How to Sell Online Courses with Squarespace [Updated for 2024]

May 13

This article was updated in February 2024 to reflect Squarespace's new online course tools.

One of the most frequently asked questions about Squarespace is whether it’s possible to host and sell an online course on the platform itself —and when I say “course,” I’m also referring to workshops, masterclasses, webinars, or any other type of content with protected or restricted access.

The short answer is yes, you can sell online courses using Squarespace.

This wasn't always the case, but in late 2023, Squarespace introduced a new course tool that lets you create and sell online courses in a way that's simple, visually appealing to students, and packed with exciting features.

How to Sell Online Courses with Squarespace

Table of Contents

When you have a website on Squarespace, there are three ways to sell courses or set up an online school:

Natively, meaning by hosting and selling courses or memberships directly within Squarespace.
A hybrid approach: hosting the course or membership content on your Squarespace website but using an external platform to sell the course (i.e., to process payments).
Externally: by hosting your website on Squarespace and selling and hosting your course or membership content on an external, independent platform.

Let's take a look at each of these options to see which one might be the best fit for you.

1. Native option: Host and sell your course within Squarespace

Personally, this is my favorite option because it makes management much easier. It’s not the best choice for everyone since it has certain limitations that we’ll discuss, but it might be the best option for you if:

You're just getting started or testing out an idea, and you don't want to invest a lot of money or time learning how to set up and manage a new platform.
You’re very committed to maintaining your brand and ensuring your students have a great experience with your course or membership. In this regard, the level of customization and design is unmatched in the market.
You don't have a huge number of students (hundreds or thousands) that you need to manage in great detail.
Or maybe you simply have a minimalist approach to running your business and prefer to keep everything in one place so you don't have to deal with too many different tools.

How courses work within Squarespace

Add a new course to your website

Adding a course to your Squarespace website is as easy as adding a new page and selecting the "Course" type. On this page, you can:

Set up and manage course lessons.
Add and manage different pricing plans for your course, and even create bundles or packages with other courses you offer.
Manage course visibility (for example, if you want to offer free trial lessons within the course content).

Access to course content

In order for someone to access the course content hosted on your website, the user must first purchase the course and, during the purchase process, create a user account on your website. If the course is free, the user will only need to create an account.

A user can access multiple courses with a single account: so if you run a school offering several courses, your students can use their account to access all the courses they've purchased from you.

Course Features in Squarespace

One of the biggest advantages of hosting your course on Squarespace—besides simplifying management by having everything in one place—is the tremendous design flexibility it offers. You can add virtually any type of content to your course and customize its design to create a unique experience for your students and a distinctive look for your brand.

Sell online courses and memberships on Squarespace

Within your course lessons, you can add text, videos, images or image galleries, files, buttons, download links, charts, forms, music playlists, or audio tracks... The lessons use the Squarespace visual editor, so there are virtually no limitations when it comes to design.

In addition, you also have the option to host your videos directly on Squarespace, or, if you prefer, you can embed them from an external platform such as YouTube or Vimeo.

Another great feature of Squarespace courses is the ability to set up pricing plans so your students can choose between a one-time payment or a payment plan, as well as the option to bundle multiple courses together at a special price.

You also have the option of offering one lesson from the course for free as a trial lesson, which can be a great way to encourage people to purchase it.

What kinds of courses can you create on Squarespace?

You can create everything from courses with multiple units and lessons to simple single-video masterclasses, memberships with new content every month, or video collections.

Courses can be of the following types:

“Evergreen,” meaning courses that are available all the time, and users have access to all lessons and content as soon as they purchase them.
Courses offered on a limited-time basis, meaning they are only available on specific dates, and the shopping cart is only open during a specific time frame
Courses with staggered access to lessons: You can set this up if you have a course organized by editions. If it’s an evergreen course, you’ll need an external tool like Memberspace (I’ll discuss this later).

Squarespace Course Tool Plans and Pricing

You can start selling courses at no extra cost, and there’s no limit to the number of courses you can offer.

In this case, Squarespace will charge a 9% commission on the price of each sale, but it’s a great way to test out the platform, especially if this is your first course and you’re not yet sure how much demand there will be or whether it will be worth investing in the infrastructure to set up your online school.

Once your sales have reached a certain level and stabilized, you may want to consider signing up for one of the additional plans offered by Squarespace, which provide reduced transaction fees of 7%, 3%, and even 0%, as well as additional hosting for your videos.

You can find more information on this page.

Benefits of hosting your online course on Squarespace

Rest assured: user accounts use a highly secure method that is difficult to compromise to access content.
It offers flexible and competitive plans: Depending on the option you choose, you can create your course on Squarespace with a 0% transaction fee, or pay a higher fee without having to sign up for an additional plan.
Users never have to leave your website: Purchases are made right on your Squarespace website, and course access is also handled through your site. When a student wants to access a course, they simply go to your website (which they’re already familiar with) and look for the access link displayed on a student-facing page, for example. It’s super simple, and everything is seamlessly integrated under your website and your brand.
You maintain visual consistency and design flexibility: Since everything is hosted on your website, your courses will align with your branding without much extra effort. Plus, you have access to all of Squarespace’s design and styling options to create highly engaging courses and lessons that keep your students motivated and make them feel right at home.
It’s a smart choice: Personally, the fewer platforms and tools I have to manage, the better, because every extra thing takes up a lot of mental bandwidth. If, like me, you’re a minimalist when it comes to running your business, you’ll love having everything in one place.

Disadvantages of hosting your online course on Squarespace

Squarespace's course tool is still very new (it was launched in late 2023), so while it has many great features, there are others that haven't been added yet... and I say "yet" because many of them may be coming in the near future.

