New toys. I’ve got a new camera, which I’m live streaming from today, the Canon 90d. I’m also live streaming from a new microphone that my friends at RODE sent me, the RODE NT-USB mini. It’s a couple of new things happening today, but I’m really pumped to be here.
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Squarespace pricing explained (for beginners) – Squarespace cost and plans – Video Transcript
In today’s live stream I’m answering a question that I get a lot and that’s around Squarespace and what’s the difference between all of the Squarespace pricing plans? I’m going to talk you through the plans and what’s the difference between each one.
And this is really for if you are a beginner and you’re a little bit overwhelmed with what all of this stuff means. I’m going to walk through all of the items in the Squarespace plans so that you can kind of make a decision on which one is kind of best for you.
I’m just going to give it a second so that I can see if this feed is coming through properly. Okay. Let’s see. Yes, it looks like the feeds coming through and hopefully, this will start working shortly. Okay, it looks like we are up and running and it’s all fantastic. Let’s get started. I’m going to share my screen.
What happened to my thing here. Sorry. Come on. Here we go. Let’s talk about Squarespace and let’s talk about what you get in all of the different pricing plans that they have so that you can kind of, I guess, decide for yourself, which is best for you.
This is a shameless plug for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I am a content and course creator and I help small businesses grow using social media and using tech with ease.
I’m here to break it down and make it easier for you so that you can grow your business without all of the overwhelm and without all the stress that comes from tech, and that is the world of social media and online.
This is also a shameless plug for my course Facebook Live Impact. It’s an online self-study course where I teach you how to get up and running on Facebook live, even if you’ve never hit record before.
I’m going to put the links to everything in the description. Make sure you check out the links for all of the resources. It’s all the resources in the training as well as related videos. I have a really good tutorial on how to get set up with Squarespace.
It’s a really popular one. I get a lot of praise that it’s a really easy to follow tutorial. Especially if you are not really technical, I’ll walk you through how to set up your Squarespace tutorial. I also have a Squarespace versus WordPress video where I talk about the difference between the two.
And now we have this video now where I will walk you through all of the components, all of the elements of Squarespace’s pricing. You also get links to all of the freebies that I have and downloads so make sure you check out the description sometime during this video.
Let’s get into it. Let’s look at all the pricing plans. So hopefully you can see this. Well, again, just here we go. So if we have a look at the pricing, I want to just get a second. So I can see this little window.
I wanted to talk about a couple of things. I’m going to move myself up here for now. I want to talk about a couple of things. So if you are looking to set up an e-commerce store, so you’re looking to sell lots of units, whether that is with Amazon FBA or if you want to become an e-commerce giant.
I personally don’t feel that Squarespace is the best platform for that. I feel that if you are looking to set up a shop online where you can sell products and you’re looking to have lots of different products, that probably the better solution for you is possibly Shopify. Shopify is a really great e-commerce platform.
And it’s really, really powerful. I know the Squarespace has an eCommerce offering, but I don’t think it’s as strong or as sophisticated in my opinion as Shopify.
So I’m not going to go through the eCommerce options as in-depth as if, because I really feel that Shopify is the better solution for you. But I’m still going to walk you through the options that you get with Squarespace. So here we are. So there are four plans that Squarespace has at the moment.
Where is my window? Why have you gone missing? That’s okay. The window that I have on the other side it just disappeared. It has just disappeared. That’s okay. So you get four pricing, four pricing plans with Squarespace. There’s personal plan, business plan, which they say is the most popular.
There’s basic commerce and an advanced commerce. So these are the two e-commerce solutions that I was talking to you about. These, the basic and the advanced commerce solutions, they’re quite new. So they were only, I think added in the last 12 months or so.
So they are really quite new solutions, but they are definitely available. Now this, this is pricing in US dollars just for the purpose of simplicity. It’s in US dollars, bear with me.
You can change the pricing on their site. If you go down to the bottom of the footer and you can change it to the currencies that you see there. But for the purposes of this livestream and this video, I’m going to compare prices in US dollars.
So I’m going to move myself and make myself a little bit smaller there. So with all of the plans you get a free custom domain. So what does that actually mean? So with your free domain, for example, I have a brand URL, which is socialmediarocketeer.com and if I was to go on any of the Squarespace plans, I’d be able to get the domain for free, which is normally about $10 a year, but I could get it for free for the first year on any of the Squarespace plans.
