Squarespace versus WordPress, which should you use to set up your website? I’m going to look at both options and show you exactly what you get inside WordPress and Squarespace so you can decide for yourself. Stay tuned.
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Squarespace Vs WordPress Review – Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Sara Nguyen, and on this channel, I make tech and social media easier for awesome entrepreneurs like yourself. If you’re new to this channel, consider subscribing for all of the latest product reviews, social media marketing tips and training, and at any time during the video, check out the description for links to all of the resources mentioned in this video.
I’m doing this Squarespace versus WordPress review because I get a lot of questions about which is better. I’ve used both and I feel that it’s more about what’s best for your individual needs than which one is actually better.
So we’re going to have a look at the differences between the two, the pros and cons. And I’ll also compare how to use Squarespace and WordPress to create pages and posts in both systems. And you can watch an over the shoulder tutorial of what this actually looks like.
I’ll look at the cost of running both so you can make an informed decision on which works best for your business needs. Let’s get into it.
Really interesting when people ask me, ‘what’s better, Squarespace or WordPress?’ and as I’ve mentioned earlier, I don’t really think there’s one that’s way superior than the other. I think it’s really looking at both of the options and what works best for you.
So let’s have a look at what they are and how they work and all the pros and cons of both Squarespace and WordPress, so you can decide which is the best option for hosting your website with. Now when we talk about WordPress or when I talk about WordPress in this comparison, I’m talking about the self-hosted option, so that’s downloading WordPress and adding it to your own hosting.
I’m not talking about wordpress.com which is a hosted option. I’m talking about self-hosting it and when I talk about WordPress, I’m talking about the fact that it’s open-source, so the code behind it is free.
You can move it from different hosting provider and you download WordPress, the software, but you also need to pay for hosting. You also need to pay for a domain name separately and these are yearly charges, but you get this content management system and a way of I guess creating pages, creating, creating blog posts for your website.
And it’s extremely customisable because it is open source, and it’s not controlled completely by one organization. People are able to add plugins, which is extra code to increase the functionality of the site and it’s very, very flexible.
When I talk about Squarespace, we talk about Squarespace as a software as a service provider. So essentially you pay a monthly fee but you get the content management system.
So the way of accessing and creating your website, you get web hosting, you also get e-commerce, options and support and a domain name as well. So whereas with WordPress you need to pay separately for your domain name and for your hosting, Squarespace is all in one, so you get hosting, you get the site builder and you get the domain name all for a monthly or a yearly annual fee.
So what do they actually look like? This is one of my websites and it is a WordPress website. When I log in and I go to the back end of the site or the admin section of the site, it looks a little something like this.
For the most part, yours will look like this too. I have a couple of plugins which you may not have, so the section that you see in the dash board may be slightly different, but for the most part this is what WordPress looks like.
If I want to add more blog posts, I go to posts and then I can go all post and this will be all of the blog posts that I’ve created over the life of my site.
If I want to add new, I can either select add new from this page or add new from the left-hand side here and creating a blog post in WordPress is pretty easy. This top section here is, once it loads, the title of the blog posts.
So title of the blog post, can’t spell ’cause I’m being watched, and then I can just add the text here. I can add images to the blog post and I can save that and I can publish it. So it’s pretty straightforward.
And the same goes for creating a page. So this is something that’s not in the blog, it sits separate to the blog. And I just go to pages, add new and it will look pretty similar to the way that a blog post looks like.
So I add the title and then I can also add the text in this visual section here. Now, this is pretty much the gist of it. You’re creating pages and you’re creating posts. You also can add plugins to WordPress.
And that’s from the plugin section here. And you’re like, ‘what’s a plugin?’ plugin is essentially a piece of code that increases the functionality of the site. So I’ve got a bunch of plugins.
I have a plugin for Google analytics, I have a plugin for forms, I have a plugin so that I can add the Facebook pixel to my page, social media plugins, a whole range of plugins and it’s essentially done from the plugin section here.
And then I can add new and once I add, select add new, I’m able to either upload a plugin that I’ve purchased or I can choose from the plugin section within WordPress. So there are a whole bunch of free plugins that I can also use.
Now let’s have a look at Squarespace. So this is a demo Squarespace site. Look and feel-wise, you can definitely get a beautiful design with Squarespace, just like a WordPress website. You can have a page, a website with a blog post, a shop, different pages, and when you go into Squarespace to actually change things, it’s here that all the magic happens.
Modifying the existing template is really easy. So what you see now is one of their existing themes and templates. And to change it, I once again go into edit in the top left-hand corner and then now I can go in and change it.
