Squarespace vs WordPress

After rigorously testing both WordPress and Squarespace, we found that Squarespace is the best website builder of the two, beating WordPress in a number of different categories. 

Squarespace’s superior design features, marketing capabilities, and customer support — as well as the fact it's decidedly easier to use — means it comes out on top. 

In this guide, we’ll take you through the ins and outs of both platforms. Check out the table just below for a direct comparison of the provider’s most important aspects.

Alternatively, try out our 1-minute website builder quiz to get tailored recommendations for web-building products based on your specific requirements. 

In This Guide:

• Squarespace vs WordPress: Head-to-Head
• Squarespace vs WordPress: Value for Money
• Features Comparison
• WordPress.org & WordPress.com
• Website Builder Alternatives
• Verdict: Which Website Builder Is Better?
• Frequently Asked Questions

Squarespace vs WordPress: Head-to-Head

In terms of ease of use, Squarespace is drastically more user-friendly than WordPress.com. “First impressions are that this does come with a steep learning curve,” one user admitted during our testing, illustrating that WordPress can be intimidating even for users who’ve built websites using other platforms.

However, WordPress does have a free version while Squarespace doesn’t, and WordPress’s plans are priced lower than those offered by Squarespace. WordPress is cheaper than Squarespace overall — which helped it secure a slightly better score in the value category. 

Squarespace had a wider range of useful ecommerce features than WordPress. 

Squarespace offers a custom domain for free for a year, but you’ll have to purchase WordPress’s Personal plan or above to obtain a custom domain and set it as your default web address.  Another point in favor of Squarespace is unlimited storage; even WordPress’s priciest plans have a 200GB maximum. 

Squarespace also provides a better suite of customer support options – its wide range of email, phone and live chat support can be accessed 24/7 on all plans, whereas WordPress only lets you access live chat on the Premium plan or above (email support is available to all). Our research team found that Squarespace had a much more useful knowledge base, which was easier to find useful articles within than WordPress’s equivalent. 

Who are Squarespace and WordPress Best for?

Although Squarespace is better than WordPress overall, both platforms have huge customer bases and contain a wealth of website-building features that would suit a wide variety of businesses and individuals. That being said, in terms of features, we found that:

• Squarespace is better for site design. 
• WordPress is better for publishing blogs and other written content. 
• Squarespace is better for ecommerce/selling products.
• Squarespace is better for customer support.

This means that certain businesses and individuals will benefit from one over the other. We concluded that:

• Squarespace is the best choice for beginners.
• WordPress.org is the best choice for experienced coders & website builders. 
• Squarespace is the best choice for growing businesses.
• WordPress.com is the best choice for businesses on a budget.
• Squarespace is the best choice for online stores and retailers.
• WordPress.com is better for digital publications.

Thanks to superior design features, Squarespace will be a much better option for anyone who’s trying to grow their business by selling products through an online store, and would find it a lot easier if all the code-based customization options are found in a platform like WordPress were just taken care of. 

Squarespace

While WordPress’s templates are mostly geared towards blogging, Squarespace has a much wider variety that can cater to a multitude of different sites. In terms of quality, they’re also top of the range; Squarespace ensures your site will look professional, sleek, and inviting, whichever template you opt for. 

Squarespace is famed for its marketing tools and integrations and should be your go-to if you want your site to gain traction on social media. Even better, it recently added more apps to the app store, including some for marketing, so Squarespace has further cemented itself as a top tier option for reaching new customers.

It’s also got one of the best customer support systems in the game (our testing found it superior to Wix and GoDaddy as well as WordPress), so if you feel like you’ll need support while setting your site up, Squarespace is one of the best options out there — and it's one of the better website building options for beginners. 

Unlike WordPress, Squarespace has no free version — but it does have a 14-day free trial available. There are four paid plans, however, the Personal ($16/month), Business ($23/month), Commerce Basic ($27/month), and Commerce Advanced Plans ($49/month). Prices listed here are for users paying annually — you can pay month-by-month too, but it costs more. 