If you need to include a forum or community within your course, generate certificates of completion, or access advanced analytics on student behavior within the course (such as the percentage of students who complete the lessons, where they click, whether they download the materials, etc.), it’s best to use another platform like Kajabi.

However, the main drawback of Squarespace is that if you (or your business) are based in Latin America, processing payments for your course can get quite complicated. This is a general issue with Squarespace because it currently only integrates with PayPal and Stripe as payment gateways, and in Latin America, Stripe is only available in Mexico and Brazil. As a result, if you’re in another Latin American country, you’ll only be able to accept payments via PayPal, which is far from ideal.

If you're in Latin America and want to build your school on Squarespace (because you want to take full advantage of all its features), you'll need to implement a hybrid solution. This might also be the best option if you're not in Latin America but want to integrate an affiliate program, or if you want a checkout page with additional features like customer testimonials or upsells.

More information and examples:

To give you an idea, here are some examples of courses and memberships I've set up on Squarespace for various clients, using different methods (click on the image to enlarge):

" Naturaleza Sensible" Monthly Membership for Laura Dapena's "Sensiblemente PAS" website (main membership page and monthly content page).

Introduction to Copperplate Calligraphy Course by Lourdes Peralta (course overview page and module content page).

Membership and online school for Jagat Kaur, a Kundalini Yoga teacher. You can find a case study of this project here.

2. Hybrid option: Use an external tool to process payments and host the course or membership content within Squarespace

As we’ve just seen, there are times when we want our content to be hosted on our website, but we run into certain limitations with Squarespace when it comes to processing payments if you’re in Latin America. Or perhaps you’d prefer to use another platform for checkout because you want to take advantage of all the tools it offers, or because you want to set up an affiliate program.

In these cases, you can set up a workflow that works like this:

Your course content is on your Squarespace website.
The course's sales landing page is also on your Squarespace website, with a "Buy Now" button that takes you to the checkout page.
The checkout page is set up using an alternative platform, such as Thrivecart or Hotmart.
And finally, once the payment is complete, the student is redirected to a page where they can access the course content on your school's Squarespace site.

3. External option: use another platform to manage all course content and students

Finally, there’s the option of building your website on Squarespace but hosting your courses and memberships on external, specialized platforms.

This option might be worth considering if you want to host your website on Squarespace but find that its course-building features aren't quite enough for your needs.

If you need to integrate a community or forum into your course, generate course completion certificates for students, track students’ progress through the course content and access analytics on that progress, administer exams or quizzes to students and have the results determine whether they can proceed or not in the course, etc., then you should consider using a specialized e-learning platform.

That said, one caveat: Squarespace’s course tool is still very new (it was launched in late 2023), and there are many features like the ones I mentioned that it doesn’t currently offer, but which they are considering adding and may incorporate in the near future.

Some of the e-learning platforms are:

Teachable

Teachable is one of the most popular platforms. If you’ve taken any online courses—especially in English—they were likely hosted here. It offers a wide range of features for customization, marketing, student payments, analytics, and more, and it truly provides a great user experience. The most affordable plan is $39 per month (less if you choose the annual payment plan), but here’s the catch: with this plan, they charge a 5% commission on the price of every course you sell. You can review all their plans here, and their features at this link.

Thinkific

Thinkific has been gaining popularity in recent years. Personally, I don't like its user interface or the student experience, but that's just my opinion. It offers a very attractive free plan, and paid plans start at $49 per month, or less with the annual plan.

Hotmart

Hotmart is a great option for getting started and testing your course, since it operates on a commission-based model. In other words, you can use the platform and all its features completely free of charge, but it takes a 9.9% commission on every course you sell.

Kajabi

Kajabiis a heavyweight in the world of online course creation. It includes everything you could possibly need to host your course and create marketing and segmentation strategies to sell your training programs, but, as a result, it comes with a hefty price tag: $149 per month for its most affordable plan. However, if you have significant sales volume, investing in a solid technological infrastructure for your school is well worth it, and Kajabi is a very good option to consider as an all-in-one platform.

Benefits of e-learning platforms

These are platforms that specialize in online training, so some of them offer useful features such as tracking student progress, marking lessons as completed, issuing certificates, and providing student analytics, among others.
In some cases, they also offer interesting sales options such as course bundles, payment and access tiers, and, ultimately, more advanced features than those available on Squarespace.

Disadvantages

When a user wants to purchase one of your courses, they have to leave your website. You can create a sales page with a purchase button on your website, but to complete the payment, they will have to go to the course’s payment page, which is hosted on the e-learning platform and is therefore external to your website.
The student who purchases your course will also have to create a new user account on a new platform and then remember where your course is located. As a student, I’ve often found myself hopping from platform to platform, trying to figure out which one has the course I want to take.
The options for customizing the course are, to a greater or lesser extent, limited.
It's just another platform to manage within your business.

Conclusion

I don't like to make sweeping recommendations because I don't believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. I believe it all depends on the specific needs of each business, which can range from budget to the personality of the person running it: things that are very important to me (like ease of management) might be secondary to you.

So, if you have a website on Squarespace and want to sell courses or memberships, you should assess your situation and determine which features you really need, and what would be the best option for you right now:

If you like the idea of having everything in one place and keeping things simple, and if you don't need advanced features for your courses, Squarespace's built-in option would be perfect for you.
If you want to have everything on your website but need slightly more advanced checkout features, or if you're based in Latin America (excluding Mexico and Brazil), a hybrid solution using Thrivecart or Hotmart could be a good option.
Finally, if you really need the more specialized features of e-learning, then a combination of a Squarespace website and courses on one of these platforms would be the best option for you—or even an all-in-one solution like Kajabi, which is specifically designed for online schools.