7 ms·

I love Squarespace. I find it to be as close to the perfect mix of flexibility, usability and beautiful defaults that I've ever seen in a website builder. I can

I love Squarespace. I find it to be as close to the perfect mix of flexibility, usability and beautiful defaults that I've ever seen in a website builder. I can hand off management of the site to someone with almost zero technical skill (my 70 y/o father with almost no technical knowledge manages a Squarespace site I built him!) and when I look back in 2 years the site will still look pretty good and will still work on mobile. Chances of the site being hacked are much much lower than on Wordpress. Prices are reasonable. The layout engine is exactly what I want, it looks nice on all devices and can handle most layouts, which is a totally worthwhile tradeoff for the few times that something just doesn't quite look the way I want it to without custom css. I know people say this stuff: "You can't transfer your site away" - I know, but I can build a reasonable site in ~2 days, so the tradeoff is worth it and the sunk cost is lower "But I want a fully custom design" - Yeah, fair enough, there is a cap on the high end of design with it but I think that cap is pretty high, especially in 7.1 "But it is making the whole internet look the same!" - Not really, between colors, photos and sections in 7.1 I just don't think this is true. If you use unsplash for all of your photos then maybe, but if you are doing that you are probably too small to care, worry about that when you hit 2MM in revenue "But Wordpress is user friendly too" - No it isn't As I write these I think that maybe it is just the perfect thing for my subset of clients (SMB), so read this from that perspective. I know this isn't really the discussion on this thread, I just wanted to see what experiences of others have been.

