Why I Switched from WordPress to Squarespace
Seventeen years ago I started designing websites in WordPress. At that time, it was really the only option. Now, that’s not the case, and I’m switching things up. Below I talk about why I’ve chosen Squarespace.
To my former WordPress colleagues, bring your best shade. To my fellow WordPress haters, get your popcorn ready.
Let’s get into it.
1. Squarespace Makes It Easier to Build Websites
Not even WordPress devotees are going to give me a hard time about this first one. Squarespace wins this hands down. Their latest builder, Fluid Engine, is the easiest one to use I’ve ever seen. It has a ton of options, it’s intuitive, and it doesn’t force you to jump through dozens of hoops to put things where you want them.
In contrast, you cannot build a WordPress website without help. Most people would struggle to properly install it.
And that’s not sarcasm or an insult to users. It’s a nod to who WordPress was created to serve. It was never intended to be intuitive or user-friendly for the mainstream. It’s a coder-heavy community and always has been.
If you’re not at least intrigued by code, WordPress is not for you.
A friend took this photo of me, going all in with WordPress and speaking at WordCamp Denver 2015 while someone in the audience looked me up on their laptop. 😂
It’s technical and laborious, which is fun if you’re into that sort of thing, but if you just want to build the freakin page that will sell your course so you can get back to your work and serve your people, WordPress is a chore.
Go with Squarespace where you can build a beautiful, professional website that works well without ever having to search for the wayward semi-colon or edit the robots.txt file.
Spend your time learning much more useful skills for your online empire like strategy, user experience, and SEO.
Okay, on to the next one…
2. Squarespace Makes It Easier to Update Your Site
This was my biggest consistent frustration with WordPress. It was always hard to give a client a beautiful WordPress website and know for sure that they would struggle to update it.
I used to pride myself on the fact that I offered my clients the superior service of forty WordPress tutorial videos on how to update their site.
Forty.
Videos.
Tell me, how stoked would you be to go through the exhaustive process of planning and creating a website only to have your designer launch it to the entire world and say, “Yay! Now, welcome to Updates University where you’ll be stuck in front of your desk for days trying to figure out how to add a link to your new content!”
Yay, right?
Squarespace, in contrast, is unbelievably easy to navigate and edit. It’s intuitive and simple to use, so updating it is cake.
Stop spending hours trying to update something—or god forbid paying someone else to update something—that might take 5 minutes to update in Squarespace.
Save your time and money. And the headache. Use that time to serve your clients. Or learn a language. Or finally figure out how to make a nice Hollandaise sauce (#lifegoals). Anything but wrestle with WordPress.
Okay, on to the next one…
3. Squarespace Has Cleaner Code
I know, I know. This one is going to be controversial because WordPress devotees make the argument that WordPress has squeaky-clean code. And they’re right. It does.
Until you install a bloated theme.
Junky, bloated WordPress themes are awful and prolific, like mosquitos in your sleeping bag, and they’re that sneaky, too. There’s almost no way of knowing if a theme is slowing down your site unless it’s already doing its damage and you know what to look for.
I’ve seen many people pay hundreds of dollars or more for a theme that looks great and is easy to work in, but is clogging up their SEO and sabotaging their traffic. Here’s how:
Clean code makes Google’s job easier.
Google wants to get to the content of your site. That’s what searchers are looking for, so that’s what Google wants to give them. Remember, accurate search results = more users = more searches = more ad revenue = more money for Google.
Google does not want to sift through a lot of junked-up and poorly-written code to get to your content, and if it has to, it will punish you in search results.
This stops your SEO success before you even start, and we haven’t even gotten to content or keywords, yet.
Me, teaching one of many workshops on heartfelt marketing to wellness practitioners in Boulder, Colorado, after I’d moved away from WordPress enough to just coach and consult.
So this is the third place that Squarespace wins. Their code is also clean (perhaps not squeaky), and it’s consistent across all of their templates. You don’t have to install questionable themes or plugins to get it to work. All that functionality is built into Squarespace.
In addition, Squarespace keeps Google happy by automatically:
Securing all sites with SSL encryption,
Creating an XML sitemap,
Making your site mobile-responsive (with some tweaking), and
Making it easier to add alt-tags, page titles, page descriptions, and other SEO necessities.
None of that happens automatically in WordPress, so a lot of sites miss out because designers and DIY-ers either don’t know how to do those updates or don’t know how important they are.
Yes, bare-bones WordPress has clean, light code, but in practical, daily life, Squarespace almost always wins out because there are too many ways WordPress gets clogged up with SEO-sabotaging features, and too few people know how to avoid that.
And finally …
4. Squarespace Has More and Better Functionality
At a quick glance, it could appear that WordPress wins this, too, but again, stick with me here.
Because WordPress is open-source software, thousands of people make thousands of plugins to do all kinds of things. Anything, anything you want to do on a site, you can do in WordPress.
This is great if you want your own social network or you want to create a quiz with cats (I mean, I don’t know why you’d want to do that, but with WordPress, you can, so … yay?).
But the reality is that most people only want to do a few things on their website: sell products, build a list, and share content.
That’s it.
And those third-party WordPress plugins that provide all that functionality come with a cost—they all have to play nicely with both the latest version of WordPress and each other.
Over time, as WordPress updates, that plugin-palooza will need updating too, and as some suddenly stop working, you—or someone you pay—will have to go in there, troubleshoot the problem, and fix it.
This may or may not be easy because the team that built the broken plugin might not still be around. (Case in point, I was going to use this example instead of the cat quiz one above because doodles!, but it hasn’t been updated in years.)
And when the plugin that breaks isn’t a fun doodle machine but is something you’re relying on for your business, this process gets annoying and expensive. Fast.
It’s also worth noting that all those plugins and WordPress updates mean that it’s impossible to keep a WordPress site secure without constant maintenance and monitoring.
So you might be (slightly) limited by what Squarespace can do, but in all likelihood, it will do every single thing you want it to, and it will do it well, consistently over time.
You won’t have to stay on top of updates, take an afternoon off, or forgo this week’s disastrous attempt at a Hollandaise again to make sure that every element of your site is working well together. (Okay, that last one might actually be a benefit. I should just take a cooking class. Or buy it in a jar or something.)
In any case, Squarespace just takes care of all that for you.
Because Squarespace is not open-source, it all plays nicely together. Nothing exists on the platform that isn’t well-tested and functional, so your site stays secure and functional without you—or your team—having to babysit it. It’s low maintenance and stress-free.
And it’s not like Squarespace isn’t customizable at all. If you want to do something that’s not already in the builder, e.g. have something to show up on mobile, but not desktop, or vice versa, you can just jump into the CSS code and do it. See? Even code junkies can get a little fix if they want to.
To Sum Up:
Squarespace is the clear winner. It’s easy to use and simple to update, you don’t have to compromise SEO or functionality, and it saves you time and money you can spend on other things. What more could you want in a website platform?
Add to that, their templates are beautiful and effective, but if you need more than that and you’re looking for the help of a designer and marketing expert, why, (adjusts my tie and rather elegantly shoots my cuffs) I’m here for you.