So this is the homepage, and I can change the title of the homepage. Lots of great stuff. All I did was go and hover into this section and then I can make changes to the text to be whatever I want to be.
So here’s the button, so if I want to make changes to the button I select it, I select the pencil icon to edit it and then I can change the text of it so I can change it to– let’s go here now, and I can change the URL to be whatever I want to be. And then select apply to make those changes.
So it’s really easy. I select the area that I want, and then I’m presented with all the options to change it, My faves. And it’s really nice and easy to change things easily. Images, so this is an image that I want to edit.
I hover over it, everything’s hovering over it and then selecting the pencil. So that then allows me to then choose an image so I can either edit it myself or I can delete it and then search for another image and I can choose images from their library or I can go ahead and upload my own images as well.
When I look at Squarespace and WordPress and compare them in terms of price, it really is not, I think that straightforward because there are lots of variable options when it comes to how much you end up paying per year depending on a whole range of things.
But at a basic level, let’s try to get a comparison. With WordPress, you’re paying for monthly hosting and you can pay anywhere from 10$ to $20 or even $50 a month for website hosting. But you’re looking at around about that kind of price depending on the amount of traffic that you get and depending on the provider that you go with, and you’re also paying for your domain name.
So that’s about $10 to $20 per year as well, depending on your domain name, you can get it cheaper, you can get more expensive. It really depends. And you’re also looking at additional for plugins because that’s the beauty of WordPress and not everyone uses plugins.
But for a lot of people, they do use plugins in order to, in order to have more functionality of the site. And once again, this is very, this is very significantly depending on the plugins that you actually use.
And you can be paying anywhere between $50 a year to a hundred to $200 a year. So roundabout pricing for WordPress is you’re looking probably at about $250 to $500 a year to keep your WordPress website up and running.
And now you may go, ‘Oh my God, that sounds like a lot of money.’ but it’s pretty standard. And as I said, there are so many variables you can probably go much cheaper.
There are lots of cheap options out there for hosting and domain names and you can get it for a fraction of what I’ve presented, but this is just a benchmark to give you a bit of a feel of how much it’s going to cost.
In terms of Squarespace, it really depends on which plan you’re on and if you pay annually or monthly, but the annual cost of Squarespace is probably around $144 a year to about $500 a year. Once again, it really, really depends on which plan you go with.
So I think pricing wise, Squarespace and WordPress, they’re actually quite similar. People tend to tell me, oh they think Squarespace is cheaper or they think WordPress is cheaper, but I actually think they’re quite similar in terms of pricing when you look at it as closely when you’re comparing apples and oranges, which is really difficult to do in this situation.
I think they’re actually quite comparable price-wise. When it comes to which one is easier to use, hands down, Squarespace is the definite winner. I think Squarespace is so much easier to use because they’ve got the drag and drop website builder.
You can put content anywhere that you want. So I showed you before you just select the page, select which element you want and then you don’t really need to know any code or you don’t have to engage with a web developer to customise it to get it to be where you want or how you want.
And it really is ideal for people who consider themselves not tech-savvy or people who really don’t have the time or interest to learn code or to engage with developers to do any of the website work. So it really is a great option in terms of being a really easy option.
With WordPress, I find that the learning curve is so much steeper. Getting started from setting up your WordPress website, comparing that to setting up your Squarespace website, it will take you longer to set up your WordPress website, particularly if you are not technical and particularly if you don’t have a background in setting up these online things.
So it will take you much longer to set up a WordPress website than Squarespace. With Squarespace, once you sign up, you choose a template and you can pretty much start adding texts and be up and live within a day, I reckon.
But with WordPress, more than likely you will need a bit more time to get it looking the way that you want. And it really is inevitable that you will need help to modify the code to get it to be how you want it to be.
And you’ll need to engage with a developer or you’ll need to know how to do it yourself, and like who really wants to learn how to code? Particularly, if you’re running a business that is not code-related, you know, it’s not really something that a lot of people want to do.
So in terms of ease of use, I think Squarespace definitely wins, hands down. In terms of user support, Squarespace, hands down, definitely the winner. So with Squarespace you get 24/7 customer support.
So if something is not working or you can’t figure something out, you can email or chat to their support 24/7 which is great particularly if something’s going wrong and you need to get it fixed right away, which is pretty much all the time with small businesses.
Having 24/7 customer support is a life-changing, lifesaving component to have. So they’re there to help and they, I found that their customers, customer support is actually really, really good.
In terms of WordPress support, it’s hard. It’s harder because you need to kind of diagnose what’s wrong. So is it the hosting that’s an issue? Then that’s not WordPress’ problem, you need to go to your hosting provider.