arkitaip 5y ago
Sounds like you know what your customers want and deliver on that. That's better than most devs who want to shove their favorite language/framework down the throat of their poor customers.
- soperj 5y ago
  >That's better than most devs who want to shove their favorite language/framework down the throat of their poor customers. This is exactly that.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Okay, but in this case, the favourite framework has a GUI. Sure, you can't use WYSIWYG HTML editors with it, but it has its own sort-of WYSIWYG editor.
  - Matticus_Rex 5y ago
    Handing your customers something solid that they can easily use and update is hardly "[shoving it] . . . down the throat of their poor customers."
    - soperj 5y ago
      Same with your insert favourite framework my friend.
temptemptemp111 5y ago
Makes no sense why anyone who likes good software could also like Squarespace
superfrank 5y ago
> You can't transfer your site away From an investment perspective, that's a pretty big positive. High switching costs locks existing customers in.
- hakre 5y ago
  Sure it's your site?
markdown 5y ago
It's ridiculously expensive though. Almost $150/yr for what probably costs $5/yr to host.
- neom 5y ago
  Ridiculously cheap if you factor in the costs of time/effort spent learning to do it yourself when your primary focus is launching your jewelry making business.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Jewelry making businesses go to where the buyers are, which is Etsy. They could do Squarespace Ecommerce and work on SEO and PPC ads to drive traffic, but as you said, they might prefer to focus on making jewelry. For me, it's not clear how Squarespace will be able to grow if their market is mom-and-pop shops. There are better economies of scale in targeting 1 enterprise accounts over 10 consumer accounts.
- mrcarruthers 5y ago
  But they're not just hosting. A website shop will probably charge you a few thousand to build a site and then charge you again whenever you want changes. $150/yr just for that alone is a bargain to someone who cannot do it themselves.
- d4mi3n 5y ago
  I hear you, but I feel like that ignores a lot of externalities to hosting a site for a client, including: 1. Support (fielding calls, answering emails, etc) 2. Updates (copy, design, patching) 3. Admin (billing, contracts) And that's just off the top of my head. Having a client is rarely about just handling the hosting. You effectively become a technical resource and field all the duties that entails.
- passivate 5y ago
  What expenses are you considering in that $5 though? Even so, keeping things running might be cheap, but its expensive to get to that stage. By the same token, it costs the same ~$50 to fill gas in a camry or a lambo.
kenneth 5y ago
I run a VC firm. I'm a full stack engineer who's built core infrastructure that runs on billions of devices and handles trillions of server side requests a year. And yet I choose to use squaris Squarespace for our website. It's just way easier and more reliable than building it myself despite being more than capable. I don't want to deal with maintenance, mobile, upkeep, etc. I have better things to do than to maintain our website.
- kevinob11 5y ago
  Yes! This is a value I kind of missed in my description. We have a static html site right now, its lightning fast and easy enough for me to maintain, but we'll be moving to Squarespace internally on the next site update. Right now our contact form is annoying to maintain, non-developers can't easily make changes and images aren't automatically optimized. It just solves too many problems at too low of a cost, in dollars and other things.
- philjr 5y ago
  Likewise. I did our wedding site in it with a wufoo form back in 2015. Spent an evening at it, sent out email. Done! Literally never touched it again. Simply done and well executed.
- pazimzadeh 5y ago
  I was trying to learn more about your fund but I think the site is down: https://oyster.vc/ https://oyster.vc/. Unless this is the one? https://www.oyster-ventures.com/ https://www.oyster-ventures.com/
  - nattaylor 5y ago
    His is https://oyster.vc/ https://oyster.vc/ and it works for me from residential Comcast in the U.S.
- debaserab2 5y ago
  I chose Squarespace for my company's marketing site, and I'd mostly agree with some caveats: * The developer mode is poorly supported. For example: you can't copy your site if it is in developer mode (which means you can't setup a staging environment and everything you push to your site will be live instantly). The local development server is also very buggy and inconsistent with the production behavior. It feels like something that they developed early on in their road map and haven't spent much time on since then. If I could go back and do this over again, I'd pick an existing theme and just customize it instead of building out a whole theme in developer mode. * The site is S-L-O-W with tons of bundled assets that it injects into your theme. I have no idea what any of it is doing, but it definitely increases page load. That said, if you find yourself wanting a solid CMS that has the full breadth of WordPress like features but don't want to deal with the hosting, SquareSpace is a solid choice.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
IDK the lack of ability to export _your_ data and leave when _you_ feel like it is pretty much crap. Frankly, from a product perspective it's short-sighted. Let people leave. Find out why. Fix the problem(s). But if you hold them hostage you're holding your own product back _and_ you're creating ill-will towards your brand. Lose, lose. That's not forgivable.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I don't see anyone's data being held hostage. I do see a specialized hosting service that will require you to rebuild/redesign your site if you migrate away. Yes, there are higher migration costs if you use Squarespace. For a lot of people those are reasonable in exchange for lower up-front and maintenance costs. People should absolutely consider the lock-in factor but there's not a universal correct answer.
  - lupire 5y ago
    My website HTML+JS content is my data.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Then use a more generic hosting site. I don't see anyone preventing you. There's always a tradeoff.
      - chiefalchemist 5y ago
        Because it's too much trouble for an outfit like SP to write an export feature?? And why not read the whole comment? You buried the lede.
        ghaff 5y ago
        So they should have an export function to export all the supporting Squarespace code? Yes, that seems like an unreasonable expectation. If being able to easily lift and shift is important to you, no one is keeping you from hand-coding your site and/or using some sort of static site generator and hosting it on a generic platform. If you write an application using AWS-specific services, you're not going to be able to trivially migrate that either. It's a tradeoff.
pembrook 5y ago
Squarespace is the perfect solution for non-tech-savvy brick-and-mortar business who probably won't update their site more than once every 5 years. I'd say it has way better defaults than Wix. Beyond the mom-and-pop flower shop down the street or the friend that needs a portfolio site...not so much. Squarespace is good for the aforementioned users because the platform makes it hard for them to create bad designs and do stupid things. Putting either of those types of users on a Wordpress site would just be a total nightmare. HOWEVER, if you're even mildly tech-savvy, Squarespace (or site builders like Wix) become frustrating and limiting almost immediately. This is why I believe Webflow is ultimately the answer. It addresses all the downsides of Wordpress with none of the limitations. I think 5 years from now, Squarespace/Wix will completely own the mom-and-pop and portfolio space. I think Webflow will ultimately own the space inhabited today by Wordpress (as well as static site generators), and be powering the marketing & content sites for most businesses. Which is where the real money is.
- armonraphiel 5y ago
  If Webflow added native i18n support, I wouldn't be surprised if they ate up considerable marketshare from most headless CMS providers.
- at-fates-hands 5y ago
  >> I think Webflow will ultimately own the space inhabited today by Wordpress (as well as static site generators) Not sure about static site generators though. They already have a pretty big head start. Netlify, Stackbit and others are constantly adding services for both tech savvy and non technical folks. The area where Squarespace sets itself apart is really their available themes. Most are way better than Wordpress themes, and easier to change to suit your needs without much work. Static site generators like Gatsby just don't have the depth of themes like WP and Squarespace do. Its kind of the app store comparison. One is Apple and Android with millions of really good apps (WP, Squarespace) and the other is the MS app store which has a limited, sort of the run of the mill stuff (Gatsby, Netlify, Stackbit). If WebFlow can offer better designs out of the box, then I agree, they will most likely own the space. Design will always be the X factor to me.
- cloogshicer 5y ago
steve_adams_86 5y ago
> "But it is making the whole internet look the same!" You know, that's alright with me in many cases. The internet is a utility, and consistency can allow for providing people with a normalized, accessible, fast, fine-tuned experience. A lot of the internet would benefit immensely from that. If it comes at the expense of your website not looking super cool or unique, that's probably fine - a lot of internet users aren't all that concerned with that. I'm not saying squarespace offers that. Just – a lot of the internet being uniform isn't in and of itself a bad thing.
tomlin 5y ago
> "But Wordpress is user friendly too" - No it isn't Only millions disagree. No big deal.
- blairbeckwith 5y ago
  Popular and user friendly are different things.
  - tomlin 5y ago
    Sure, but in order for this first world perspective to hold, you have to pretend that properly developed WordPress themes don’t exist.
- kevinob11 5y ago
  Fair enough, Wordpress is certainly more user friendly than everything I used before it. All I know is how often my clients who use Squarespace make meaningful changes to their site and how often my clients who use Wordpress do it, as well as their technical levels needed to do so. In my case, they seem to do it a lot more if they have Squarespace.

