival Shopify, which offers a range of card readers, barcode scanners and till equipment, Squarespace has no such physical Point of Sale (POS) for Canadian customers. We’ll look at this in more detail in the “Key features” section below.

Squarespace key features explained

1. Template design flexibility: better than Wix

Squarespace scored 4.2/5 for the quality of its design functions, thanks, in part, to its flexible template designs. Unlike Wix, you can switch your Squarespace template after you’ve already started editing it. And the new template will keep your existing content.

It’s just as well, as the template suggested for my test website (an architecture business) did not support portfolio pages. This was very odd, as I’d indicated my sector was real estate, so a portfolio seems an obvious key ingredient. So the template recommendations don’t perfectly match business sectors.

It’s a rare feature of a website builder to automatically repopulate your new template like this. Only Weebly, Pixpa, Format and One.com will do the same if you change your mind about your template.

2. Drag-and-drop editor: easier than most

To make changes to style elements of your website, all you need to do is click on what you want to edit, then a menu appears with a small selection of options. This simplifies the process of editing, and allows you to change elements one at a time. You don’t feel overwhelmed by a smorgasbord of confusing icons, either. So if you’ve only used Paint because Photoshop intimidates you, you’ll be comfortable using Squarespace.

The benefit of Squarespace’s intuitive editing is the time and stress you’ll save. With clear and helpful pop-up tips, you feel as if you already know how to use Squarespace, even as you’re just getting started.

The editor isn’t perfect, however. It was hard to get out of preview mode back into editing mode, when I accidentally clicked into it. Though Shopify is arguably far more confusing, as you have to switch between multiple menu types to edit various parts of your website.

3. Taking payments: falls behind competition

You can set up an online shop with Squarespace, for sure. But it’s best suited to smaller inventories, with 100 or fewer products. Options for taking payments are very limited: you can use Stripe (which allows payments with all major credit cards, plus Apple Pay and Afterpay/Clearpay) or PayPal. That’s it.

Payment processing rates through Stripe are 2.9% + 30¢ per card charge.

Squarespace has been slower than competitors to integrate the ability to take in-person payments through its websites in Canada. Although US customers have had access to POS hardware via Square since 2019, it’s been a missing (though much-requested) feature in Canada.

4. Marketing features: very strong

Squarespace scored the highest marks possible in our tests for its range of marketing features. As well as email marketing and a built-in social post creator, Squarespace offers comprehensive organic search engine marketing support as well. Its keyword support also makes it one of the best ecommerce platforms for SEO in Canada.

It should be said, Wix offers all the same marketing features as Squarespace. Still, that puts Squarespace ahead of IONOS, Hostinger, and Strikingly, which all have far fewer marketing options.

5. Help and support: wide ranging

Squarespace has a wide range of customer support options, compared with similar products on the market. In our testing, it scored 4.8/5 in the ‘Help and Support’ category, joint first with Wix. However, that doesn’t mean all Squarespace customers were delighted with the assistance they could access. We’ll look into this more in the reviews section further down.

Squarespace offers live chat, email, and social media support, among other onsite options. It lacks phone support, though, which Wix, Weebly and GoDaddy all offer. So if you’re not willing to read through forums and sit through webinars, you may struggle to find the solutions to issues that crop up.

What kind of business is Squarespace best for?

Because Squarespace is a looks-focused website maker, it suits business owners who need to grab visual attention. With plenty of varied templates to show off images, Squarespace is the best fit for websites in the following industries:

Style-conscious: fashion, beauty, cosmetics, health, lifestyle, and creative arts

If you’re trying to sell a vision of high-end luxury, either to promote cosmetics or chic clothing, Squarespace is a great choice. With a choice of 40 templates, or the option to put together your own design, images always come front and centre of a Squarespace site. That makes it ideal for businesses in style-conscious industries.

Image-heavy: videography, photography, motion graphics, streaming

Thanks to the bonus of unlimited memory and bandwidth in every price plan, entrepreneurs in visual media can upload as much as they need to. If you’ve got videos, high-resolution images or other graphics to showcase your business, then Squarespace is a great option.

Restaurants and hospitality venues

Given how well Squarespace allows you to showcase pictures, hospitality and catering companies would benefit from signing up. Squarespace added restaurant app Tock to its array of website features when it bought the company in 2021. It’s a handy all-in-one app that lets you manage bookings, tables, events, and takeaway orders from one place.

It’s not a cheap service, though, with the basic Tock plan costing C$299 per month, and the Pro upgrade at C$999 monthly. It’s convenient to be able to manage takeaway orders through Tock, but there’s a 2% fee on every order plus payment processing charges.

Now you know if Squarespace is a suitable match for businesses like yours, but let’s glance at the competition to see if there’s a better option.

How does Squarespace compare to its competitors?

• Squarespace is the easiest to use
• Wix has higher quality features, all round
• Shopify is more suitable for large or complex selling

Here’s a quick comparison chart of Squarespace’s nearest competitors:

Its nearest rival is Wix, which is more widely used than Squarespace. However, Squarespace is definitely on track to rival Wix thanks to recently improved features. Currently, though, Squarespace loses out to Wix on its overall range and quality of website features, scoring 4.6/5 against Wix’s 4.8/5.

On the other hand, Squarespace is joint first place in our testing for ‘Ease of Use’, scoring 4.4/5 alongside Wix. Our research found Squarespace easier to use than GoDaddy (4.1/5), Weebly (3.7/5) or WordPress.com (2.7/5). Beginner website designers: you need Squarespace.

An advantage Squarespace has over Wix is its unlimited bandwidth and storage space at every price plan. With Wix you only get 10GB of storage space at Unlimited (C$20/month) and 35GB at VIP (C$44/month). That’s why we favour Squarespace for websites relying on multimedia.

However, if your main focus is on selling products and services at scale, Shopify is a better option than Squarespace. Reason being Squarespace’s inventory management and synching for physical sales is non-existent compared with Shopify’s. With Squarespace, you’ll have to make time to update your own stock levels if you sell the same products from your website and in person.

Does Squarespace have good customer reviews?

In our focus group, 92% said they were likely to recommend Squarespace. That’s a higher percentage than any other website builder tool in our testing.

Unfortunately, Squarespace has a totally dire reputation on Trustpilot, with a shameful average review score of 1.4/5. It seems complaints were mainly around lack of accessible customer support. Others struggled with software updates that affected ease of site editing.

But you know what they say about those who leave reviews: it’s likely to be only the customers with really great or really terrible experiences. So it’s worth taking the negativity with a pinch of salt.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom from our researchers’ point of view. Let’s take a look at how our focus group got on with Squarespace.

What did our test users have to say?

Our focus group participants generally felt Squarespace was easy to use, and appreciated the handy hints that cropped up during the creation process. One of our testers noted: “Feedback boxes asking, ‘How’s it going?’ with options like ‘Can’t decide on a template’ felt like a really user-friendly approach.”

The grid guidelines in the editor workspace stood out as a highlight for another user, who said:

“I loved the background grid for organising your layout – It was so good for making sure everything was aligned properly. My page ended up looking so much sleaker and neater than other platforms.”

On the other hand, some test users didn’t like the fact you had to manually click ‘Save’ after making edits. They felt an autosave feature would have been more convenient.

How We Reviewed Squarespace