Squarespace Review: Great for Building Beautiful Sites Without Code

If you’re a fan of podcasts, you’ve probably heard an ad for Squarespace, a popular website builder that powers over 5 million websites. But does it live up to the hype?

I tested Squarespace by evaluating its ease of use, performance, customer support, security and value. My experience with Squarespace was mediocre, with more technical difficulties than I expected and poor customer support. There were some upsides — good server performance, security and value — but I don’t recommend Squarespace if you expect to need high levels of support.

Squarespace plans and pricing: Simple and streamlined

Squarespace offers its website builder on cloud hosting, which stores websites on multiple interconnected web servers located in the cloud. Cloud hosting provides several benefits over more traditional hosting types like shared hosting, including:

• Redundancy: If your main site goes down, browsers can access it by pulling data from one of the other servers in the cloud network. This helps cloud hosting providers ensure consistent uptime.
• Scalability: When your site needs more resources — like storage and bandwidth — the cloud hosting network can draw on more servers to provide those resources. As a  Squarespace user, this means you won’t have to worry about storage or bandwidth limits.
• Faster international service: International visitors’ browsers can retrieve data from the server closest to them rather than being forced to request data from a single physical server located on the other side of the world. This can improve loading times for those users.

All Squarespace plans are fully managed, meaning that Squarespace will build, configure and maintain server software for you. Squarespace also maintains its website builder, including all updates and security features.

Squarespace offers four plans built on this software. Every plan includes a free domain for the first year, full access to the core website builder, SEO — search engine optimization — tools and AI site editing tools. You’ll also get a full roster of security features, including:

• Secure socket layer — SSL — certification
• Distributed denial of service — DDoS — protection
• Two-factor authentication
• 24/7 server monitoring

The main differences between plans are cost and access to e-commerce features. Here’s a quick breakdown of how those distinctions shake out:

Squarespace templates: Quality over quantity

Squarespace offers 180 designer-made site templates in categories like entertainment, fashion, photography and professional services. While this is less than the 900 templates offered by rival Wix, it’s clear that Squarespace went for quality over quantity. Most Squarespace templates emphasize balance, with prominent areas for images, taglines, body text/copy and interactive elements like buttons.

Other templates for industries like fashion or art and design emphasize images, with only minimal space for text:

All Squarespace templates use excellent fonts, color schemes and spacing to create a sleek, elegant look. You can change any of these elements to match your personal or brand style, but if your only goal is to create an attractive website, you won’t need to change much to achieve it with a Squarespace template.

Squarespace AI site generation: A collaborative process

The Squarespace AI site generation tool is different from other AI website builders I’ve tried. Instead of building a generic website based on one or two sentences about your website, it asks you for several types of information:

• Site name
• Brand personality (Professional, Playful, Bold, etc.)
• Homepage sections (About Us, Products, Services, etc.)
• Pages (About Us, Products, Services, etc.)
• Color scheme
• Font pairing (header font and body text font)

You can see a rough idea of what your site will look like with each feature change, then generate the website in about a minute. The site it created was sleek and professional — matching the brand personality I selected — with a great balance of images, text and interactive elements like buttons. I liked it better than many of the sites I built with AI when testing free website builders, probably because I got more say over elements like fonts.

The AI-generated images are very high quality, especially compared to content built by other AI image generators. However, they’re not always relevant. For example, the lamp pictured above is beautiful, but I’m not certain how a lamp connects to marketing strategy. The images also feel generically professional, so you’ll probably want to replace them with images more directly connected to your site’s unique brand.

The text is more relevant, serving as a great starting place, but it’s also chock-full of buzzwords and lacking in substance. You can use AI tools to generate new text, but I recommend writing content yourself — or hiring someone to do it — if you want your website to fully reflect your brand.

While I enjoyed experimenting with this tool, there are ethical and legal implications of using generative AI. Many AI programs are trained using data scraped from the web without consent from or compensation for the original creators. There are ongoing lawsuits against some of these tools, most notably a major lawsuit against Stable Diffusion. You also cannot copyright AI-generated content in the US. You may want to avoid using AI for these reasons, especially if you’re building a business website where ownership of your content is important.

