About Squarespace

Squarespace is an all-in-one content management system, or CMS. A Squarespace subscription includes content hosting, professionally designed layouts, 24/7 support, and access to our user-friendly platform for creating beautiful websites. You can use Squarespace to build websites and online stores.

Official Comments

Squarespace is like the Apple of website builders. It’s intuitive, curated and thoughtfully designed. Highly recommend it.

Squarespace templates are fresh, sophisticated and share a similar look and feel: lots of whitespace, bold typography and room to showcase photography.

It’s of course a bit subjective, but in my opinion Squarespace has the best templates of any website builder:

Squarespace also has excellent features. They have the best blogging, podcasting, audio players and photo galleries of any website builder. Plus, their ecommerce is a viable alternative to pure ecommerce website builders such as Shopify.

To top it all off, Squarespace has honest, up-front pricing. You won’t be nickle-and-dimed further down the road— an unfortunate problem with many other website builders.

The Editor

Squarespace pages are made up of sections and content blocks.

Sections are a quick way to layout a page without designing it from scratch. They stack vertically on a page and are pre-designed containers of content blocks.

Content blocks are the building blocks of sections— they are text, buttons, images, maps and more.

t’s worth noting that Squarespace is a little late to launching sections— other website builders have had sections for years. But you don’t always have to be first, you just have to be best.

There’s a wide selection of sections to choose from and all are customizable so you can add additional content blocks as you need them:

Each section can have a custom background, padding and colors. This is a welcome change— previously in Squarespace you could only add a background at the top of a page.

Squarespace is easy to use— but among website builders it’s not the easiest (Weebly is the easiest to use). In fact, Squarespace is the only website builder that does not mention “ease of use” anywhere on their homepage.

So instead of easy to use, I describe Squarespace as intuitive. Everything is just thoughtful. If you were to think of Wix (one of Squarespace’s competitors) as Microsoft, Squarespace would definitely be Apple.

One of my favourite examples of thoughtfulness is image cropping. In order to display thumbnails as a square in a photo gallery, images will need to be cropped. Most website builders just automatically crop around the center and leave it at that. Not Squarespace. Squarespace includes a handy focal point editor to adjust the crop.

Another example of thoughtfulness is a content block called Menu— which is for restaurant menus. Restaurant menus are typically a challenging format for web design— it’s why many restaurants just link to a PDF menu. Squarespace solved the formatting problem by inventing a simple markup language for users to compose their restaurant menu in. The menu is automatically formatted and the colors, fonts and borders can be customized. It’s just a thoughtful touch.

In addition to sections and content blocks there are four collection page types: blog, store, portfolio and events.

Squarespace 7.1

In early 2020 Squarespace officially launched 7.1. The .1 feels almost misleading because the update was substantial— and I’m happy to report that after using 7.1, 7.0 starts to feel outdated quickly.

The biggest feature changes in 7.1 are the addition of sections and a huge overhaul of the template system (I explain this further in the templates section).

In addition to feature changes, Squarespace has also made changes to the interface— making it more explicit, which is nice. At times, Squarespace 7.0 could be minimal to a fault. Elements occasionally felt hidden and could only be uncovered by minesweeping with your mouse. For example, in order to preview a website in mobile, users had to discover this button:

Now in Squarespace 7.1 the mobile preview button is no longer hidden– it’s obvious:

The mobile preview button is more explicit in Squarespace 7.1.

Squarespace can still occasionally be on the wrong side of minimalism— for example in styles, you have to click the gear icon to change font sizes. The gear icon feels ambiguous. I had to stumble on it rather than just intuitively understand it:

Pricing & Plans

Squarespace offers four plans— two for general websites and two for ecommerce:

Squarespace's four plans as of February 2020.

Squarespace is priced equally to many of it’s competitors. For example I checked the price for one year on the cheapest no-ad plan of the top 7 website builders and Squarespace, Webflow, Weebly and Format all come to $144. Wix and Shopify are more expensive:

Graph: cheapest plans with no ads plus the cost of a custom domain name. Carrd is the cheapest— but is meant for one page websites.