Squarespace is great for so many things, but is it right for you?

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace is a web building tool that is self-hosted. This basically means that you are paying for both the storage space on the internet (required for any website), and the tool that allows you to build your website in a visual manner. Squarespace is popular mainly because of its easy-to-use interface, though it also has beautiful, flexible templates, and the possibility to compress complex systems into what essentially amount to widgets.

Uhh.. what does that mean?

Well, what I mean is, you don’t need a team of developers to build and maintain your website! Your ongoing payments are to Squarespace for hosting and the ability to make edits using their visual tools, as well as a great support team, but your up front costs are much lower than building a site from scratch, and your overhead moving forward is a steady, predictable expense.

What about mobile?

I’m glad you asked. Squarespace is built to work in a responsive fashion. This means that your website is flexible enough to work on desktops, tablets, and small mobile devices. You can even customize your site for each platform if you want to make sure that your site looks great on every screen size.

So, what kinds of sites work best in Squarespace?

Well, the good news is that it’s a flexible system that can work for many different kinds of websites. Let’s take a look at a few different types of sites and why they may or may not work well in Squarespace.

Small Business / Freelancer

If you’re a small business owner or a freelancer, Squarespace can be a great option to get you up and running quickly.

If you’re a designer who wants to present a portfolio of work, it’s easy to create image galleries, include descriptions of your process, embed videos and other media, and include a form for potential clients to contact you.

If you’re running a photography business, you might want to allow people to schedule appointments with you. Squarespace has a great agreement with Acuity Scheduler that comes free with your Squarespace account and allows clients to book appointments right online, and you can even require a deposit to be paid on the booking if you want.

If you’re a restauranteur, you might want to include a gallery of your food, your space, and have an editable menu on your site. These are all widgets you can add to your site easily.

Nonprofit Organizations

Squarespace is great for nonprofits because it’s a highly cost-effective option for getting a great looking website up and running quickly. It even has a built in functionality for collecting donations. Every nonprofit’s needs are as different as every business’ needs, but Squarespace provides an easy entry point and works great for most small nonprofits.

Event Sites

If you’re running an event and want a great looking splash site to get people excited about your event, Squarespace is a great option. While it doesn’t have a ticket sales system built in, it’s really easy to integrate with a service like Eventbrite to sell tickets.

If your event is a wedding, shower, or other party, Squarespace is a perfect way to put all your information in one spot. Want to include an engagement photo gallery? Can do. Need to include a map with directions to the reception? No problem.

E-Commerce Sites

Selling products is easy to do with Squarespace. With a custom site, building a shopping cart for your website from scratch requires a great deal of setup. You need a payment platform, product pages, a shopping cart, a checkout system, possibly some sort of fulfillment process, etc. With Squarespace, you have the ability to sell products simply by adding a shop page to the site. Now, to be fair, it still requires a fair amount of setup—you need to create a payment account, you need to create all your products, you may need to do some customizing for your checkout process, etc. but the functionality itself is built into the system.

Depending on what plan you purchase from Squarespace, they offer options for a 3% Squarespace purchase fee or no Squarespace purchase fee (you may still have to pay fees for Credit Card payments, but that’s through the payment gateways—e.g Stripe/PayPal—not Squarespace).

If your shop has complex items with lots of variations, Squarespace may not be ideal, but for most folks selling basic products, it’s a great entry level e-commerce system.