So the other thing that you get with all Squarespace plans is SSL security. And what that is is you can’t see it very well here, but in the corner, tiny little section here, you can see this little padlock and this is– it means that the site is secure and it’s secure because it has an SSL certificate and that means that data is transferred securely through the sites.
So that is something that you have to pay additional for. Normally when you have website hosting you need to pay additional for it, but you get it for free with all of the Squarespace plans. So that’s pretty cool.
It’s also important because Google came out and said that they are going to deprioritise I think, websites that don’t have this security certificate. So it’s good that you get it for free
with all of this Squarespace plans, with all of the plans, you also get unlimited bandwidth and storage. That means that you can add as many pages as you want. You can add as many images to the pages as you want and you don’t run the risk of Squarespace taking your site down because you don’t have enough space.
So you’ve got a lot of, you’ve got plenty, you’ve got unlimited bandwidth and storage. You also get SEO features as well. So this is a pretty standard feature that you should get with all website builders.
So it’s the ability to add titles. It’s the ability to add a meta-descriptions, what does that mean? So it’s about the, let’s call it the backend of your site. So it’s all of the information that Google wants to see, to know that if it needs to connect your webpage with what people are searching for.
So let’s for argument’s sake say that I have a blog post that is a Canva tutorial. I can, in theory, use the SEO features to optimise the title, the meta-description and other components so that it ranks in Google the best that it can.
So all of the Squarespace plans have SEO features, which is great and it’s very easy to use as well. It’s this, you know, plugging in the keywords and description and making sure that it’s all optimised.
All of the plans have templates, which is great because they have beautiful templates. Squarespace has really beautiful, elegant templates that are really elegant and easy to use.
Now, the thing that starts to get a little bit different between the plans, so in the personal, business, commerce and basic commerce and advanced commerce, in the personal plan, you can have two contributors.
And in the business, basic commerce and advanced commerce, you have unlimited contributors. What does that mean? So that means that you can add more than one person to your site, so they have access to your sites so they can create pages, create blog posts, help you manage the e-commerce store if you have that and just manage the site in general.
So on the personal plan you’re gonna only have two, whether it’s yourself and your virtual assistant, but on the business, basic commerce and advanced commerce, you have unlimited. So if you have a team with lots of members, then this is something to consider if you wanted multiple people to access your site, contributors and it’s something to consider.
A mobile optimised websites. So all of Squarespace’s plans are mobile optimised, which is great. Once again, Google loves web optimised websites. I think they came out and they said something about websites being deprioritised if they thought that it wasn’t well optimised for mobile.
A lot of these things are a bit, you know, blown up in the media and blown up in social media. But having a web optimised website is ideal because a lot of people view the web from their mobile. I know that I view the web and I spent a lot of time on the web, on my mobile device.
I think the statistic is something like at least 50% of people view websites on a mobile device. It makes sense to have the website work well and render well for mobile. Now all of the Squarespace plans also have 24/7 customer support, which is great because you never know when something won’t work.
You never know when the form stops working, something goes down, something’s just not playing the way it should be. Being able to contact someone to help you with that problem at any time and not have to wait for a separate time zone or wait for, you know, the next business day is really, really handy.
You get basic website metrics with all of the plans, which is information on how many people have visited your site, where they’re coming from in terms of traffic sources. Are they coming from Google?
Are they coming from Facebook? Are they coming from other social media platforms? And you get just very general information about the geographics of where they’re actually coming from and how they’re actually navigating through your sites. If they’re going to the homepage, where they’re going next?
Are they going to the about page? Are they going to the blog page? And things like that. You get some basic information to help you understand how people are using and interacting with your website.
You get also access to Squarespace extensions and Squarespace extensions– let me show you what Squarespace extensions are. Essentially they’re plugins, they’re third-party plugins that you can add to your website.
And Squarespace has a couple of them that they classify as Squarespace extensions and there are things such as an integration with Printful. If you’re doing print on demand, you can integrate with Printful to help you manage the orders that you get.
There’s also integrations with other software providers such as QuickBooks. If you’re selling things, you can integrate QuickBooks or there’s another one down here, Xero, so your accounting with your website as well to manage orders and sales.
These essentially, I guess additional functionality and these are the official Squarespace plugins that you can use and they’re available on all of the plans. Now, here is where it starts to get a little bit different.
Now everything from here on in is not available on the personal plan. On the business commerce, basic commerce and advanced commerce, you get an email, you get a free email address from Google.
