Squarespace VS WordPress: The Ultimate Showdown

by Jeremiah Svaren | Last Updated: February 21, 2022 •  8 min read

Articles » Comparisons

So you’re trying to decide between Squarespace or WordPress for your website? Both of these world-renowned platforms come with a list of Pros and Cons, but which one is right for you and your website? We’ll go in-depth in this article with client examples so that you can decide once and for all the website platform to move forward with!

The TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) Version

Squarespace is a great beginner blogging platform. You will be limited in add-ons and fancy stuff. You can increase the site speed up to a certain point (not fast enough in our eyes). You get access to great support if you ever get stuck or frustrated.

WordPress is for serious bloggers. If you want to make money with your blog, you will eventually move to WordPress. Access to plugins and themes that can help you leverage your website will be paramount to growing. But learning WordPress can be like drinking from a fire hydrant at first.

Now onto the showdown!

Let’s go over a brief history of both Squarespace and WordPress as that can tell a lot about who the platform is targeted towards.

History of Squarespace

Squarespace was originally founded and coded into creation by Anthony Casalena in 2004 while he was still in college at the University of Maryland. He first created Squarespace to solve his own problem, which was creating a place for himself on the internet but he felt the tools at the time were clunky and old-school.

In college, he noticed that his classmates were in a similar situation. So over the next 3 years, while still in college mind you, Anthony was the sole employee of Squarespace and was working to simplify the act of creating a website all under one roof. By the time he had graduated, his little startup was pulling in $1 million in revenue.

From there Anthony moved Squarespace to New York where he steadily expanded. From 30 employees in 2010, 550 employees in 2015, to going public on the stock exchange in March 2021. At the time of going public, Squarespace is valued at a whopping $10 billion. Not too shabby for a dorm room startup!

History of WordPress

Now the history of WordPress is wildly different from that of Squarespace. Almost apples to oranges, but this will help you see the contrast between these two website platforms. You see WordPress is known as Open-Source, which means that all the code can be viewed and improved by anyone.

WordPress was first released into the wild in 2003 by the creator’s Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. The first few versions of WordPress gained traction quickly in the then weblog (blog) community.

In 2006, Matt’s company Automattic filed a trademark registration for WordPress and the WordPress logo.

But then in 2010, Automattic transferred ownership to the WordPress foundation. This was HUGE because now WordPress was able to grow with the community vs relying on a company to keep things moving.

By 2013, WordPress had become the most popular CMS (content management system) in the world. See an expanded history of WordPress here.

Pros and Cons

Everyone loves a good pro & con list, right? A simple way to compare!

Pros for Squarespace

• Built-in drag and drop interface for creating your website.
• Super easy to use, you won’t need any coding skills or knowledge of CSS/HTML.
• Offers unlimited bandwidth, so no matter how much traffic your website gets Squarespace will scale with it.
• Decent SEO-ablity out of the box (good for low competition).
• Includes SSL encryption, which is a great security feature.
• Over 100 Squarespace themes to choose from, and they are all mobile-friendly as well!
• Award-winning chat support.
• When Squarespace goes down, their team works around the clock to get back up and running.

Cons for Squarespace

• You will be limited in add-ons or plugins you can use on Squarespace. It’s not impossible but it will take some coding knowledge.
• Site speed will be limited just by the nature of Squarespace‘s backend code.
• Squarespace doesn’t offer an easy way to create backups or manually export data from Squarespace. (If Squarespace suffers a catastrophic event, all content is lost).
• When Squarespace goes down, you have zero control to get your site back up and running.

Best for Beginners

Try Squarespace Free for 14 days

Risk-free trial, no credit card required.

This is a great way to get some hands-on experience with Squarespace to find out if you should build your next website on Squarespace.

Free Trial

We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.

Pros for WordPress

• The best choice for SEO when looking to grow with organic traffic.
• WordPress is currently the website platform of choice for over 43% of the internet, which means that there is plenty of resources dedicated to the growth.
• Access to over 30k themes, either paid or free if you know where to look. (we recommend Carbonate for speed and simplicity)
• As Squarespace‘s add-ons and plugins are limited, WordPress has an unlimited supply for you to choose from (and even create yourself). This lets you really customize your website to do exactly what you need it to do.
• WordPress is open source software which means the code is available for anyone to view, learn from, and improve on. This community aspect is one of the reasons WordPress dominates as a CMS.
• You have control over every aspect of your website when using WordPress – hosting, design, functionality, etc. If something goes wrong with your site or you want to make changes, you hold the power!

