Squarespace versus WordPress

For those of you heavily invested in blogging, the natural platform of choice is WordPress.  Free and easily customizable, WordPress gives you so many options in terms of creating the look, feel and functionality of your blog and website.  But after four years of managing my SMB blog which gets about 8,500 unique visitors a month, I moved over to Squarespace in April 2015.  And for the most part it has gone well with some caveats.  My goal was to have a simpler administrative experience so I could focus on content which is what I got.  But that wasn’t without some drawbacks on Squarespace.  Here’s how I see the two platforms…

Squarespace

Pro’s 

• Easy to learn and use with an elegant interface
• Visually well-designed templates, good for high-quality images
• Built-in content delivery network with fast page-load speeds
• Responsive design for our mobile visitors
• e-Commerce engine and shopping cart built-in
• Contact forms built-in
• Automatic software updates that have gone through QA, easy to manage

Con’s 

• Migration tool decent but imperfect, will require lots of hand edits to move over
• No SEO description or title easily available for blog posts.  Impacts clickability of posts showing up on search engines
• Social sharing limited and flat, recommend use of add-on
• No media library, must upload image multiple times for re-use
• Presentation of blog posts and drafts is columnar, not tabular.  Not easy to navigate with a large number of posts

WordPress

Pro’s 

• Thousand’s of hosting options available at different companies, prices
• Ton’s of template options but of varying quality
• Huge library of plug-in’s for additional feature/functionality
• Ability to get “under the hood” to edit your pages and posts
• Easier to manage a large number of posts
• Great statistics and metrics available as part of platform

Con’s 

• Steeper ramp-up to learn interface and capabilities of platform
• Need to update platform regularly and potentially break parts of website
• Great choice of plug-in’s but of varying quality
• Getting responsive mobile version to work properly can be tricky
• If CDN needed, must manually add for heavy traffic websites

In the end, Squarespace is an excellent blogging platform for the price but just be aware of its limitations. If your website is image-heavy and you need an online store, Squarespace is an easy choice. However if you’re more about text content and SEO results are crucial for you to drive traffic, WordPress may still be a better choice. The ability to leverage WordPress’ vast library of plug-in’s to get exactly what you need and edit the blog post under the hood is a powerful advantage.  There’s no right answer when it comes to your website and blogging platform, just be aware of what you get and what you give up!

Ron

www.linkedin.com/in/ronwen