When Squarespace Is Fine

I build custom websites for a living. You’d expect me to tell you Squarespace and Wix are always wrong. They aren’t.

Most takes you’ll find about “custom versus Squarespace” are written by people who have one to sell. Here’s the unbiased version.

When Squarespace is actually fine

If you are starting a new business and you don’t know yet whether you have a business, Squarespace is a reasonable place to start. You pay about $20 a month, you get a clean enough template, and you’re online within a weekend. You can put off the custom site conversation until you have revenue.

If your business is essentially a portfolio (a photographer, a wedding planner, an artist), Squarespace’s templates were designed for you. Their gallery features and built-in commerce work well for selling prints or booking sessions.

If you genuinely don’t care what your website looks like and you just need a phone number and an address findable on Google, Squarespace is fine.

When Squarespace starts to fail

The moment your business is serious about being found online, the problems show up.

Squarespace’s SEO is workable but not great. The page speed is usually mediocre because their themes carry a lot of JavaScript by default. The customization stops where their templates stop, and the templates start to feel familiar after the third or fourth Squarespace site you see in the same week.

The bigger problem is what happens when you outgrow it. You can’t easily migrate a Squarespace site to a custom platform. The content lives inside their system. The structural decisions they made for you are baked in. Eventually you rebuild from scratch.

I’ve talked to a lot of small business owners who used Squarespace for three years, paid $720 total, then paid me to build the custom site they should have started with. They would have spent less in total if they had skipped the middle step.

The middle ground

Squarespace is fine for the first 18 months of a new business. After that, if the business is working, you’ve outgrown it.

If you’re past that point and your Squarespace site is starting to feel like the wrong tool, we should talk. The migration is easier than you think.