Cons for WordPress

• Requires some technical knowledge in order to use correctly (although there are plenty of tutorials around that can help you get up and running).
• Can be overwhelming and confusing at first (which is why we offer 1-on-1 coaching).
• There is a very steep learning curve, so it’s harder for non-technical people to get into. This also means Squarespace has an advantage over WordPress because Squarespace is easier for beginners but lacks some of the advanced features that WordPress offers.
• You will need hosting (we recommend SiteGround) and a domain name (recommend NameCheap).
• There are so many plugins available that you can easily bloat your website and slow things down.

Our Hosting Choice

WordPress Hosting - Fast and Secure Managed by Experts - SiteGround

We only use SiteGround for hosting our website along with our clients WordPress sites. They have an easy to use platform, great support, daily backups, and stagging so that you can work on your website without screwing up your live site!

Buy Now

We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.

Let’s see some examples!

So now that you understand some of the basics between these two platforms, we’ll go over a few real-world examples to help illustrate Squarespace VS. WordPress.

Squarespace website examples

WordPress website examples

Which one is right for you?

Like I mentioned above, Squarespace is going to be better for beginners. There’s no need to worry about hosting, plugins, or any other technical aspects of running a website! Squarespace has all that already built-in and ready for you to use. It just might cost more in the long run vs making an initial investment into learning how to properly set up your own self-hosted website on WordPress with SiteGround (and getting the Carbonate theme).

Client Case Study

Our client, Will Gibbons, had started out on Squarespace a few years back and wrote a number of in-depth articles to complement his YouTube channel. Then back in the summer of 2021 after a Google update started prioritizing fast websites, he realized that Squarespace wasn’t going to cut it. So we helped him Graduate Squarespace and he is very happy to be taking his website seriously with WordPress and the Carbonate theme.

Now what?

First, make sure that you purchase a domain name (that’s your .com like svarenwebstudio.com is our domain name). We highly recommend purchasing that with a service like NameCheap, that way if you ever change website platforms, you will have a much easier time.

If you have decided to use Squarespace, get started with a free 14-day trial here. Once you are ready to go live, you follow the steps to connect your domain, and voila! Your site will be live for the world!

On the other hand, if you have decided to use WordPress, then we recommend starting out with SiteGround, they will lay out every step you need to get started. SiteGround will even walk you through connecting your domain name so that you can get started right away. Once you have installed WordPress, we highly recommend getting the Carbonate Theme and following the setup that is included in that theme bundle.

Try Squarespace Free for 14 days

Risk-free trial, no credit card required.

This is a great way to get some hands-on experience with Squarespace to find out if you should build your next website on Squarespace.

Free Trial

We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.

Our Hosting Choice

WordPress Hosting - Fast and Secure Managed by Experts - SiteGround

We only use SiteGround for hosting our website along with our clients WordPress sites. They have an easy to use platform, great support, daily backups, and stagging so that you can work on your website without screwing up your live site!

Buy Now

We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.

Fastest WP Theme

Carbonate: A Lightweight WordPress Theme Built For Speed

$97.00

If you are a blogger looking for a super-fast platform, then you better be using the Carbonate WordPress Theme! These is a lean machine that will make your website load in well under 1 second and be passing all of Googles Core Web Vitals with flying colors!

Buy Now

We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.

Still need help?

Reach out to us and we would be happy to lend a hand! We offer a range of services including coaching so that you get the help you need when you need it. Get started with a free 20-minute coaching session!

Jeremiah Svaren wears just about all the hats at Svaren Web Studio. He started getting into web design and development back in 2013. First starting to learn on his own with books and tutorials, then in 2014 he attended The Tech Academy in Portland, Oregon. He learned all about software engineering and decided to start freelancing. Now when he isn't helping clients, he makes helpful content here and on his YouTube channel Svaren.