Squarespace Review 2024: Features, Pros and Cons, Pricing

Squarespace is one of the best website builders on the market today. In testing by our expert insights team, Squarespace scored a  4.7/5. 

Squarespace is ideal for beginners who need a slick, professional website without the hassle. The platform’s ease of use is one of its main strengths. It also suits design centric business owners working in the creative or hospitality industries.

In this review we will go through the pros and cons of Squarespace, its different pricing tiers and its strongest features.

Let’s dive in.

The Pros and Cons of Squarespace

Like every website builder we’ve tested, there are benefits and drawbacks to 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.

Squarespace is ideal for businesses who need to showcase appealing design and visuals. Examples would be a restaurant, photography business or an architecture practice.

✅ 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. Its ease of use is often cited as its key selling point and its no surprise that it scored 4.7/5 for User Experience in testing.

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. Read more about IONOS pricing for a clearer comparison.

✅ 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 UK customers. We’ll look at this in more detail in the “Key features” section below.

❌ Limited Function for a Multilanguage Site

With Squarespace, the options for creating a multilanguage site is limited. Translations have to be done manually and even when the site is translated the checkout page will still stay in one language.  If you need a website builder that supports multiple languages, look at Wix, which supports over 180 languages.

Key Features Explained

1. Flexible Design Templates

Squarespace scored 3.7/5 for the quality of its design functions. 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. Easy Drag and Drop Editor

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. Limited Payment Processing Features

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.

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

However in December 2023, Squarespace announced an integration with SKU IQ, a software that syncs POS and ecommerce platforms. With this integration, Squarespace can sync with POS like Square, Clover and Lightspeed.

4. Strong Booking and Appointment Features

Our expert insights team found that Squarespace has the best booking and appointment features out of all the website builders they tested. Squarespace offers Acuity Scheduling which is a powerful scheduling software it acquired in 2019. Acuity has tools such as calendar syncing, automated email and text message reminders, payment processor integrations, and more.  Any business that requires robust scheduling features – like a hospitality business – will benefit greatly from this.

5. Wide Ranging Help and Support

Squarespace has a wide range of customer support options, compared with similar products on the market. In our testing, it scored 4.2/5 in the ‘Help and Support’ category. 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.

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:

In our latest round of testing Squarespace scored 4.3/5 for Value for Money. Its plans are reasonably priced, with its most expensive plan coming out at $49 per month, billed annually. This quite good, even for a business owner starting out. Squarespace came out joint top for Value for Money, with only GoDaddy scoring the same.

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 convenient 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 $249 per month, and the Pro upgrade at $749 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:

Squarespace and Wix are both tied at 4.7/5 overall in our latest round of testing. Wix wins out in categories like Website Features and Design Functionality however.

Squarespace, however, wins out when it comes to User Experience, scoring 4.7/5 , with only Hostinger coming close with 4.5/7. Excellent user experience is a consistent theme with Squarespace.

An advantage Squarespace has over Wix is its unlimited bandwidth and storage space at every price plan. With Wix you only get 5GB of storage space with its Unlimited ($22/month) package. That’s why we favor 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. Shopify is a better ecommerce builder and 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.

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.