WordPress

WordPress is a powerful website-building tool — over 455 million websites have been created using the platform. WordPress is a highly customizable builder, but a lot of this customization comes from plug-ins that you’ll have to find elsewhere, rather than built-in features. 

WordPress has a free version and four pricing plans — Personal ($4/month), Premium ($8/month), Business ($25/month), and eCommerce ($45/month), which are all billed annually. The business plan is the one you want to go for if you’re a small business, whereas the eCommerce plan is the best option if you’d like to start an online store. 

WordPress is definitely geared towards bloggers and digital publishers in general — it’s one of the best options on the market if you’re going to be publishing a lot of written content. The vast majority of the website templates on offer are geared towards this use case, which means that you may find it quite restrictive if you have other goals or aims for your site. 

Best Value: Squarespace

Despite being a better overall website builder, our research found that WordPress is a better value than Squarespace, almost entirely due to the fact that it's starter and advanced pricing plans are so affordable.

For starters, WordPress has a free plan and Squarespace doesn't, which gives it a big head start. On top of that, WordPress has two pricing plans — Personal ($4/month) and Professional ($8/month) — that are more affordable than Squarespace's most affordable plan —Personal ($16/month).

Yes, WordPress is pretty bare bones, but if you don't plan on scaling down the line and only need a website for blogging, WordPress is going to be a lot easier on your budget than Squarespace. Still, if you have any plans to branch out to ecommerce, need to attract customers to your website in a meaningful way, or want your site to look as professional as possible, Squarespace is going to be the better long-term bet, even if your wallet takes a bit of a hit.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace departs from WordPress initially as it doesn’t have a free plan, although it does have a free trial so you can road test the software without spending a cent. 

Cheaper Squarespace Plans

Squarespace has four paid plans. Like WordPress, there’s a Personal plan, but at $16/month, it’s a lot more expensive than WordPress’s similarly named offering. You don’t get any commerce features on this plan, but Squarespace will give you a free custom domain, SSL certification, 30 minutes of video storage, 24/7 customer support, a collection of SEO tools, and access to Squarespace’s library of extensions. 

Overall, it’s definitely more impressive than WordPress’s equivalent, but it doesn’t let you earn ad revenue, which WordPress does. 

The Business plan is available for $23/month and allows for complete customization with CSS and JavaScript. The Business plan allows for full access to Squarespace’s video studio application, in which you can create promotional pop-ups and banners (and you’ll also get $100 of Google ads credit). 

You’ll also be granted access to a number of commerce features including the capacity to sell unlimited products and sell digital gift cards, and you’ll be able to use Squarespace’s shipping and inventory management tools too. 

Squarespace Plans for Commerce

Commerce Basic plan ($27/month) and Commerce Advanced plan ($49/month) are what you should really be looking at if you’re planning on selling products and items in an online store. 

The Commerce Basic plan has powerful merchandising tools, ecommerce analytics, and access to a commerce app that integrates with Square’s (different company — confusing, we know) Point of Sale software, so you can take orders online and in-person and never lose track. Transaction fees are also reduced from 3% on the Business plan to 0% on the Commerce Basic plan.

On top of this, Squarespace's Commerce Advanced plan provides even more useful functions like abandoned cart recovery, advanced shipping (including calculating the real-time rates for companies like FedEx), and subscription capabilities. 

WordPress Pricing

WordPress has a free version and four pricing plans. The free plan is pretty limited, although you’ll still have access to a number of themes/templates and a pre-installed SSL certificate. You’ll also get all the Jetpack essentials features, including ways to view your site activity and SEO tools, as well as 3GB storage space. 

Cheaper WordPress Plans

The Personal plan ($4/month) offers users a free domain for one year, unlimited email support and 6GB of storage. WordPress ads will also be removed, and you’ll get a custom domain as your web address. You’ll also be able to accept payments, create subscriber paywalls and paid newsletters. 