Squarespace ease of use: More complicated than it needs to be

I bought a plan and created a website to test Squarespace’s ease of use in three areas: the purchase process, account management and website creation.

Purchase process

The Squarespace purchase process starts by directing you to name your site and choose a template before you select a plan. This ensures that you won’t purchase a plan only to realize you don’t like any of the templates. However, it also means you can’t see the prices until you’ve started building a site. This is unusual and frustrating, as you might spend ages scrolling through templates only to realize you’re not prepared to pay Squarespace prices.

Next, you’ll be required to create an account (or connect a Google account). This signs you up for a free 14-day trial and directs you to the site editor. You’ll need to click the Subscribe button at the bottom of the screen to purchase your plan.

Thankfully, the final stages of the payment process are simple. You select a plan, enter your billing information and make your purchase. There are no upsells or hidden costs and no massive price increases to worry about when your contract renews, things you’re almost certain to encounter if you purchase a website builder plan from a traditional web host like Hostinger or Ionos. However, this is similar to what I’ve seen from other website builder companies like Wix.

Account management

Logging into Squarespace automatically takes you to the site editor, with no obvious links to your account information or billing area. Billing is instead nested into the overall site settings accessed through the gear icon in the bottom left corner.

Your account settings are even more difficult to access. You’ll need to click on a circle with your first initial (located near the gear icon in the bottom left corner) to reach the account dashboard, then choose Account Settings. These settings include your name, profile picture and security settings, like two-factor authentication.

Site editing and management

Editing individual pages on Squarespace is wonderfully simple. You can click on any content block to drag it to a new area of the page or see other editing/design options. You’ll also get an option to replace text with AI-generated content using the three-circle icon.

Adding content blocks (called “Sections” by Squarespace) is similarly easy. You can choose from a library of heavily formatted sections for things like testimonials and simpler ones for things like basic body text.

Unfortunately, the links in the site menu aren’t live links. You’ll need to exit the page editor entirely and open the Pages submenu in the site dashboard. Here, you’ll be able to add new pages, choose what pages will appear in the main menu and click on individual pages to edit them.

Overall ease of use

Squarespace earns a 7/10 ease of use ranking. The purchase process is cumbersome, and reaching account/billing settings is more challenging than it needs to be. The page editor itself is easy to use and more flexible than tools like the GoDaddy website builder, but switching between pages is frustrating. Squarespace is less complicated than WordPress — you won’t need to install or update any software — but it’s not as beginner-friendly as I expected.

Squarespace performance: Excellent uptime, acceptable site speed

I created a simple website with Squarespace and spent one week testing it for two performance metrics:

• Uptime: The percentage of time your site spends online. Uptime matters because users who can’t access your site will often go elsewhere. This can result in lost traffic, audience trust and, in the case of a business website, lost income.
• Site speed: The number of seconds it takes for your site to load. Bounce rate — the percentage of people who leave your site after only viewing one page — decreases by 32% when site speed goes from seconds three to one, making it essential to keep your site speed under three seconds if you want to build an audience.

Let’s see how well Squarespace did!

Uptime

Squarespace offers the industry-standard 99.9% uptime guarantee, meaning your website shouldn’t go down due to server issues for more than 10 minutes per week. I monitored my test site with BetterStack for one week to see if Squarespace lives up to this guarantee.

My site experienced no downtime during this week, suggesting that Squarespace may actually exceed the 99.9% uptime guarantee. This earns Squarespace a 10/10 uptime ranking, on par with top web hosts like Hostinger and Ionos (both of which have website builders).

Site speed

I spent five days running speed tests for my site on WebPageTest. I ran tests at different times each day, conducting both mobile and desktop tests in various locations to evaluate how users in different locations would experience a Squarespace site.

