Squarespace vs WordPress: Which Is Best for You in 2023?

Which Is Meant For You?

Squarespace is a website builder, while WordPress is a content management system (CMS). Here’s what that means:

• Website builders are all-in-one tools that include everything you need to create a website, from designer templates to hosting. You don’t have to know anything about code, and your whole site can be managed in one place. This makes Squarespace the more beginner-friendly platform.
• Content management systems are more advanced software, made for handling larger websites with a lot of data. You can fully customize these websites, but only if you know how to code. You’ll also have to find a hosting provider yourself, but you’ll end up with more storage space and scalability. This makes WordPress the more powerful platform. 

Further Information

• Read our Squarespace Review for a fuller look at this builder’s ease of use
• How hard can it be? Read our WordPress.org Review to find out more about this popular platform

Which Is Better for Beginners?

The Winner

Ease of Use: Squarespace is Better

With a 4.4 out of 5 rating in our user testing, Squarespace takes the lead as the easiest to use out of these two platforms. You can easily modify your design, while WordPress requires coding. This makes Squarespace much more beginner-friendly, as you can simply drag and drop features onto your pages.

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Squarespace: Easier but Less Flexible

Squarespace is easier to use than WordPress because:

• It requires no coding skills
• You can preview changes in real-time as you make them
• It has a drag-and-drop template editor

However, you can only customize limited parts of your site’s features, which can be restricting when you want to let your creativity flourish!

Wait, What Is Drag-and-Drop?

By drag-and-drop, we mean you can move different elements (like text boxes and images) around on the page to customize the layout. Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor goes by section, so you can move different elements around within a block on the page.

This is called “what you see is what you get” editing. It makes it super easy to make changes, because you’re seeing exactly what visitors will be seeing once your site is live. As one of our user testers said:

“I felt like I was great at making websites but really it was just Squarespace doing it for me!”

Whenever we’ve used Squarespace in the past, we’ve been impressed by its stylish templates and fast setup, and this has only gotten better as time goes on, with Squarespace’s ease of use score rising 11% in our rankings from last year’s 4 out of 5 to this year’s improved score of 4.4 out of 5. 

In fact, Squarespace’s dramatic rise of ease of use across UX, SEO, grid-based layout, onboarding, and templates lead to some interesting comments from our testers…

“Never thought I’d say this but I found it easier to use than Wix.”

said one user, while another commented,

“My page ended up looking so much sleeker and neater than when I used Wix.”

Yep! Squarespace wowed our research testers so much that they put it above Wix, something that has never happened in all five years of our testing! 

WordPress: Harder but More Customizable

WordPress is harder to use than Squarespace because:

• Code and third-party plugins are often needed to customize pages
• You do your editing in the backend, meaning you can’t see your changes as you make them

Making changes in the backend is like flipping switches backstage. You can walk around to the front to see which lights you’ve turned on, then go back behind the curtain to change those settings.

This can be really disorienting for a beginner. But the payoff is that WordPress is very customizable, because editing the actual code of your site opens up a whole new world of possibilities – you won’t have to stay within the confines of a premade template.

If you’ve got money rather than coding skills, you can hire a developer to help you at around $100 per hour. This will raise the cost of your website, but reduce the amount of tech you’ll have to deal with yourself.

Which Has Better Templates?

The Winner

Design: Squarespace is Better

Squarespace templates are consistently higher quality than WordPress templates. This is why Squarespace scores an impressive 4.7 out of 5 in our design category – the highest out of all the builders we’ve tested. And while WordPress offers tons of customization, you’ll have to be pretty comfortable with code in order to really make a WordPress template shine.

Squarespace’s huge improvements in user experience since we last tested it have only strengthened its design prowess where it scores a perfect 5 out of 5 in UX, image editor, and the flexibility of its design.

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Choosing a Template

If you want a website builder but don’t want to compromise on design, don’t worry: Squarespace’s designer templates are clean, modern, and professional. 