If it’s WordPress, okay. How do you then fix it? There’s a forum that you can go on to try to find the answers. Is it an issue with the plugin? You’re really on your own to diagnose, and 9 out of 10 times you end up getting a developer to troubleshoot the problems if you can’t do it yourself.
So I find in terms of being able to get support to fix stuff or to just get help when you need help, Squarespace wins hands down. In terms of flexibility of being able to make the site function and do all the things that you want and to be able to make the website look how you want it to look, WordPress wins in this section.
So with Squarespace they’ve got style parameters and special field features that are built into each template that you can’t change. So there are things about the design that you just have to live with, you can only change the text for and you can’t modify it.
And this is deliberate on their behalf. So they do this so that they can better control things and that not as much can go wrong because they monitor it and look after it all. With WordPress, you can change whatever you like, particularly with the help of develop, the help of a developer.
And you can add as many plugins as you want and to get it functioning the way that you want. There are definitely pros and cons to this. So with WordPress being so flexible, you’re also responsible for maintaining it yourself.
But either way, WordPress definitely gives you more flexibility. I think for the most part with most business owners, they won’t need the level of flexibility that WordPress offers.
Squarespace definitely offers enough to get a website up and running and to have a way of people finding you online, but WordPress just has definitely the advantage when it comes to customising the site to do everything that you wanted to do.
In terms of maintenance, I think Squarespace wins 100% in this, this area. So we just talked about how WordPress is great because it’s more flexible, but when it comes to maintaining the website, you don’t have to worry about Squarespace.
You don’t have to worry about updates, you don’t have to worry about regression. You’re like, what’s the regression? So with websites, you’re typically updating the software quite regularly because developers push out updates to fix bugs and they also push out updates for enhancements, and Squarespace takes care of all of this for you.
So you don’t need to worry about this. With WordPress, because you’re customising it yourself. You’ve got different developers creating different plugins and different code, but you have to handle all of the updates and you’re responsible for handling the backups and all of the security.
Whereas, Squarespace would do all of that for you. So with WordPress, it’s quite easy to do because you can get plugins that help you manage updates, help you manage backups and automate this, but you’re still responsible for it.
You have, you do have to do it regularly and you also have to worry about regression. So you have to worry about when I do this update, is it going to break other things on the site?
And regression is not just a thing that happens with WordPress website. It happens with pretty much all open source websites. So I’ve seen regression on sites for Drupal, I’ve seen regression on sites for a whole bunch of other different platforms.
It’s not unique to WordPress, but it is in this situation, relevant for WordPress more than it is Squarespace. So when it comes down to which one is better, Squarespace or WordPress, my recommendation is choose WordPress if you want a website that you have complete flexibility to customise and add your own things to and you really, really want that control of every single aspect of your site.
You also, I think can consider WordPress if you don’t mind the thought of getting developers in and therefore paying for developers to do things that you can’t do yourself. So whether you know code or you don’t know code, 9 out of 10 times is you’ll probably end up hiring a developer to help fix stuff on the site or to add things or to add functionality for the site.
And with that said, I think choose WordPress if you have a higher tolerance for tech pain because things just go wrong with WordPress and just websites in general. I find that you just need to understand that there will be regression.
Things will not always work that nicely in WordPress, but they’re able to be fixed. So you need to have a bit of a tolerance for being able to work through the tech pain. For Squarespace, I think choose Squarespace if you really don’t want that hassle, you want a one-stop shop for your website.
You want someone else to take care of the updates, the hosting, and you want to be able to have support and all of that is simplified for you and you just really want a website that looks beautiful and that works so that you can add content to easily yourself, and you’re happy with working with a design and they have so many beautiful designs straight out of the box, so you can get up and running really quickly and you don’t want to do any major, I guess, development or any major customisations over time.
Check out the link in the description because I also have a tutorial that shows you how to use Squarespace and set it all up. And this is really an in depth step-by-step guide of how to set up a Squarespace website so you can see exactly what it takes to set up a blog post, set up a page and modify a Squarespace website.
If you found this Squarespace versus WordPress tutorial useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel. And if you’re looking for more ways to grow your business, deciding which platform to set up your website on is just one part of the equation.
You also need to figure out how to promote your business, what social media accounts to set up, what to post, and how to make it all work for you. So I’ve put together a Social Media Checklist.
I outline all of the things you need to do to get up and running on social media so you can start leveraging the power of social to make more sales with ease. To get your hands on it, simply click on the link in the description box below and thanks for watching.
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