WordPress’s Premium plan ($8/month) unlocks additional support features – including Live Chat and 24/7 Priority support – as well as more than double the storage space in the Premium Plan (13GB). The Premium plan also unlocks premium themes and advanced design customization. Marketing features like Google Analytics integration and PayPal payments are also available. This is the cheapest plan you can earn money with through ad revenue with too. 

Pricier WordPress Plans

The Business ($25/month) and eCommerce ($45/month) plans equip users with the full suite of marketing and monetization tools that WordPress offers, as well as the maximum amount of themes, and 200GB storage. The eCommerce plan has additional, advanced commerce features – such as the capacity to accept payment in 60 countries and integrations with top shipping carriers. 

The Business plan is the one you want to go for if you’re a small business, whereas the eCommerce plan is the best option if you’d like to start an online store. Unless you’re a freelancer or a very small team, you’re going to find the Personal plan quite limited – the Premium plan is a nice in-between though. 

WordPress.org, by contrast, is just free. It will require you to find your own hosting, which costs around $7/month depending on what provider you choose. You’ll then be tasked with buying the plugins you need from different vendors, which will fill your site with features. 

Squarespace vs WordPress: Which has the best Free Plan?

Well, WordPress wins this head-to-head by default, because it actually offers a free plan, and Squarespace doesn't. It's worth noting, however, that the WordPress free plan is pretty limited in terms of what you’re given. Aside from an SSL certificate, domain, and access to some free themes, there’s not much else to write home about.

Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan but does offer a free 14-day trial for anyone who wants to try out their software. You don’t even have to hand any payment details over to start the trial and you won’t automatically be rolled over onto a paid plan unless you decide you’d like to.

Best for Business Features: Squarespace

Squarespace beats WordPress hands down when it comes to business features. It excels in two areas — marketing and ecommerce — that make it the perfect choice for growing your business and selling products. 

Marketing

Squarespace’s marketing features are some of the best available on the market today. You can track website visitor numbers, traffic sources, visitor geography, and various other important information. Squarespace’s Business plan offers additional sales and conversion metrics, so you can understand how customers contact you. 

While it used to be low on marketing app integrations compared to competitors like Wix and WordPress, Squarespace has recently launched a bunch of updates to the app store, including marketing integrations like online booking, scheduling, and CRM. This significantly increased its features score, keeping it in a clear tie with our top choice Wix.

SEO & Social Media

Squarespace also has some great SEO tools that will help you climb up the Google rankings, including title and keyword management. What’s more, they’re all ready for you to use in Squarespace as soon as you sign up. 

Squarespace ensures your site is optimized for mobile and provides both an SEO checklist for users to review and an SEO panel so you can edit your site title and description.

WordPress offers a pretty good selection of SEO tools as well, and all of its themes are already optimized to improve your google ranking. Unlike Squarespace, however, there’s no keyword support. On top of this, Squarespace offers a built-in translation feature so your site can be read across the globe — with WordPress, you’ll have to get a third-party plugin. 

Social media is another area where Squarespace does really well. It has support for all platforms, and everything is built into the site, including the automated scheduling of posts. With WordPress, you have to use an add-on called ‘Publicize’, which works quite well aside from the fact it doesn’t support Instagram. 

Ecommerce

Both WordPress and Squarespace have ecommerce options but when compared with Squarespace, the main problem with WordPress is that they’re locked away in the provider's most expensive plans.

Customers can expect to pay $300/year ($25/month) to access WordPress’s cheapest plan that offers ecommerce features; Squarespace’s Business plan is 28% cheaper, at $276/year ($23/month).

Squarespace also has a much wider range of ecommerce features — abandoned cart recovery, gift cards, product tagging on Instagram, limited availability labels, detailed ecommerce analytics, product waitlist are just a flavor of what Squarespace can offer — none of these features are available from WordPress.

Best for Blogging Features: WordPress 

WordPress will be the better option for anyone looking to start a blog or anyone who will be publishing digital content in bulk. With Google Analytics integration and WordAds, you’ll be able to compile data on who’s visiting your site and generate revenue from advertisements. 