It’s really easy to change the colors of your chosen template, and even add different pages as you go. With 100+ to choose from, Squarespace’s templates cover a variety of categories from online stores to blogs. In the past, specific features would be locked to templates, like adding videos to pages and certain form types. This is no longer the case, because Squarespace now has these features permanently available on all its templates, freeing up your customization options. 

WordPress has more templates (also called themes) than Squarespace – in fact, it has thousands – but they’re not all as expertly designed as Squarespace’s. In other words, you’ll often have to do a lot more work yourself to make the theme into something stunning!

Customizing Your Template

Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor lets you easily add galleries, slideshows, video backgrounds, and more with just a few clicks. And if you’re feeling a little more advanced, you can use the built-in custom CSS editor, which lets you apply custom code to your template. With Squarespace, coding is an option, whereas it’s almost mandatory with WordPress.

Of course, WordPress has quite rightly made a name for itself in this area, giving you ultimate control over your website. It may not be quite as easy as drag-and-drop, but there are no limits on what you can change in your template. For this reason, we’d recommend designing a website using WordPress if you don’t mind starting from a blank canvas.

Further Information

• Discover the Best Squarespace Templates in our handpicked selection

Which Is More Affordable?

The Winner

Pricing: WordPress is Better

Considering WordPress is completely free itself, it’s no surprise that the open-source platform scored a nice 4.8 out of 5 rating for value for money. Still, you can’t really get a site live without paying for additional services like web hosting. You can pick and choose some of these additional costs, though, which gives WordPress pricing some really nice flexibility.

Squarespace has four pricing plans, ranging from $16 to $49 per month. These prices cover everything you’ll need to get a site live.

Compared to other builders on the market, Squarespace gives you a lot for what you pay for. Just $16 per month gives you access to unlimited bandwidth, a free custom domain, and SEO features to get your site seen! In our research, we gave Squarespace 4.6 out of 5 for value for money, an increase of 15% from last year’s 4 out of 5 score.

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Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace offers 4 premium pricing plans, ranging from $16-49 per month (billed yearly).

If you sign up to an annual plan, you can save between 25% and 30% compared to a monthly plan.

Here’s what you need to know about each plan:

• The Personal plan is the cheapest, and gives you everything you need to create a stylish website
• The Business plan supports basic ecommerce – for example, if you just want to sell a few items on the side – and comes with more marketing features than the personal plan
• The Basic Commerce plan is specifically aimed at online stores selling more than a few products
• The Advanced Commerce plan is built for growing an online store, and includes plenty of powerful ecommerce tools

WordPress Pricing

WordPress is a free platform, but you’ll still need to get your wallet out to help cover other aspects of your site. The most important cost is web hosting. 

WordPress will require you to sort out your own hosting, which generally costs around $7 per month (roughly $84 per year). WordPress recommends using either Bluehost, DreamHost or SiteGround (click to read our reviews of each host). Bluehost is our top-rated WordPress hosting provider, scoring an impressive 4.8/5.

These are the other common costs to anticipate when starting a WordPress site:

• Themes: While some themes are free, for top quality, it’s worth thinking about investing in paid themes ($30-$80)
• Plugins: WordPress plugins can add all kinds of additional features to your website, from email marketing to ecommerce checkout tools ($15-$50)
• Domain names: Squarespace gives you a free domain for your first year, but with WordPress, you’ll have to purchase your own domain name from a third-party registrar like Domain.com ($10-$12 per year), or pick a hosting provider that offers a free domain for your first year (like Bluehost)
• Developer costs: If you’re building a large and/or complex website, you may even want to hire a developer, which could end up costing thousands of dollars

Because a WordPress site has so many moving parts, it’s hard to give a definitive answer to how much it really costs. The good news is that this model is very flexible, so you can choose cheaper themes and plugins in order to stay within your budget.