What does that mean? You can obviously get a free email from Google at any time where it’s at gmail.com, but you can use the Google suite, which means that you can use your own URL as the email address. I can have let’s, let’s, I’ve got a slide for this. Let’s go to the slide.
Here we go. Present. With the customised Google account, I can have a email address for my actual domain names. ben@socialmediarocketeer or sara@socialmediarocketeer.
It lets you have that little bit of, I guess, it looks a little bit more professional when you’re using your own domain names, email address as opposed to a g-mail one. You get that for free.
But the other things that you get with your Google account is that you get access to Google calendar, you get access to Google Hangouts. The video conferencing option. And I love Google Hangouts. I use it all the time to communicate with my team.
We live in different time zones and it’s included with your Google account and you also get access to Google Drive. You may be saying, “Yeah, but I have Google Drive already ’cause I have a Gmail account.” and that’s great.
But you only have I think 5 GB worth of storage. Whereas, with your Google account you get unlimited storage. Just store all of your files to transfer things between you and your teams or between you and your clients. Google Drive, unlimited storage is amazing.
I love it. And I don’t think I can ever go back to not having unlimited storage. Nope, I just won’t do it. The other thing that you get with the plans is premium integrations and blocks.
Now you may be saying, “What does that actually mean?” now, once again, this isn’t available in the personal plan. It’s only available in the business, basic commerce and advanced commerce plan. And essentially the premium integrations are more extensions and they increase the functionality of your site.
For example, if you are a consultant, I’ll move myself here, you can add a booking form on your website to allow people to book in for consultations or booking for appointments with you.
They can go to your website and like what you see here, they can, you can select the days that you want to be available and then clients can then choose a time like this, continue.
And then one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and put their details in and make an appointment directly from your website with this integration. This is just an example of one integration, but it allows you to add the functionality on your website so that people don’t have to leave the website in order to complete something, whether it’s making a booking with you or whether it’s making a reservation.
If you have a cafe or a restaurant, you can integrate with open table and it all happens within your website so that they’re not getting distracted and going off to other websites to do a certain task.
That’s what you mean by premium integrations and blocks, so there’s lots of different integrations. I showed you the booking one. There’s open table. You can also use an integration that allows you to sell items via Instagram.
I have a love-confused relationship with Instagram. I think when it first came out because it didn’t have links on it, it was all, it was really confusing how to use it for business. But now, you know, Instagram is a little bit more sophisticated.
You’re able to sell on Instagram if you have a special integrations with Shopify or integrations with Squarespace. That when people click on the images on your Instagram, it will take them to your store. That’s really cool. That means you’re selling off the platform, which means you can leverage the traffic of Instagram, whether you’re running ads to it or if you’re even just relying on the organic traffic of it.
Premium integrations will allow you to do that with Instagram and your Squarespace store on the business, basic commerce and advanced commerce sites.
You can also add custom CSS and JavaScript. What does that mean? I wouldn’t worry too much about this, but only I would, well, I would worry about this if you wanted to customise your website.
That means that if you had a Squarespace template that you liked but you wanted to change it quite significantly in terms of the colours, the fonts, and the layout. If you really want to make it your own and create something different to the template, you’d need to enable your web developer to go into the CSS and JavaScript to make the layout and the design changes.
That’s something that you can consider if you want to make the changes. If you’re kind of happy with the template and you don’t really want major changes to it, then you don’t really need it. You get some marketing, stuff with your Squarespace plans on the higher plans.
You get access to advanced website analytics. This is additional stuff from the basic analytics they provide you. The personal plan doesn’t get the advanced analytics, but this just gives you more details and you can see how your site is performing and how the products that you add are also converting advanced analytics.
You also get a $100 Google AdWord credits, so that if you wanted to run some Google ads to generate some traffic to your website, you’ve got a 100 bucks.
There does come with a lot of terms and conditions as Google always does. It’s only available at the time of this recording in the US and in Canada. And it’s only available after you spend $25. It’s not really a $100. It’s kind of like less than– anyway, so, you get that with the plans.
The other thing that you get with the higher plans, and probably one of the motivating things personally I think to upgrade to the business plans, is that you get to have promotional pop-ups and banners.
Now, what does this actually look like? Let’s have a look. In terms of pop-ups, here’s an example of a pop up on a website. Someone’s using your website after a certain amount of time that you define, they’ll see a pop-up. And with your pop up it can be asking them to join your email list.
It can be giving them a free download or it can just be a pop up saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got this flash sale on this weekend, here’s the coupon code. Don’t forget to take advantage of it before you check out.’ so the pop up is a great feature and people have a lot of mixed feelings about pop-ups.
