Why I Chose Squarespace Over WordPress for My Website

First of all, before deciding on Squarespace for my blog and website, I tried out Blogger and WordPress, and I recommend that before you choose a platform, you at least do your research on the features and capabilities of several options.

That's the only way you'll be able to make the decision that best suits your needs.

In my case, I was looking for a platform that would allow me to streamline the process of creating and maintaining the site, while also giving me the flexibility to customize the web design to my liking. 

Blogger has the advantage of being easy to use, highly customizable, and offering built-in hosting. But I found it too limiting for what I wanted to include on my website—not just now, but also looking ahead to the future. It’s an excellent platform for someone just starting out with a very limited budget, especially if they aren’t quite sure where they want to take their blog or business in the future.

WordPress is, without a doubt, the king of platforms... it’s no coincidence that it’s the most widely used platform across the entire internet. It’s a robust and extremely flexible platform. With a WordPress site, you can do whatever you want because there are plugins for everything under the sun. And you can customize the design to your heart’s content.

WordPress was a good option for what I wanted to have on my website now and in the future, but I found it a bit overwhelming.

Why?

Well, because my time and my peace of mind are very important to me. I didn't want to spend hours trying to make a small adjustment, or figuring out what the heck is wrong with plugin X that decided to stop working, or how that same plugin X ended up conflicting with Y and now I have to figure out how to fix it...

WordPress's flexibility and customization potential are, in my opinion, both its greatest strength and its biggest drawback.

That's when I decided to check out Squarespace. But...

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace isn't just a simple blogging platform—no. With Squarespace, you can easily create a blog, but it's so much more:

• It is a platform for creating fully featured websites, with many built-in features.

• It offers a wide variety of highly professional templates specifically designed for different types of businesses, from service providers to product sellers.

• It's a platform designed specifically for DIY entrepreneurs who want a fully featured, professional website even if they have little (or no) technical knowledge.

And I'm not going to lie to you—the platform has its limitations. It's not perfect.

But in my case, the benefits it offers more than make up for its limitations. If you'd like to learn a little more about it, I've written a post explaining in detail what Squarespace is and what types of websites I recommend it for.

And what are the advantages of Squarespace? 

Ease of use

Squarespace is incredibly intuitive and easy to use. In just a few hours, you can have a website up and running, and there are tons of features you can customize without writing a single line of code.

In my case, I did have to tweak a few lines of code to adjust the layout of the default template to my liking. And it can be customized even further.

Another feature that makes Squarespace an easy-to-use platform and allows you to spend minimal time making adjustments is my next point:

Integration of features

Squarespace offers a wide range of features built right into the platform, so there’s no need to install any plugins.

This ensures that these elements always work—and work very well. Say goodbyeto conflicting plugins—the ones you install that suddenly "break" your site—and to updates that render them useless until the developers release a new version of the plugin.

In other words: goodbye to headaches.

So what can you do with Squarespace's built-in features? Well, there are actually a lot of things, but here are a few of them:

• Well, you can easily create sales pages—as many as you need.

• You can include sign-up forms and integrate them directly with Mailchimp, or you can integrate other email marketing services.

• You can restrict access to certain pages by password-protecting them and customize them.

• You can create stunning photo galleries.

• You can easily add and edit content using the drag-and-drop interface

• SSL certificate and analytics included in the platform.

• And so on and so forth...

Another advantage of having everything integrated into the platform is that Squarespace sites are very secure. Since you aren’t adding third-party plugins to your site, and the platform’s code isn’t publicly available (as is the case with WordPress), it’s much more stable and difficult to hack.

You can add a store without having to install anything

As I was saying, I wanted a platform that could adapt to my website’s potential future scenarios. And one of the possibilities I’m considering is selling digital products at some point.

Squarespace includes built-in functionality to set up an online store—as large or small as you like— without the need for any plugins, and it integrates directly with Stripe and PayPal.

It's easy to use and set up, and you can manage the entire process—from product inventory to payment processing and shipping, as well as advanced store analytics—right from Squarespace, without having to go anywhere else. 

Your website is optimized for mobile devices

This isn't unique to Squarespace by any means, but it's an important point to keep in mind. Sites on this platform automatically adjust to any screen size... and this is incredibly useful . No matter which template you choose, they all feature responsive design.

Currently, more than half of this website's traffic comes from mobile devices, so having a fully responsive platform that doesn't require any extra effort on my part is a huge advantage.

In summary

Creating a basic website on Squarespace is easy, and the platform requires very little maintenance on your part. Squarespace is very comprehensive, thanks to its built-in features that would otherwise require plugins in WordPress.

This makes the work a lot easier because you don't have to spend a lot of time fiddling around, and you don't have to worry about "breaking" the site or messing up... total peace of mind. So, in my case, I preferred the efficiency of Squarespace and all its built-in features because it makes my work and my life easier. 

And don't let anyone tell you that you can't create a custom design on Squarespace—by tweaking the settings or modifying the code (if you want to take it a step further), you can achieve the results you need.

So... after all that: Are you going to give Squarespace a try, or what? 

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