The 3 Best Things About Squarespace
Let me just start by saying that I am not an affiliate of Squarespace and this is not an advertisement. Squarespace doesn’t even have an affiliate program! And even if they did I would still sing their praises for free, that’s how much I love Squarespace and how thrilled I am that I made the switch from Wordpress.
1. Time
The first and most important reason for switching to a Squarespace website, is time. I have my time back. I wasted two years on a Wordpress website that I was never happy with. It didn’t look professional, it lacked functionality and more importantly, I spent so much time trying to figure it out that I wasn’t concentrating on what was important - growing my business.
Since making the switch to Squarespace, I’ve transferred and rebuilt my entire website in the space of 30 days. I’m happy with it, it looks professional, it has flow and functionality, it’s mobile responsive and apart from updating blog posts and home page features, I won’t need to spend any more time ‘tweaking’ it. And when I say tweaking, what I really mean is spending hours fumbling around the back end, watching ‘helpful’ You Tube videos, entering ‘simple’ code, downloading the latest ‘must-have’ plugins and all for what, more of the same. An ugly website.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Wordpress. If you have the expertise it is highly customisable and offers so much in terms of functionality and design. However, if you’re just starting out, the learning curve can be STEEP. And let’s face it, if you’re building your own website, you’re probably a small business owner or blogger trying to make money, not lose it by wasting valuable time figuring out Wordpress or outsourcing to an expert.
2. Money
Which brings me to the next reason I prefer Squarespace, money. So essentially Wordpress is free however you obviously need to pay for hosting. My hosting with Siteground (who I love by the way as their service is excellent) was approximately AUD$300 per year. My Squarespace site costs me AUD$330 per year (I already had a domain). I’m sure you can do the math, a $30 difference, which I am more than happy to cover because it means that I won’t be paying any additional funds in outsourcing costs.
There will be no scrolling through Fiverr, Freelancer or Google trying to find the right web developer and then basically emptying my bank account! Outsourcing is great if you are getting value for money. There are definitely times when paying someone to resolve an issue you have in your business is worth it. The trick is knowing when to part with your money and how, where possible, you can avoid it #squarespace.
3. Design
Squarespace have 84 professionally designed, responsive templates that you can choose from. For my website, I used the Rally template which is a member of the Brine family. Different template families have different features but it’s really not that daunting to choose one at all. So design is yet another reason I love Squarespace. The templates offer clean looking websites with professional fonts and social media icons.
There are some features that Squarespace don’t offer and if your business requires something specific to operate, you should investigate that further, but for me everything I needed was at the touch of a button. It’s super easy to add images, link your social accounts and integrate your email lists, newsletter and opt-ins.
Who else hates updates and plugins? I absolutely do. My inbox was flooded daily with notifications about issues on my Wordpress site concerning updates and plugins. That probably tells you I wasn’t managing my site effectively and you’d be right. I didn’t have the time. But that doesn’t stop the emails coming and when I did eventually log in to my Wordpress backend I was just pushing the update button and not really understanding what I was doing. Then of course, you get the plugins that cause trouble! Love those. And the advice is almost always to deactivate every plugin to find the issue, then reactivate. Again, this all involves time and often, a certain amount of expertise. With Squarespace, you don’t have that issue. Squarespace manage the back end and even though you can use plugins, I have found (so far) that I don’t need any. Am I happy about that? Absolutely!
I could carry on all day, there are just so many more benefits to choosing Squarespace but you’re a busy small business owner and blogger and your time is precious! See what I did there! But seriously, if you’re looking for a well-designed, easy to use website builder, I can’t recommend Squarespace enough. I’m now confident that my website does what it says it will do and I’m happy to point people in my direction. Best of all, my time is now free to focus on helping other small businesses find their game changers!
There may be affiliate links in this blog. If there is it's because I've tried the product and loved it! Any cash I receive when you click on a link will go straight to my wine fund, thanks in advance!