This testing allowed me to establish the following average loading times (remember, lower numbers are better):

These numbers aren’t an accurate representation of every user’s experience — speed varies based on the device and internet plan they’re using — but they provide a solid data set, letting me create the following averages:

• Mobile site speed of 3.39 seconds
• Desktop site speed of 1.95 seconds
• Overall site speed of 2.67 seconds

This overall site speed is under the recommended three-second maximum, but it’s notably slower than our top-ranking web host, Hostinger (averaging out at 2.34 seconds). This earns Squarespace a speed ranking of 7.5/10, on par with other popular web hosts like Ionos and SiteGround.

There are things you can do to improve your site speed — like compressing images to reduce the file size — but you can’t install tools for things like caching, which limits your ability to reduce your website’s loading times. I recommend using a traditional web hosting company with a guided WordPress installation process — A2 Hosting is a great choice — if you want more control over your site speed.

Overall

Squarespace’s excellent uptime and acceptable site speed earn it an overall performance ranking of 8.75/10, the same score as our second-highest-ranking web host, Ionos. This makes Squarespace a decent choice if server performance is your main concern, but the limited ability to optimize your site might make a WordPress-based hosting solution more worthwhile.

Squarespace security: Robust tools to keep your data safe

Squarespace sites benefit from several built-in security measures:

• Secure socket layer — SSL — certification: An encryption protocol that translates data sent to and from your site, like email addresses submitted through a contact form, into a language only computers can understand to prevent malicious users from stealing it. SSL certification also tells browsers and VPNs that your site is safe (some won’t even open a site without it). Moreover, Google penalizes sites without SSL certification.
• Firewall: Software that scans all data to your site, attempting to filter out malware and other harmful data. A firewall is like the website equivalent of wearing a mask during COVID or flu season: it keeps most of the bad stuff (viruses) out and lets the good stuff (air, or for websites, regular traffic) in.
• Distributed denial of service — DDoS — protection: Software and automated protocols to prevent your site from being overwhelmed by a flood of malicious traffic.
• Two-factor authentication: A protocol that requires you to enter your login credentials and a second “factor,” like a number sent to your email address, to access your account. This makes it more difficult for users who gain access to your login credentials through illicit means to get into your account and harm your site.
• Security monitoring: Squarespace’s Security Operations Center monitors Squarespace servers and websites 24/7 to remove threats and vulnerabilities.

This is similar to the roster of security protocols and tools offered by competitors like Wix and Shopify, protecting your account and all data hosted on — or sent to — your website, like customers’ payment information.

Squarespace customer support: An exercise in mediocrity

Website builder customer support starts with a collection of tutorials and other documents you can use to quickly solve minor website-related issues on your own. For bigger problems, customer support should be available 24/7 through multiple channels, like live chat or email. Response times should be fast — a few minutes on live chat or one to three hours via email — and staff should be able to help with a variety of issues.

I tested Squarespace’s knowledge base, live chat and email support to see how they live up to these expectations.

Knowledge base

The Squarespace Help Center is easy to navigate, with a search bar at the top and categories for Squarespace products like websites, domains and e-commerce tools. Individual articles use simple, beginner-friendly language and step-by-step instructions to help you complete various simple processes.

What really stands out about the Squarespace Help Center is its commitment to video. I went through 12 articles, and almost all of them included video tutorials. This makes Squarespace’s Help Center more accessible to visual learners than most competitors’ knowledge bases, which tend to only include the occasional video tutorial for complex processes. This level of accessibility earns Squarespace a 10/10 knowledge base ranking.

Direct communication

Squarespace offers live chat support from 4 AM to 8 PM ET and 24/7 email support. There is no phone support, which is a common issue with website builders. you’ll need to choose a website builder offered by a traditional web host like Ionos to get phone support.

I contacted Squarespace via live chat first. More accurately, I attempted to contact Squarespace customer support via live chat — twice (once on a Thursday, once on the following Tuesday). The Help Center displayed a message saying, “Live chat availability is limited due to high demand for support on certain topics” on both occasions. I received some quick, helpful answers to basic questions via the chatbot, then attempted to speak to a person to resolve a more complicated problem.