Further Information

• Read our Squarespace Pricing Review for more details on this builder’s plans
• Read our WordPress Pricing Review to learn more about how to budget for your WordPress site
• We recommend Bluehost for a great value WordPress host – check out our Bluehost Pricing Review for more details

Make Sure You Get Found Online

The Winner

SEO: It’s a Tie!

Both WordPress and Squarespace score full marks in our SEO-specific testing. While WordPress is known for its powerful SEO capabilities, Squarespace prides itself on having more built-in features. By installing SEO plugins on WordPress, you can call on powerful tools like Yoast. But if you want built-in features and much less work, then Squarespace is the better choice.

Squarespace SEO

Squarespace has built-in SEO tools, including:

• Customizable meta titles and descriptions: These are the title and paragraph that describe a page in Google search results
• Customizable URLs: You can clean up your URLs to make them more readable to search engines (for example, squarespace.com/pricing is a clean and simple URL!)
• Image alt text: Alt text just describes what an image is showing, and it makes your website more accessible because anyone using a screen reading tool won’t have to wonder what each image shows. Alt text also helps search engines understand the purpose and relevance of each image.
• Page redirects: If you change a page’s URL and someone tries to visit the old one, Squarespace will let you automatically send them to the new one!
• Automatic sitemaps: A sitemap is a list of the different pages on your site, designed to help search engines figure out how they’re all related. Squarespaces generates one of these for you automatically.
• Hide a page: If you don’t want a certain page to show up on search engines just yet, you can simply hide the page from Google! 
• Control social image: You can control which image appears alongside your content when someone shares it on social media.

All of these tools are totally integrated, meaning you won’t need to download any extra plugins to access them. Squarespace has really improved its SEO capabilities since we did our last round of testing. It scores a perfect 5 out of 5 for SEO and went up a whole point in marketing from 4 last year to 5 out of 5 this year, an increase of 25%!

WordPress SEO

WordPress websites come with some built-in SEO features, but most of the platform’s impressive power comes from its arsenal of SEO plugins – which you’ll have to install yourself.

For example, the Yoast SEO plugin has a five star rating from over 25,000 reviews, and has over 5 million active installations. Yoast guides you through the best SEO practices, from creating cornerstone content to adding keywords and meta descriptions.

Further Information

• Discover our Top 15 WordPress SEO Tips to help your WordPress site rank in search engines
• Wondering if Squarespace is really good enough for your SEO needs? Check out our full Squarespace SEO Review

Which Has More Built-In Tools?

The Winner

Features: Squarespace is Better

In terms of website features, Squarespace has high-quality tools included in its website editor, earning the platform an awesome 4.6 out of 5 rating. Because of how much WordPress relies on third-party plugins, it doesn’t offer as many built-in features to help you out. If you do want to make the most of its potential, you’ll have to install more third-party plugins yourself. This is why WordPress dropped down our research rankings with a score of 2.2 out of 5.

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Squarespace Features

Squarespace comes with more built-in features than WordPress. These are just a few of the ones we found most useful:

• Analytics: Track website visits, traffic sources, visitor geography, and more
• Social accounts: Import content to your site from social platforms like Instagram and Twitter
• Social feeds: Embed feeds from your social accounts directly onto your site
• Podcasts: Host a podcast on your Squarespace site, and publish it to Spotify or Apple Podcasts
• Blogging: Categorize and schedule posts to make content easier to navigate
• CRM: Manage and take online bookings and schedules with new and improved customer management tools

You don’t have to install extra apps or plugins for any of these features – all you have to do is select them from your dashboard! And if you do want to install extra apps, then Squarespace has a new and improved app store waiting for you! In our most recent round of testing, we found that it’s got loads more apps to choose from, experiencing a 100% increase in score, jumping from  its old score of 2 out of 5 to a new score of 4!

WordPress Features

WordPress is known for its powerful tools – the only catch is that you have to install most of them yourself. Still, you’ll get some great stuff included, such as:

• Customizable designs
• Publishing tools, such as scheduling
• Password protected pages
• Multiple contributors
• Image editing tools
• Comments management
• Multilingual site options (70+ languages)

Beyond this, you’ll want to check out the seemingly endless amount of WordPress plugins to add more features to your site.