As has already been mentioned, a lot of WordPress’s themes are produced for bloggers, so you’ll really be getting a site with everything you need to publish your content. 

Unlike sites like Wix, which are traditional website builders, WordPress is more of a blogging platform – so it has features like analytics, search feature, an archive, comments, social bookmarking and display categories.

Plus, WordPress has one of the cheapest personal plans ($4/month), and the Premium plan is also very reasonably priced ($8/month) – so getting yourself online won’t even break the bank. 

Best for Customer Support: Squarespace

Squarespace is tied for the highest help & support score in our research with our other highest performer Wix, with both netting an impressive 4.9/5 in the category, thanks to 24/7 coverage and lots of channels available for assistance.

Squarespace provides support via email, social media, and live chat and has both a knowledge base and a community forum. There’s a great knowledge base and community forum to learn from which are useful for quick fixes, and there are GIF and Image tutorials too, as well as onsite editor help. 

The last thing you want as a business dealing with products, services, and customers is having to troubleshoot your own technical issues, or your website going down during peak shopping times. So, choosing a website builder with a far-reaching customer support system is vital — and Squarespace won’t leave you with any regrets. 

However, Squarespace does not provide phone support, whereas WordPress does, so if that’s your preferred mode of communication when receiving help, you may want to opt for the latter provider. 

Best for Ease of Use: Squarespace

Squarespace takes an intuitive, drag-and-drop approach to website building and its designs are a lot less cluttered than other sites. In short, it’s not difficult to make your site look pretty with Squarespace, which is how it got its 4.4/5 score for ease of use in our research.

The downside of being supremely uncomplicated is that Squarespace is a lot less customizable than sites like Wix, but if you’re satisfied with the preset templates offered, then you won’t need to make drastic changes anyway. 

Another point in Squarespace’s favor over sites like WordPress is the fact it really provides an “all-in-one” package — WordPress relies heavily on add-ons, plugins, and third-party apps, and it’s not always easy to keep track of exactly which ones you need.

WordPress certainly isn’t known for providing a user-friendly experience, netting a score of only 2.7/5 for ease of use in our research. Suffice to say, although WordPress.com relieves the user of many of the complex coding duties, it’s still got vast room for improvement. Again, as was mentioned before, the lack of congruence between the editing view and how the page appears in a tab can cause issues, especially for new users.

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

Before we get into judging WordPress against Squarespace it’s important to note here that this article is comparing Squarespace with WordPress.com rather than WordPress.org (although we still mention it in a couple of relevant places). To avoid confusion, here's the difference between the two:

• WordPress.com feels like a traditional website builder, but it's probably best described as a blogging platform. It has a lot of features that have been brought over from WordPress.org, but remains a streamlined version that doesn't have any coding or hosting responsibilities for the end-user. 

• WordPress.org is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) that allows users to create and manage their own websites. It's self-hosted, meaning you just get a copy of the CMS. You'll have to find your own domain provider and sign up to a hosting service. The end-user manages everything, from site maintenance to security. 

The reason this article compares Squarespace and WordPress.com – rather than WordPress.org – is that Squarespace is the same ‘type' of program as Word.com. Both WordPress.com and Squarespace operate like traditional website builders – whereas WordPress.org is better described as a CMS.

If you're looking to build a website, then, WordPress.com and Squarespace will be useful to compare – WordPress.org, not as much. Overall, WordPress.com is a lot easier to use, more streamlined and you don’t have to do all the more complex elements of website building required by WordPress.org. You need a significant amount of resources and technical ability – as well as traffic potential – to justify building a website in WordPress.org. 

Squarespace & WordPress Alternatives

It’ll be clear to you by now that Squarespace is the clear winner when put up against WordPress. But how does it far when compared to other providers? To give you a better idea of how Squarespace squares up to the rest of the market, have a look at our table just below:

Frequently Asked Questions