Squarespace had me fill out a form with my contact details and question, then told me it was “Opening a Support Case”. I kept the window open for four hours both times, but as far as I can tell, it never actually opened the case. I certainly never connected with a human customer service agent. This lands Squarespace a live chat ranking of 3/10.

Next, I sent Squarespace an email with some simple questions. I received a response in about 40 minutes, faster than the one to three hours I’ve experienced with most web hosts. Unfortunately, customer service wasn’t able to answer my question right away, asking me to further explain what I was looking for. I received a second response an hour later, and the agent did resolve my issue. This led to me giving Squarespace an email support ranking of 7/10.

Overall

To summarize, Squarespace earned the following rankings for its various support channels:

• Knowledge base: 10/10
• Live chat: 3/10
• Email support: 7/10

This results in an overall customer support ranking of 6.66/10. Unfortunately, poor customer service is common in the web hosting industry. Even Hostinger, our top-ranking host, only earned a customer support ranking of 6.5. The only hosting companies I’ve encountered that have both a website builder and good customer service are Ionos and GoDaddy.

Reputation

My experience with Squarespace is only one experience. Unfortunately, it seems like a common one. Squarespace has a Trustpilot rating of 1.2 out of 5 stars, with most reviews citing poor customer service and domain management tools. The BBB page shows almost 200 complaints in the past year. Most of those complaints are closed, but combined with the Trustpilot reviews, this suggests that Squarespace is providing generally shoddy customer service.

Squarespace value: Similar to other popular website builders

I analyzed the features and pricing of Wix and Shopify to determine how much value Squarespace provides compared to other popular website builders.

Here’s a quick overview of the basic plans offered by Wix and Shopify:

We can draw a few conclusions from this information:

• Squarespace offers unlimited storage on all plans, providing more value than Wix and equal value to Shopify.
• Squarespace offers average security for a website builder, including a full roster of tools and protocols to keep your data — and your users’ data — safe. Notably, all three of these website builders offer better security than traditional hosting plans from popular companies like GoDaddy.
• Most website builders, including Squarespace, limit e-commerce functionality to higher-tier plans. Shopify is the exception to this rule, which makes sense because it’s specifically meant for building e-commerce stores.
• Squarespace offers good pricing, on par with Wix and more affordable than Shopify. Notably, the Basic Commerce plan is slightly cheaper than Shopify at $28 a month.

Squarespace vs. traditional web hosts

Many traditional web hosting companies have launched their own website builders in the past few years. These hosting companies use a different pricing model with low introductory prices and high renewal costs.

The website builder plan from Hostinger, our top-rated web host, costs $3 a month for the first term (based on a four-year contract) and rises to $13 a month on renewal. This plan includes enough storage for 1,000 large pages (or 10,000 small pages), email hosting for up to 100 email addresses and a free domain for the first year. You’ll also get essential security features like SSL certification, firewall protection and DDoS protection.

Other website builders from traditional web hosting companies might start at a lower price than Squarespace but rise to a similar price when you renew the contract. GoDaddy, for example, has a website builder plan starting at $10 a month, but it renews at $17 a month.

Overall value

Squarespace provides more value than other popular website builders, but it is more expensive than newer options like the Hostinger website builder. This gives Squarespace a value ranking of 7.5/10.

Squarespace: Is it right for you?

To answer this question, we’ll need to consider all of the category rankings Squarespace earned so far:

• Ease of use: 7/10
• Performance: 8.75/10
• Customer support: 6.66/10
• Value: 7.5/10

All together, these rankings earn Squarespace an overall product score of 7.47/10, putting it roughly at the same level as GoDaddy (ranked at 7.5/10). The website builder is pretty good, but the hoops you need to jump through to create an account and the lack of consistent customer support make Squarespace frustrating to use. I only recommend Squarespace if you’re already confident in your ability to learn new tech.