arkitaip 5y ago

Sounds like you know what your customers want and deliver on that. That's better than most devs who want to shove their favorite language/framework down the throat of their poor customers.

soperj 5y ago
>That's better than most devs who want to shove their favorite language/framework down the throat of their poor customers. This is exactly that.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  Okay, but in this case, the favourite framework has a GUI. Sure, you can't use WYSIWYG HTML editors with it, but it has its own sort-of WYSIWYG editor.
- Matticus_Rex 5y ago
  Handing your customers something solid that they can easily use and update is hardly "[shoving it] . . . down the throat of their poor customers."
  - soperj 5y ago
    Same with your insert favourite framework my friend.

temptemptemp111 5y ago

Makes no sense why anyone who likes good software could also like Squarespace

superfrank 5y ago

> You can't transfer your site away From an investment perspective, that's a pretty big positive. High switching costs locks existing customers in.

hakre 5y ago
Sure it's your site?

markdown 5y ago

It's ridiculously expensive though. Almost $150/yr for what probably costs $5/yr to host.

neom 5y ago
Ridiculously cheap if you factor in the costs of time/effort spent learning to do it yourself when your primary focus is launching your jewelry making business.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Jewelry making businesses go to where the buyers are, which is Etsy. They could do Squarespace Ecommerce and work on SEO and PPC ads to drive traffic, but as you said, they might prefer to focus on making jewelry. For me, it's not clear how Squarespace will be able to grow if their market is mom-and-pop shops. There are better economies of scale in targeting 1 enterprise accounts over 10 consumer accounts.
mrcarruthers 5y ago
But they're not just hosting. A website shop will probably charge you a few thousand to build a site and then charge you again whenever you want changes. $150/yr just for that alone is a bargain to someone who cannot do it themselves.
d4mi3n 5y ago
I hear you, but I feel like that ignores a lot of externalities to hosting a site for a client, including: 1. Support (fielding calls, answering emails, etc) 2. Updates (copy, design, patching) 3. Admin (billing, contracts) And that's just off the top of my head. Having a client is rarely about just handling the hosting. You effectively become a technical resource and field all the duties that entails.
passivate 5y ago
What expenses are you considering in that $5 though? Even so, keeping things running might be cheap, but its expensive to get to that stage. By the same token, it costs the same ~$50 to fill gas in a camry or a lambo.

kenneth 5y ago

I run a VC firm. I'm a full stack engineer who's built core infrastructure that runs on billions of devices and handles trillions of server side requests a year. And yet I choose to use squaris Squarespace for our website. It's just way easier and more reliable than building it myself despite being more than capable. I don't want to deal with maintenance, mobile, upkeep, etc. I have better things to do than to maintain our website.

kevinob11 5y ago
Yes! This is a value I kind of missed in my description. We have a static html site right now, its lightning fast and easy enough for me to maintain, but we'll be moving to Squarespace internally on the next site update. Right now our contact form is annoying to maintain, non-developers can't easily make changes and images aren't automatically optimized. It just solves too many problems at too low of a cost, in dollars and other things.
philjr 5y ago
Likewise. I did our wedding site in it with a wufoo form back in 2015. Spent an evening at it, sent out email. Done! Literally never touched it again. Simply done and well executed.
pazimzadeh 5y ago
I was trying to learn more about your fund but I think the site is down: https://oyster.vc/ https://oyster.vc/. Unless this is the one? https://www.oyster-ventures.com/ https://www.oyster-ventures.com/
- nattaylor 5y ago
  His is https://oyster.vc/ https://oyster.vc/ and it works for me from residential Comcast in the U.S.
debaserab2 5y ago
I chose Squarespace for my company's marketing site, and I'd mostly agree with some caveats: * The developer mode is poorly supported. For example: you can't copy your site if it is in developer mode (which means you can't setup a staging environment and everything you push to your site will be live instantly). The local development server is also very buggy and inconsistent with the production behavior. It feels like something that they developed early on in their road map and haven't spent much time on since then. If I could go back and do this over again, I'd pick an existing theme and just customize it instead of building out a whole theme in developer mode. * The site is S-L-O-W with tons of bundled assets that it injects into your theme. I have no idea what any of it is doing, but it definitely increases page load. That said, if you find yourself wanting a solid CMS that has the full breadth of WordPress like features but don't want to deal with the hosting, SquareSpace is a solid choice.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

