Squarespace

What Is Squarespace?

With headquarters in New York City, Squarespace is an American website-building and hosting company that provides software allowing users to use pre-built site templates and drag-and-drop elements to create and modify web pages.

The story of how Squarespace came about is interesting. Back in 2004, Anthony Casalena found Squarespace as a blog hosting service while attending the University of Maryland, College Park. And he was its only employee until 2006 when it reached $1 million in revenue. 

The company grew from 30 employees in 2010 to 550 by 2015. By 2014, it had raised a total of $78.5 million in venture capital, added e-commerce tools, domain name services, and analytics; and replaced its coding backend with drag-and-drop features. 

Squarespace has been known to power more than 2.6 million sites and online stores and, along with Wix and Shopify, is one of the best-known site builder/eCommerce products available. 

Let’s take a look at how Squarespace works and ways to make the most out of it.

How Does Squarespace Work?

Squarespace is a ‘hosted’ solution, which means that it comes with its servers, and you don’t have to install any other software on your computer to use it.

The platform allows users to create a professional site in a web browser without coding and edit it easily thanks to a user-friendly content management system (CMS).

With Squarespace you can just easily create sites using the templates and styles offered by the platform, making your site development life a lot easier!

How do you use it?

Well, it’s simple. All you have to do is choose a template, click on the design components you may want to integrate or change, and then adjust controllers in the style editor to tweak them. For instance, you can click on some text and apply a new typeface or click on a site background and change its color.

So, for the most part, there are no limitations to what you can achieve using this tool. However, there are some downsides that you may want to consider.

Why Is Squarespace Bad?

There are a few cons to consider when using Squarespace, especially if it’s not meeting your business needs.

For starters, once you customize a website, you can’t troubleshoot your site to remove the changes through Squarespace. In other words, the platform doesn’t always support all customizations, and you may need a developer to overwrite a Squarespace template if you want to change something.

Also, some essential features are missing from the software, and you may find yourself a bit limited as to things such as SEO integration and image optimization.

However, overall, Squarespace isn’t a bad tool to use for site-building and can help provide the basics to get you started.

That aside, it’s also important to note that Squarespace is a software as a service (SaaS) tool, which implies that you’ll have to pay a monthly fee to use it online. So, let’s take a look at its fee structures.

Key Takeaway

You can use Squarespace to build professional websites and customize your brand according to your specific needs. The pricing is pretty flexible, and there is a range of valuable features offered that allow you to optimize your site-building experience. 

What’s more, the simplicity allows you to save time and publish a site at the click of a few buttons!