Which Has More Extra Features?

The Winner

Apps: Squarespace is Better

While WordPress certainly has the most plugins to choose from, with over 59,000 free plugins, Squarespace’s recent improvements to its app market have seen its crop of quality third-party integrations get even better. In our research, Squarespace sees a 100% increase in scores going from an initially low 2 out of 5 last year, to a 4 out of 5 in our recent research, overtaking WordPress’ 3 out of 5.

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How Do They Compare?

Think of Squarespace like a restaurant. Your food is prepared and cooked in-house. Your waiter knows the menu inside out, and is there to answer questions. You can pick and choose what you want, but all the food arrives from the Squarespace kitchen.

WordPress is more like a fancy buffet. It has dishes from different places and different kitchens. You don’t know exactly where most of these dishes were made, and some are better quality than others.

With WordPress, you have to put the dishes together yourself. This is perfect if you know which flavors work best together, but the waiter can’t answer all of your questions, because the food was made somewhere else.

Either way, you can end up with a delicious meal – it’s just a question of how you go about it!

WordPress Plugins

WordPress is an open-source platform, meaning that its codes are open for anyone to use and customize. Developers or programmers can use WordPress to create their own tools (such as templates, themes or plugins) to share for free, or sell to other WordPress users.

There are tons of WordPress plugins – 59,000 and counting – covering practically every function you can imagine. You can add contact forms, open comment sections, improve your Google rankings with SEO plugins, or even use WooCommerce to sell through your WordPress site… the possibilities are endless. There are both free and paid plugins available.

Squarespace Extensions

Squarespace comes with a good selection of apps already built into your site, including tools for blogging, tracking performance, and displaying images. In other words, there’s no downloading or updating necessary on your end.

And if you do find that you need additional functionality, Squarespace has a separate app market called Squarespace Extensions. The third-party apps available there are much higher quality on average than WordPress’s, but and while there are used to be only 24 to choose from, there are now 31. It’s a quality over quantity type situation in which Squarespace really provides!

Which Is Better For Selling Online?

The Winner

Ecommerce: Squarespace is Better

Out of all the ecommerce builders we tested, Squarespace made our top three with a 5 out of 5 overall rating. Its sales features are all built in, so so it’s a lot easier to start selling right away on any of its ecommerce plans. With WordPress, you’ll have to install a plugin before you start selling, but it can give you a more powerful store than Squarespace.

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If you want to sell online, you can! Both Squarespace and WordPress have the tools to let you create a powerful online store. Squarespace lets you create an all-in-one store, with all your sales tools at your fingertips. WordPress relies on plugins like WooCommerce to add ecommerce to your site.

Selling with Squarespace – All-in-One

Squarespace gives you everything you need to start selling online already included, as long as you’re on the Business plan or above. All sales tools are fully integrated, meaning your online store will look totally seamless and professional. For additional shipping and tax functionalities, you can also browse the Squarespace Extensions marketplace.

The Business plan is designed for small stores, and charges a 3% transaction fee on every sale you make. You can create promotional pop-ups, sell unlimited products and accept donations, have a professional email and more.

For serious selling, you’ll need to upgrade to an ecommerce plan – you can choose from the $27 per month Basic Commerce plan, or the $49 per month Advanced Commerce plan. With these, you unlock a whole range of advanced ecommerce features, including:

• 0% transaction fees
• Inventory, orders, tax, and coupons
• Label printing
• Product listings on Instagram
• Gift cards
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Video storage 
• Subscription selling 
• Advanced web analytics

All of this is automatically included – you don’t need to install, activate, or update anything to access these features. Just upgrade to the best plan for you and start selling!

Selling with WordPress – Plugins

WooCommerce

You can create a really powerful online store on WordPress using the ecommerce plugin WooCommerce. WooCommerce is specially designed for WordPress users, to help them sell online!