But I think that when you use it correctly, like when you have a delay or when it appears it’s not so intrusive. And I think that pop-ups are a little bit misunderstood and can still be quite powerful.
The other thing that you have with Squarespace in addition to the pop up is that you can have banners. You’re like, “banners, what does that actually mean?” if I show you now, here is a site without a banner and I’m going to enable the banner now. Ha-ha.
You can add a message at the top of your website. If you’re having a sale like I did here, sale on this weekend only or it can be a promotion that you’re running or it can be a launch that you’re doing.
It’s just an additional way to push things that are happening. Whether you want to push a particular product or you want to promote a particular event, using the announcement bar and changing that easily is something that you can do from your Squarespace website on the higher plans as well.
You don’t get this on the personal, see? It’s fun to hear more and more that, you know, the personal plan is really just one that you end up leaving eventually because you don’t get pop-ups, you don’t get banners. Now, these other commerce solutions, and I did say that I didn’t want to go too much into them.
With the business plan, which is the one that I recommend you kind of start off with, if you are going to set up a website, you get a couple of e-commerce solutions. You get, they say fully integrated e-commerce, but essentially it’s the backend or a system for you to put in all your products, manage your inventory.
If someone buys from the site, the count will go down, you can catalogue your products or you can put in the SKU numbers, and it also manages in terms of the taxes that you need to add
and a whole bunch of things. You really get a done for you selling option if you are to, if you did want to have a e-commerce solution. With the business plan, they charge you 3% transaction fee on all sales in addition to any of the credit card processing fees and merchant fees.
On the two higher plans, so on the basic commerce and the advanced commerce plan, you don’t get charged additional transaction fee. That’s just on the business one.
On all of the business basic and advanced commerce plans, you can sell unlimited products, which is great. It allows you to, I guess, grow, add more units as your business grows. And I think in terms of the e-commerce solutions, as you go into the bigger plans, you get more stuff that helps you be successful in the eCommerce space.
On the basic commerce and advanced commerce plan, you’ll see that you get other things such as more e-commerce analytics, get merchandising tools. On the highest plan, you get abandoned cart recovery. These are all the e-commerce solutions that you can get on the higher plans.
But for most businesses, my recommendation is to start on the personal or business plan. The business plan will give you more functionality to be able to add marketing components to your website, add a email opt-in, add a integration. If you have an accounting software. And it’s just kind of nice to have.
The personal one you can definitely start off with, and if you are feeling confined and restricted, like it’s not enough, you can definitely move from your personal plan to the business plan. That essentially wraps up the walkthrough of the plans. I hope that was helpful. Now, let’s go through and see what else there is.
I did talk about the premium integrations. This is what the open table booking system integration looks like. Let me, let me move myself, if you were to integrate it onto your site, so if you use open table before you’ll see that it’s, you know, integrated nicely in here where you can choose how many people you want to make a booking for, the date and then the time and then you can find a table and the rest will happen like black magic. That essentially is it walking you through all of the Squarespace plans?
I think when it comes to Squarespace, the beauty of Squarespace is that it’s really easy to use and that you get a beautiful website without having to play with all of the code. And with the plans, it really, you have the flexibility in the sense that if you go to a start from a small plan, you can scale up easily.
It’s really easy within Squarespace to go to a bigger plan. And you can technically go backwards, but it’s a bit more arduous and painful to get that refund and whatnot. The other thing with Squarespace pricing is that you get a little bit of a discount by paying annually.
If they say you save 30% if you pay for the year in advance, otherwise you can pay monthly. You can always pay monthly and then switch to annually later if you feel that yes, this is definitely the way you want to go after trying it out for a month or so.
That pretty much wraps up today’s Squarespace pricing presentation and livestream. If you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel. And if you’re looking for more ways to kind of grow your business, so you’re setting up your, you’re considering the website and then after you set up your website, what do you do next?
I’ve got a Social Media Checklist and it walks you through how to set up social media so that you can start leveraging the power of social to grow your business. And it really is a step by step walkthrough on what you need to consider and how to set it up and to get it up and running for you so you can start making more sales using social media with ease. Now, I hope you’ve enjoyed the broadcast.
I was really excited to use all my new tools. I’ve got my new computer, I’ve got my new microphone, I’ve got my camera going and I hope that you have a wonderful day and I will see you in the next livestream. Bye for now.
