You’ve seen those sponsored YouTubers. Ads on Super Bowl. YouTube pre-rolls. Heck, you might even have heard your semi-professional bestie who’s in the know talk about using Squarespace.
Well, I admit – I fell for it. I signed up for Squarespace.
And while it is an easy-to-use, no-code web builder, here are a few reasons why I’ve stopped using them (after only a month, AND without being able to get a refund too 😡):
1. Squarespace is just too slow
Squarespace templates look great – they’re polished, some even have smooth, spiffy transitions. Unfortunately, they aren’t coded well (lots of extraneous Javascript), which I found out after noticing my brand new website taking a long while to load.
After making sure I didn’t have my CDN or cache settings setup wrongly, I ran the site through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to understand what was going on. This is what I saw:
And the reason for the low performance score? PageSpeed Insights drilled down on the details too:
2. Squarespace is expensive
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate things that are well-made and acknowledge that well-crafted things cost money. But for the cost of a Squarespace subscription, I was getting far too little functionality/customization.
The base Personal Plan goes for USD23/mth – or USD192 annually (a 32% discount to USD16/mth). Pretty good for a polished, easy-to-use site – until I needed to use it.
Want to include Google Analytics on the webpage to understand traffic to your website? Not allowed on the Personal Plan. Want to add any sort of tracking for Google Ads? Sorry, can’t do that. To add any code at all, I’d be looking at the Business Plan for an annual fee of USD396.
Feeling forced to spend more money just for basic functionality, I decided to abandon my annual subscription to Squarespace, less than 30-days in without a refund.
I switched to running WordPress on Hostinger’s annual Premium Plan at $36 (working out to USD2.99/mth). Add a one-time WordPress template license for USD60 and that comes up to a total of USD96. Full-functioned, flexible, optimized templates for a great user experience for visitors – all at a fraction of the cost.
For anyone looking to start a website, both Squarespace and WordPress are equally easy-to-use. But going for WordPress is way more useful (feature and functionality-wise) and makes more sense numbers-wise. I’m never recommending Squarespace again.