Because it was built for WordPress, you don’t need to worry about WooCommerce not being compatible with your website or your plugins – it’s easy to install, as well as free!

WooCommerce has every tool in the box, making it a powerful way to kick-start your ecommerce business. Some of those features include:

• Digital and physical products
• Payment and shipping options
• Hundreds of themes
• Inventory management

One of the main benefits of WooCommerce is that it’s totally customizable – so you can align your branding, sell whatever products you want, and even integrate ecommerce with powerful blogging tools.

If you already have a WordPress site, then WooCommerce is the clear choice. If you’re looking to set up an online store from scratch, then Squarespace can give you a professional site in about half the time.

Further Information

• Read our Squarespace Ecommerce Review for an in-depth look at its sales features
• Intrigued by WooCommerce? Our full WooCommerce Review explores its pros, cons, features, and more
• Compare the Best Ecommerce Platforms on the market to help you choose the best fit for your business

Which Is Better For Bloggers?

The Winner

Blogging: WordPress is Better

WordPress was built with blogging in mind. Every WordPress site includes commenting abilities, plus helpful plugins to achieve creative, content-heavy blogs. Squarespace has solid, built-in blogging tools, but it just can’t beat WordPress in this area.

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A blog is a great way to connect with your audience or simply document your work online. But not all websites are built to display a regularly updated stream of articles. Squarespace and WordPress are both up to the task of supporting a high-quality blog, but they offer slightly different tools to help bloggers create a website.

Squarespace Blogging Tools

One of Squarespace’s best blog-friendly features are its free blogger templates. Users can pick from a variety of modern interfaces that display blog posts on the homepage either in a single reverse chronological feed or in a more compact magazine-style grid of blog posts. Many allow multiple authors to contribute, making it easy to run a blog with friends or coworkers. Don’t worry about external authors having access to the whole site – Squarespace lets you set permissions, so you have ultimate control over who can do what.

Within Squarespace, you can manage daily workflows and use the dashboard to categorize, publish, and tag blog posts as you go. They can also be excerpted, and a link to each new post can be automatically sent to social media feeds like Facebook and Twitter.

In other words, Squarespace lets you accomplish all the basics needed to easily operate a sleek blog. In our research, it scored a prefect 5 out of 5 for blogging capabilities.

WordPress Blogging Tools

Like Squarespace, WordPress has plenty of free templates aimed at bloggers. The service also has built-in features that include all the tagging and categorizing ability a blogger needs, and a variety of plugins to help bloggers connect to social media.

For serious bloggers who want to design their own look, WordPress also lets users access HTML directly — an ability Squarespace doesn’t make available. Granted, you’re unlikely to need to go into the code very often thanks to the plugins the website platform lets you use, but it’s there if you need it.

Another big differentiator is the blogging community that WordPress has to offer. Anyone with a WordPress account can comment on any other WordPress blog, provided that blogger doesn’t disable the ability. Since WordPress already powers nearly a third of the websites on the internet, there are plenty of WordPress accounts that might stumble upon your blog and leave a comment without any of the friction of needing to log into a new commenting account first.

Further Information

• Compare the Best Blogging Platforms to see how WordPress and Squarespace compare to the rest of the market
• Discover 16 of the Best WordPress Blog Themes for inspiration on getting started
• No matter which platform you choose, our beginner’s guide on How to Start a Blog will come in useful!

Can You Work from Your Phone?

The Winner

Mobile: It’s a Tie!

This really comes down to personal preference – Squarespace gives you more options when it comes to mobile apps, while WordPress offers a fuss-free single solution. Both offer apps for iOS and Android that are free to install.

