Why Small Businesses Should Choose Squarespace Over Wordpress
Image Credit: Death to Stock
The great website platform debate continues to rage across the internet while I sit here and sip my coffee, wondering why people are wasting their energy. The website platform you choose ultimately depends on your business needs, the time available to whoever will be managing the website regularly, the skillset of whoever will be managing the website, and if the platform supports the lead generation process that ensures the best results with the least amount of work on the business owner’s end. After nearly 8 years designing custom Wordpress websites at an agency, I learned a lot about the pros and cons of Wordpress. And now that I’m a business-of-one, I can say with confidence that I will never, ever use Wordpress for my business’s website needs. This blog could (and probably will eventually) become a full guide, but as the title suggests, it boils down to a simple concept: businesses of 1-10 employees should, in most cases, select Squarespace over Wordpress. Here’s why…
When to Use Wordpress
Wordpress was designed to be a robust CMS (content management system) for large and complex websites that require custom coding and access to an infinite amount of plugins to ensure all business processes and automations can be implemented. Ideally, a Wordpress website design project requires a team of experts, often in the form of a pricy agency, and requires content planning, design, copywriting, development and a content marketing strategy to be implemented post-launch to effectively optimize SEO.
Of course, if you’re a small business of 1-10 employees, you can certainly tackle a Wordpress website if it makes sense for your business objectives. But it’s highly recommended that you already have experience using Wordpress, establishing hosting and setting up the backend server and domain, updating and paying for plugins regularly to ensure your website doesn’t break, and even have a little coding knowledge to ensure the design and functionality will reach and engage your ideal client. This is in addition to being familiar with the less-than-intuitive content management system interface that you will have to click through ad-infinitum to make even the most simple of changes.
If this sounds like a hassle, that’s because it is! While working at my previous agency, our clients’ businesses were typically larger (think 50-500 employees) and could make use of the robust tools Wordpress has to offer (they had dedicated teams to do so). But there were also many clients that didn’t fully use the Wordpress website tools they invested in, and even reached out to us just months after launching because they coulnd’t figure out how to update a plugin or make a simple edit to text on their website.
When to Use Squarespace
If you’re a business of 1-10 employees, there’s a good chance you don’t have the time for the learning curve required to learn Wordpress from scratch. And while Squarespace does require some education and training upfront, the learning curve is much smaller, as the interface of the back-end is a well-designed delight to use. I’ve found that 99% of the small businesses I work with have no need for the additional features and functions (aka plugins, more on those below) that Wordpress supports, rather, they get by perfectly on a beautiful, streamlined and easy to use platform a la Squarespace. It is seriously easy to launch a website on Squarespace, detailed below:
Create Squarespace account (username and password)
Select a template based on your business needs
Purchase the right hosting plan for your business needs
Customize your website with original copy and images/graphics
Optimize your website for SEO with headers, metadata and Google Keywords (optional, as Squarespace websites have built-in optimization that doesn’t require any effort on your part)
Press a button to launch
The Back-End Matters
The Squarespace back-end interface allows you to see the edits you’re making to your website design in real-time. This is not how Wordpress works. Wordpress requires you to sift through many tabs in the back-end interface and it’s very easy to get lost. Once you’ve actually made your update on a screen that doesn’t resemble the web page you’re updating, you have to click a publish button, visit your website or refresh your website URL to preview the change only after it goes live. Not exactly user-friendly, nor time-saving to say the least.
I’ve had clients balk at the slightly higher subscription costs that come with a Squarespace website. I tell them that what they spend on the platform now, they make up for exponentially in the future simply through the amount of time they will save making updates to their website, especially compared to Wordpress.
Beautiful & Engaging Templates
Wordpress does have many templates you can choose from that look nice and function well. The problem lies in customizing to fit your visual branding. The Wordpress back-end is clunky and awkward to try to figure out, and most of the templates are set up completely differently, so it’s very difficult to decide to switch templates once you’ve begun setting up your website in one. On the other hand, Squarespace has beautiful templates and their easy-to-use and intuitive back-end interface makes it far easier for you to update the styles and content to fit your brand with minimal effort. And because the quality of design in the Squarespace templates is far superior to Wordpress, it speeds up the customization process significantly.
Marketing Tools In One Place
Squarespace doesn’t stop providing excellent tools for your business at the launch of your website. Squarespace offers a handful of tools available to subscribe to right in your account dashboard, including email marketing, e-commerce websites including subscription-based services and member area creation, scheduling integration, social media and video creation tools.
Better Support
Squarespace has a super helpful support area on their website, a support team you can contact for a real-live human to help troubleshoot, and a forum that has answers to even some of the more obscure questions you may have about your website. Wordpress is an open-source platform, so the support is limited to experts you have to hire or a Worpress expert with an online blog.
No Effort Required to Keep Your Website Running
One of the worst things about Wordpress is the dreaded plugins. These are actually what make Wordpress more desirable for larger companies looking for specific functions that only a Wordpress plugin can provide, and they work great…if you keep them updated. Wordpress requires you to manually log into your website to update these plugins every time the plugin developer makes an update to the plugin. I’ve seen some terribly broken websites because the owners couldn’t figure out how to update the plugins, or they just forgot about them because they didn’t log into their websites often enough. Breaking both the design and the functionality of your website can seriously damage your company’s image and make the website-going experience painful for your current and ideal clients.
Squarespace does have the option to add what they call extensions to better run your business, but these extensions are typically third-party software subscriptions that have a code injection (easy block addition) that updates automatically. Otherwise, you can quite literally set and forget your Squarespace website, as long as you pay for your hosting plan and domain once per year. Why even run the risk of your website breaking without you knowing it?
I’ve had a handful of clients who have been sold a bill-of-rights about how Wordpress is the end-all for website hosting platform options. They’re told they need specific features and functions only Wordpress has, which is just not true on both counts. Wordpress may seem like a better fit for your small business at first glance, but it’s definitely worth looking into other options before going all-in on Wordpress, if not to save money, but to save time and sanity in the website design, launching and updating process.
