10 Reasons Why WordPress is Better Than Squarespace
It was actually in a recent meeting at my local Rising Tide group (Long Beach Tuesdays Together), where I was asked about the difference between the two platforms. So I hope this article helps you too in deciding which platform could be best for you. I’m a huge fan of using WordPress to build websites, so I want to share with you 10 Reasons Why WordPress is Better Than Squarespace.
In 2003, WordPress surfaced as a content management system (CMS) and has since been a favorite as a platform for creating websites and blogs for many developers and designers over the years. WordPress offers a wide range of capacities for customizing them as well.
Squarespace is a Software as a Service (SaaS) CMS which also creates websites or blogs. It launched about a year after WordPress and has remained a top choice for many. Lately, Squarespace has been an attractive option showcasing cool commercials and sleek design layouts. I admit they are awesome! (psst… The thing is, you can do ALL that + more on WP for way less $$$!).
Both platforms provide different types of options, and it would be laughable to say they provide the same level of options. Let’s dive into the reasons I believe WordPress is better than Squarespace.
1. Control at Your Fingertips
The most important difference to me is that WordPress offers you full control over your website. Squarespace, on the other hand, has a say in what you can & can’t do on your site. Seriously! With WordPress, you get full creative reign, and if you don’t like how it looks, you can easily change the design without losing your content or images. If you are testing out niches or attracting a new target market, it’s important to be able to change things seamlessly.
2. Opportunities to Expand
Being an open source CMS, WordPress offers unlimited opportunities to develop and expand your design, all thanks to the thousands of plugins and themes. It’s easy to incorporate tools for SEO management, create polls, or build and host an online course on WordPress. Yes! Stop paying fees to teachable or thinkific and host your OWN course on your website!
3. You Own Your Website
Not only do you have full control of your website on WordPress, but you actually OWN your WordPress website. You don’t get ownership of your website with Squarespace. One fine day, if Squarespace shuts down, your website will go down with them. They justify this by controlling everything for you, and thus not giving you the primary right to it. That’s not cool!
Trying to choose between WordPress or Squarespace to build your website? Here are 10 reasons why I believe WordPress comes out on top. Click To Tweet4. Endless Customization & Options
WordPress gives you more options to customize your website. From themes, plugins to CSS styling, you can achieve endless customizations on your website. Since WordPress is an open-source platform, it’s easier to customize than Squarespace. If you have coding skills can do amazing things. If you utilize coding, you can manipulate how something looks and that offers a powerful amount of possibilities.
5. Better SEO Capabilities
Understanding Google’s algorithm for ranking on the first page can be a total mind fuck. Personally, I love tackling SEO but it’s definitely not everyone’s favorite topic. Once you go down that rabbit hole, it’s sink or swim. So why make it more complicated?
With Squarespace, you don’t have complete control over optimizing your pages which is basically doing SEO half-ass. You can make your life much easier by utilizing the Yoast SEO plugin for example. This plugin helps you optimize page titles, meta descriptions, headings, tags, and readability of the content.
6. WordPress Is FREE
Well, not completely. You will need to purchase hosting and will need to buy your domain or URL name. With WordPress, you can choose your web host, unlike Squarespace which charges you to host with them. Again, limiting your control. Additionally, you can purchase plugins or themes on WP, but you don’t need these to have an amazing website. On the other hand, Squarespace charges you on a monthly basis, and there is no guarantee that fee won’t increase unexpectantly.
7. Unlimited Choices
The functionality of controlling the style and design of your content on WordPress exceeds Squarespace by a landslide. WordPress offers thousands of plugins to choose from developers around the world. With Squarespace, you’ll have to choose from a limited number of plugins created by Squarespace only. Your website is at their mercy all the time. The reason? Remember, WordPress is an open source software and Squarespace isn’t.
8. Community Support
If you want to compare the community size of WordPress and Squarespace, simply Google each of them separately. You’ll find thousands of WordPress support articles for roadblocks in your way. That’s a huge benefit from being open source. Take something from here, something from there and you can build amazing things. Squarespace, while they have spent millions of dollars on those cool commercials, they have just under 700* employees total. It’s not disclosed how many of them are actually customer service support staff.
*691 (as of October 2017)
9. AD Campaigns
Since you are the owner of your WordPress site, you also have the option to monetize it. You have the liberty to display ads that are profitable for you. On your WordPress site, you can display ads from website affiliate programs or sponsors that pay you for displaying their ads on your website.
With Squarespace, you can’t control the ads running on it. Since Squarespace websites aren’t completely yours, Squarespace picks which ads are shown (much like Facebook) and the revenue from those ads is paid directly to Squarespace. Basically, you can make money with advertising on WordPress while you can’t on Squarespace. Very limiting again…
10. eCommerce
Talking about money, are you thinking about opening an online store? Well, WordPress allows you to integrate and use any payment program you want. Again, with the access to an abundance of plugins and themes, you can create inventory tracking systems, client management, shipping and adding unlimited products.
On Squarespace, e-commerce is really limited. First, you have to use Stripe as the payment processing platform. This also limits you from selling to a larger global audience plus they limit the number of products you can list. They have options to some third-party plugins, but so few it’s very limiting. That’s just not good for a growing business.
Final Thoughts
WordPress has a very large and active community. There are several high profile companies that use WordPress and trust it. Many celebrities also have built their site on WordPress platform. Apart from this, millions of volunteers contribute to the WordPress Support Forum and answer the queries posted by other users. Squarespace’s community is not as vast as WordPress with online or offline, with the many conferences worldwide that WordPress has.
I’m not saying Squarespace is bad. That’s not the point of this article. Think about this way: if you are looking for a simplistic website and you’re just planning to have a website because you want to be present on the internet, Squarespace might be the best option for you.
However, if you are truly looking at the big picture and what to grow your business, WordPress is the best option. If you want to build a website with captivating landing pages or include features that further enhance the functionality and user experience of your website, then look to WordPress.
WordPress keeps updating its platform to make websites more stable by removing bugs and addressing security issues. If you are looking for an easy to design CMS that will allow you to easily update and host your blog, then I highly recommend WordPress.
Next Steps…
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