IDK the lack of ability to export _your_ data and leave when _you_ feel like it is pretty much crap. Frankly, from a product perspective it's short-sighted. Let people leave. Find out why. Fix the problem(s). But if you hold them hostage you're holding your own product back _and_ you're creating ill-will towards your brand. Lose, lose. That's not forgivable.

ghaff 5y ago
I don't see anyone's data being held hostage. I do see a specialized hosting service that will require you to rebuild/redesign your site if you migrate away. Yes, there are higher migration costs if you use Squarespace. For a lot of people those are reasonable in exchange for lower up-front and maintenance costs. People should absolutely consider the lock-in factor but there's not a universal correct answer.
- lupire 5y ago
  My website HTML+JS content is my data.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Then use a more generic hosting site. I don't see anyone preventing you. There's always a tradeoff.
    - chiefalchemist 5y ago
      Because it's too much trouble for an outfit like SP to write an export feature?? And why not read the whole comment? You buried the lede.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        So they should have an export function to export all the supporting Squarespace code? Yes, that seems like an unreasonable expectation. If being able to easily lift and shift is important to you, no one is keeping you from hand-coding your site and/or using some sort of static site generator and hosting it on a generic platform. If you write an application using AWS-specific services, you're not going to be able to trivially migrate that either. It's a tradeoff.

pembrook 5y ago

Squarespace is the perfect solution for non-tech-savvy brick-and-mortar business who probably won't update their site more than once every 5 years. I'd say it has way better defaults than Wix. Beyond the mom-and-pop flower shop down the street or the friend that needs a portfolio site...not so much. Squarespace is good for the aforementioned users because the platform makes it hard for them to create bad designs and do stupid things. Putting either of those types of users on a Wordpress site would just be a total nightmare. HOWEVER, if you're even mildly tech-savvy, Squarespace (or site builders like Wix) become frustrating and limiting almost immediately. This is why I believe Webflow is ultimately the answer. It addresses all the downsides of Wordpress with none of the limitations. I think 5 years from now, Squarespace/Wix will completely own the mom-and-pop and portfolio space. I think Webflow will ultimately own the space inhabited today by Wordpress (as well as static site generators), and be powering the marketing & content sites for most businesses. Which is where the real money is.

armonraphiel 5y ago
If Webflow added native i18n support, I wouldn't be surprised if they ate up considerable marketshare from most headless CMS providers.
at-fates-hands 5y ago
>> I think Webflow will ultimately own the space inhabited today by Wordpress (as well as static site generators) Not sure about static site generators though. They already have a pretty big head start. Netlify, Stackbit and others are constantly adding services for both tech savvy and non technical folks. The area where Squarespace sets itself apart is really their available themes. Most are way better than Wordpress themes, and easier to change to suit your needs without much work. Static site generators like Gatsby just don't have the depth of themes like WP and Squarespace do. Its kind of the app store comparison. One is Apple and Android with millions of really good apps (WP, Squarespace) and the other is the MS app store which has a limited, sort of the run of the mill stuff (Gatsby, Netlify, Stackbit). If WebFlow can offer better designs out of the box, then I agree, they will most likely own the space. Design will always be the X factor to me.
cloogshicer 5y ago

steve_adams_86 5y ago

> "But it is making the whole internet look the same!" You know, that's alright with me in many cases. The internet is a utility, and consistency can allow for providing people with a normalized, accessible, fast, fine-tuned experience. A lot of the internet would benefit immensely from that. If it comes at the expense of your website not looking super cool or unique, that's probably fine - a lot of internet users aren't all that concerned with that. I'm not saying squarespace offers that. Just – a lot of the internet being uniform isn't in and of itself a bad thing.

tomlin 5y ago

> "But Wordpress is user friendly too" - No it isn't Only millions disagree. No big deal.

blairbeckwith 5y ago
Popular and user friendly are different things.
- tomlin 5y ago
  Sure, but in order for this first world perspective to hold, you have to pretend that properly developed WordPress themes don’t exist.
kevinob11 5y ago
Fair enough, Wordpress is certainly more user friendly than everything I used before it. All I know is how often my clients who use Squarespace make meaningful changes to their site and how often my clients who use Wordpress do it, as well as their technical levels needed to do so. In my case, they seem to do it a lot more if they have Squarespace.