Squarespace: Plenty of Options

Squarespace offers four different mobile apps, all with different key functions:

• Analytics (iOS and Android) – View key statistics for your website
• Blog (iOS and Android) – Write, edit, share, and manage blog posts
• Commerce (iOS and Android) – Manage your store
• Squarespace App (iOS only) – Update pages, add images to galleries, write and edit blog posts, review pages, and track analytics

For actually editing pages, you’ll need the Squarespace App, which combines certain functions from across the other three mobile apps. The Squarespace App includes functions such as writing blog posts, adding images, and reviewing traffic analytics. This way you can play around with your site on the go. 

You can easily download any of these apps for free, from either the Apple Store or Google Play (depending on your device).

WordPress: One App for Everything

For managing your WordPress site on the go, you’ll need WordPress Mobile Apps. There are different versions of this available for iOS, Android, and desktop devices, and it lets you update blog posts, track your site’s stats, keep up with notifications, and more – all from the palm of your hand.

All you need to do is install the right app for your device (it’s free!) and you’re good to go. Simply connect the app to your website, and say hello to on-the-go management.

How Time Consuming Are Updates?

The Winner

Maintenance: Squarespace is Better

All of Squarespace’s updates are managed for you, while WordPress updates need to be done manually.

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WordPress: Keep Your Eyes Peeled

One important thing you should know is that WordPress is continuously updating its platform to fix bugs and improve security. This means that whenever it rolls out updates – which could be multiple times a year – you may also need to update your WordPress site.

This becomes something of a headache, because not every plugin or theme developer will do you the favor of updating those tools for you. And without the required updates, those tools could potentially:

• Harm your site’s performance
• Conflict with the updated version of WordPress
• Crash your site

Some reputable developers will take care of updates for you, but you can’t count on that being the case, and will have to use your own time to check whether all of your tools are actually up to date.

Basically, when you receive a notification from WordPress to update your version of the site, check for conflicts with other tools and themes first.

Squarespace: Sit Back and Relax

With Squarespace, ongoing maintenance is simple. All updates are tested and then pushed to your website automatically. Squarespace takes care of the process for you, so you can focus on designing your site.

Which Platform Is Safest?

The Winner

Security: Squarespace is Better

The main difference here is what happens if something goes wrong. If Squarespace is under a DDoS attack, it’ll let you know while its in-house experts sort everything out for you.

But if you install a faulty or malicious plugin to your WordPress site and get hacked, you’ll be putting out those fires on your own.

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Squarespace Security

Squarespace takes care of security for you, checking for malware and protecting against DDoS attacks (DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service, an attack where a website is flooded with traffic to make it unavailable to real users).

It’s important that Squarespace keeps an eye out for this, because while its popularity has risen, it has also become a target for DDoS attacks – indeed, if you disrupt Squarespace’s platform, you can disrupt a lot of websites.

Three main ways Squarespace protects your data: 

SSL Certificates – Squarespace website traffic is encrypted via SSL so you and your visitors are protected. It also prevents things like hackers impersonating your site or stealing information. It’s even more essential if you’re selling through your website, because it helps protect customers’ payment details.

GDPR – A vital feature for those selling to EU countries, Squarespace reviews how customer data is stored. You also have built-in editing tools that let you post your own privacy policies on your site. 

Cookies – Delicious and important! Squarespace uses cookies to help your site run more efficiently and securely.

WordPress Security

With WordPress, security is your responsibility. This includes sorting out your own SSL certificate, carrying out regular backups, and periodically updating your WordPress site. There are plugins to help with some aspects of running your site, but ultimately it’s down to you.

WordPress isn’t as much of a target for DDoS attacks, but a lot of your security strength will depend on the hosting provider you choose. Some providers, like Bluehost, include free SSL certificates and automatic WordPress updates to help you manage your security.

Do You Own Your Site Content?

The Winner

Content Ownership: WordPress is Better

Both platforms offer roughly the same (good!) deal. However, WordPress wins because its status as an open source software means you’re completely free from licensing terms – although it’s wise to check if the same is true of your hosting provider.

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If you create a website through any online platform, it’s a good idea to check up on their content ownership policies: You don’t want to accidentally give up the rights to your own work, after all.

