Square space is a New York-based building and hosting company that provides software as a service for website building and hosting. Squarespace prides itself on having more built-in features While WordPress is known for its powerful SEO capabilities. WordPress is supported by many free plugins and by installing SEO plugins you can call on powerful tools like Yoast. But if you are seeking built-in features and much less work, then Squarespace is the better choice.
WordPress is a good package and is widely used as a content management system. Both Squarespace and WordPress are SaaS i.e. Software as a service but with Squarespace, you have to bear recurring fees of $180 per year. On the other hand, self-hosted WordPress is a piece of software that is open-source and can be installed on your server.
The Target audience of WordPress & Squarespace:
The key idea behind Squarespace is that anyone can use the platform to make their website — without any web development skills. Similarly, it is certainly possible to create and maintain a WordPress site without resorting to coding, particularly if you’re using the hosted version. WordPress is also geared towards another audience because of its open-source nature, users with coding skills who urge to create an extensively-customized website with much more functionality than the customization available from Squarespace.
The pricing of Squarespace and WordPress
Squarespace includes four types of the main plan. They are as follows:
- Personal — $19 per month
- Business — $33 per month
- Basic Commerce — $36 per month
- Advanced Commerce — $65 per month
Annual plans are significantly cheaper and a two-week free plan of Squarespace is also available. Now, we shall proceed to discuss WordPress pricing. Besides its open-source nature, you need to pay for other stuff to get WordPress working properly. Mentioned below are the five things that you will generally need to pay for:
- Hosting
- Themes
- E-Commerce Integration
- WordPress Plugins
- A developer
Ease of Use
The interface of Squarespace is easier to use and it is pretty straightforward to change basic template design elements — font colors, heading sizes, and so on with its style editor. According to a study, the main difference between the WordPress and Squarespace approaches to content management is, concerned with on-page editing.
If you’d like to tweak and click on a bit of content to edit it with Squarespace, you can just go to the page and you can see your edits concerning context on the page, as you make them.
Quality & Quantity of Templates
We cannot deny the prettiness of Squarespace templates, often outclassing those available from competing hosted website builder platforms like Wix or Jimdo. Presently, there are approximately 140 Squarespace templates available but the attractiveness and effectiveness of WordPress templates are much more. Variations are there and are increasing day by day in WordPress.
Content Management Functionality
When content management is concerned in a Squarespace vs WordPress shootout, WordPress wins comprehensively. WordPress provides the functionality of version history— multiple versions of pages and posts can be stored on the system and rolling back to any of them at any point is possible. Even your entire WordPress site can also be backed up on regular basis and restored the same as and when required. Squarespace does not permit you to do this but saves on web hosting costs and resources.
An autosave feature is not facilitated by Squarespace which is a pretty big omission. When editing blog posts it has been loads of times over the years by this, losing work unnecessarily as a result of lost connections or computer crashes.
Flexibility
WordPress is really more flexible than Squarespace and a step ahead in the web design industry. Bundled with a lot of out-of-the-box useful features, Squarespace is a fairly ‘locked-down’, walled-garden system.
On the contrary, you can use WordPress to pretty much create any sort of site you select. You can do this easily either by installing some WordPress plugins to your site or commissioning a developer to code something for you.
If you want to add e-commerce features to your site, display a sophisticated photo gallery, capture data or show customer reviews, you’ll find that there is nearly always a suitable plugin available. To craft a truly unique site, a WordPress developer can help you that involves your template and functionality rather than those of a third party. Recently, Squarespace has introduced something called ‘extensions’ which are similar to WordPress plugins in that they add extra features to your site, and are easy to install.
Who is suitable to build large complex sites?
Squarespace is not the best solution for big corporates although it can often work well for small businesses, especially if you’re planning to build a very large, complex business website.
This is because deep website hierarchies don’t facilitate by the platform — it limits you to just two levels of navigation, resulting in a very ‘flat’ website structure.
Generally, to some extent, a flat structure for your site is a good idea, as it can make the site a lot easier to use and make its content considerably more discoverable.
But particularly for large organizations or businesses or those offering a very wide variety of services and resources — a deep hierarchy will become a key requirement for the building of a website.
Read also: How much does a WordPress website cost?
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