The biggest online companies know that they can’t steal content without a huge backlash, of course, and both Squarespace and WordPress try to keep their customers as happy as possible. Here’s how each company approaches the content ownership issue.

How Easily Can You Move?

The Winner

Migration: It’s a Tie!

Both platforms allow you to migrate your site, giving you the freedom to leave if you want.

Yes, you can migrate your website to a new platform, whether you want to move from WordPress to Squarespace or the other way around. That said, it’s usually harder to export content than import it, so migration won’t always be a hassle-free task.

You can’t migrate audio, video, product pages, or the styling of your website. That’s the same with both WordPress and Squarespace, so you’ll need to redesign your site when you migrate.

Migrating from WordPress to Squarespace

So how easy is it? Well, Squarespace has a built-in import tool for moving your WordPress site across, as well as helpful guides to walk you through each step. It’s pretty straightforward – set up a Squarespace site, pick your design, then use the Advanced import option to transfer content from your WordPress.org site.

Make sure you disable any plugins first, and transfer using .xml files.

Squarespace will import all of your:

• Blog pages, posts, and authors
• Comments
• Categories and tags
• Images
• Attachments
• Site Pages

Migrating from Squarespace to WordPress

Exporting content from Squarespace is a little more tricky. If you don’t already have a WordPress site, you’ll need to set one up (including finding hosting, installing WordPress, and registering or transferring your domain name).

Once you’ve done this, you can export your Squarespace content. You’re more limited in what you can export from Squarespace – here are the main things you can move across:

• Regular pages
• One blog page and all its posts
• Gallery pages
• Image blocks
• Text blocks
• Comments

So, you’ll have a lot more work to do if you’re moving from Squarespace to WordPress. But Squarespace still gives you step-by-step guides to help you complete your migration. How simple or complicated it is will depend on the content of your site, for example if it’s an online store.

What's the Customer Service Like?

The Winner

Support: Squarespace is Better

Much better! While Squarespace has actually dropped its score by 5% from its previous perfect score of 5 out of 5 to 4.8, it’s still one of the best-tested builders for help and support with an in-house support team available over live chat and email. With WordPress, you’ll have to rely a lot more on the community forum for help.

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Squarespace Support

Unlike WordPress, Squarespace has a centralized support team available to help you via:

• Live chat Monday – Friday
• Email 24/7
• Free online webinar sessions
• Twitter 24/7
• Community forum (for specific advice)

This team has also developed a library of help guides, workshop videos, and a community forum to help you build your website.

We mentioned earlier that Squarespace’s help and support score has dropped slightly after our most recent round of testing. Why is this the case? Well, it comes down to our “Help vs Price” category. In general, most builders have increased in price due to factors such as increased competition and inflation, and we like to test whether their offerings have increased or stayed the same. So while Squarespace has increased in price, its help and support have stayed the same, unlike Wix which actually increased its help and support along with price. Hence, the lowering of Squarespace’s support score to 4.8 out of 5 this year from its previous 5 out of 5.

WordPress Support

Because WordPress is open source, there is no in-house team that you can contact for official help, hence why it only scored 1.3 out of 5 in this category. Instead, you can browse WordPress forums to see what other users and developers have written about different topics.

There are tens of thousands of articles, so you’ll almost always find a relevant article for your questions. That said, some answers will be more helpful than others.

If talking to a real person is important to you, and you’re using WordPress, then it’s best to use the support offered by your hosting provider – for example, Bluehost offers 24/7 phone support.

Overall, we recommend Squarespace over WordPress. There are a few main reasons why Squarespace should be your go-to choice: 

• It’s a lot easier to use, with no coding skills required
• You get to choose from stunning designer templates
• There are far more built-in tools, so you don’t have to go searching for any

WordPress is, of course, a great choice for customization and taking your blog to the next level, but Squarespace gives you a fair amount of creative freedom whilst offering a helping hand along the way.

Let’s do a quick recap so you can pick the perfect platform for your needs: