Squarespace and 7 Other Platforms to Build your Website

This article has come to the rescue. If you are having a thought of moving to another eCommerce platform, here are our TOP 7 recommendations for Squarespace alternatives:

1. Shopify
2. Wix
3. Wordpress.org
4. Weebly
5. BigCommerce
6. Duda
7. Webflow

We’ll be clarifying both Squarespace's pros and cons and how other eCommerce solutions could be suitable choices to perfectly replace Squarespace.

Let’s get started!

Squarespace Overview

Squarespace is a website builder that is designed to help users create their own website from scratch without coding skills. Founded in January 2004, Squarespace is a hosted solution that is also known as a blog-hosting service.

This builder is suitable for photographers, art designers, artists, dedicated bloggers, and small size businesses that want their own site to look as stunning as things they present online. Accordingly, this builder offers affordable pricing plans to fit all kinds of users’ goals such as making personal projects, blogs, or running small online stores.

As a matter of fact, Squarespace is currently powering 2.6 million live websites and online stores (according to Builtwith).

Squarespace Pros and Cons

Pros

Templates and designs

- All templates are fully responsive to mobile, tablet, and desktop devices. Over 100 stunning and clean templates are professionally designed to ensure usability along with site performance.

Support

- You can contact Squarespace customer service via live chat and email. Thanks to live chat, you can get in touch and get your answer quickly and instantly. Furthermore, you can find almost everything in Squarespace’s FAQs and the knowledge base is super comprehensive.

Ease of use

- It uses a grid system and an available toolkit in which you can rearrange and drag every element strictly. Plus, for both IOS and Android mobile phones, you can still edit almost all aspects of your website, including pages, blogs, etc.

Pricing

- With a pretty good value Squarespace brings to users, you can get what you pay for. If you pay annually, you can save up to 30% for each plan.

Apps & Extensions

- Squarespace has enough extensions to run your business. Most of Squarespace’s extensions focus on boosting eCommerce features.

SEO

- Squarespace’s SEO is solid. You can edit title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, and URLs. 301 redirects are also possible with Squarespace.

Other features

- Blogging features: Squarespace’s strongest point. This builder has a feature-rich commenting feature, multi-author functionality, the ability to schedule posts, and AMP support. Especially, you can even host your podcast on Squarespace.

Cons

Templates and designs

- You'll not be able to switch to another template once you’ve picked it.

Support

- Telephone support is not available on Squarespace.

Ease of use

- Every change on your site will go live directly. And you can’t 100% freely customize your site due to its restriction.

Pricing

- Squarespace lacks a free plan.

Apps & Extensions

- Limited amount which is only 24 extensions available on Squarespace.

SEO

- Squarespace lacks an SEO checking tool, therefore, you have to do it manually.

Other features

- Only support one sub-navigation which means you cannot control a deep menu hierarchy. Therefore, it’s hard to create multilingual sites.

- Squarespace doesn’t have a backup and restore tool.

- In terms of payment gateway, Squarespace limits its providers as it only supports Stripe, Paypal, Square, and Afterpay.

- You can’t sell through many sales channels with Squarespace.

Squarespace alternatives

Considering its pros and cons, you may find Squarespace no longer suitable for your growing business, or unable to offer enough functionalities in the long run. Fully understanding the circumstance, let’s have a look at the top 7 Squarespace alternatives to help you choose a more suitable platform that better suits your goals.

1. Shopify - an eCommerce giant

The first Squarespace alternative that should be mentioned is Shopify for various good reasons. This hosted solution is powering over 2.3 million live websites globally with the aim to help merchants build their own websites and start selling quickly without technical skills.

In the battle of Squarespace vs Shopify, the latter has many advantages which make it the best alternative:

• Shopify offers more comprehensive support than Squarespace as it provides phone support.
• There are a hundred integrations and apps available for specific industry features, while Squarespace offers only 24 extensions.
• Shopify provides you more options when it comes to payment gateways - 100+ choices are available.
• You can easily run a dropshipping business, sell multi-currency using a built-in option or a third-party app.
• Shopify provides some extra features out-of-the-box includes Abandoned cart saver, Point of sale (POS) functionality, multilingual website creation.

If your aim is to create a large online store with automatic tax measurements, advanced functionalities, professional reporting, and analysis, then you might want to migrate Squarespace to Shopify to enhance your site’s functionality.

2. Wix - a user-friendly platform with great designs

Wix has risen to the top of the competition as a result of its fierce marketing campaigns for years. With over 4.5 million live websites using Wix, this builder can be your optimal alternative thanks to its drag-and-drop interface and all-in-all functionality for building your website or running a serious business.

Here are the top reasons why Wix could be a good alternative to Squarespace:

• Talking about price, Wix has various plans for you to choose from which are website plans along with business & eCommerce plans. Furthermore, this platform has a free plan which is the main reason why people choose Wix to start. And, there is no transaction fee charged on any of its eCommerce plans.
• Wix’s drag-and-drop editor remains its top-selling point as it gives you a chance to freely customize your website without learning how to code. Plus, there’s another way to create your website easier, which is Wix ADI. It asks some questions about your business and then presents a website for you automatically based on the information provided.
• Wix’s built-in features include a free email marketing tool that allows you to send email campaigns to your contact list and even create workflows to manage your own sales revenue. Also, this builder does offer abandoned cart recovery for every pricing plan you choose.
• With Wix, you can restore the previous versions of your website while Squarespace doesn’t have this backup tool. Best of all, the previously saved version can be restored without disturbing published blog posts.
• Other features that Wix also offers users include abandoned cart saving, product variant support, automatic tax calculation.

In a nutshell, Wix is a good all-rounder that does provide a lot of decent eCommerce features at a good price which can be your best fit for your small business.

3. Wordpress.org - A top-notch blogging platform

According to Builtwith, WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Currently, WordPress is powering over 28 million live websites which means this can be a reliable home for your business.

Let’s head to the reasons why WordPress.org can be your Squarespace alternative:

• WordPress is more suitable for building any type of complex website than Squarespace. Furthermore, you can create your website with deep levels of navigation which is very suitable if you have lots of pages on your website.
• WordPress’s SEO is much more flexible and comprehensive than Squarespace. First of all, WordPress allows you to use a wide range of sophisticated SEO plugins like Yoast SEO which assesses the quality of your on-page SEO and suggests improvements if needed. Additionally, you will be able to add rich snippets without a fuss using WordPress.
• A thousand WordPress extensions and plugins are available to help you add functionality to your site. You can create a multilingual site as well as the option to sell in multicurrency.
• If you use WordPress, you can have full control of content which means what you put on your site is completely up to you. Meanwhile, with Squarespace, your blog might be removed if it conflicts with their acceptable use policies.
• In terms of content management and blogging, WordPress comes with content versioning and you can roll back to any of them at any point. Furthermore, in WordPress, you can edit the underlying code when editing your content or freely use categories and tags in a more flexible way.

WordPress’s learning curve is steeper and requires coding skills. Hence, it takes time to learn how to use this platform. But once you know the way around everything, you will have full control over what you make with WordPress. Especially, you can find almost every extension with specific features to extend your site possibility by choosing from a thousand plugins. WordPress is definitely an excellent Squarespace alternative.

4. Weebly - The easiest website builder

It’s undeniable that Weebly is worth being one of the suitable Squarespace alternatives thanks to its ease of use and better value for money. Weebly is considered the easiest website builder in the eCommerce industry. The answer lies in its simplicity and user experience while providing sufficient toolkits for almost all basic needs to create a website. As a result, this hosted platform has brought home over 1 million live websites and is still growing more in the future.

Here’s why you should choose Weebly as a Squarespace alternative:

• Weebly has a free-to-use plan without a time limit, but with ads. However, thanks to its free plan, over a million users choose this builder as a destination for their website.
• When it comes to support, you can contact the Weebly support team via email, phone, and live chat to get your answer ASAP.
• Weebly’s designs and templates are super flexible, compared to Squarespace’s restrictive system. Every single element can be edited, including even the depth of navigation, social icon color, header font, etc.
• Creating a website is greatly intuitive with Weebly. You can edit whatever you want by clicking on the element from the left sidebar and dropping it anywhere. Plus, the editor is well-organized and you don’t need to struggle with the hidden buttons or strange icons. One more thing that makes Weebly the best fit for your demands is that it offers both drag-and-drop features and underlying code customization which make it even more flexible and powerful.
• Unlike Squarespace, Weebly allows you to access a multi-level sub-navigation and submenus which will be great news if you have plenty of pages on your site.

With that being said, Weebly is suitable for mindful individuals or small businesses looking for the easiest and quickest way to build a website from scratch with little effort. It has a plethora of features and can do a bit of everything from blogging to eCommerce.

5. BigCommerce - a cloud-based eCommerce platform

Being one of the top 20 website builder software, it’s reasonable to bring BigCommerce on the list of Squarespace alternatives. This platform is mainly designed for retail businesses of all sizes that lets you create an eCommerce website using customizable themes and manage sales through a centralized dashboard.

Let’s see why BigCommerce is worthy of being a Squarespace alternative:

• This builder is completely suited to those who want to get more sales in different countries because BigCommerce is equipped with multi-currency selling features.
• In view of POS options, BigCommerce brings more POS integrations to enhance your sales performance. It also gives you a chance to connect to several POS systems such as Square, Vend, Hike, Clover while Squarespace only allows you to use Square.
• If you want faster support, then BigCommerce can be your perfect choice as it provides more methods of contacting the help center, and crucially, offers phone support, which Squarespace doesn’t. Moreover, BigCommerce brings an easily accessible “contact” option on your dashboard which allows you to see its support team’s contact details more quickly.
• Obviously, BigCommerce is better than Squarespace in terms of eCommerce function by providing more advanced selling features, a wider selection of payment gateways, dropshipping systems, etc.

If your primary objective is selling products, then BigCommerce is nearly always the better bet compared to Squarespace. With more options concentrated specifically on selling goods, BigCommerce is a better alternative for scaling up your online store.

6. Duda - a great platform for marketing features

As you may know, Duda was one of the first website builders that offered mobile-responsive templates way before anyone else did. You can find it unequal when letting Duda be a Squarespace alternative, but this platform opens up a more personalized experience to users by offering built-in features such as multiple languages and dynamic content features.

You can use Duda over Squarespace as it has marketing automation for websites. You can freely display and personalize your content to visitors based on their specific behaviors. This can be one of the coolest features that hardly any other platforms have.

Furthermore, Duda willingly lets its users customize their theme while Squarespace doesn’t. Almost all Duda’s templates are regularly updated in terms of advanced features. Apart from niche templates, there is also an opportunity to pick a blank template and customize it from zero by using the extensive set of design customization parameters Duda comes with.

7. Webflow - a tremendous platform for designers

The last Squarespace alternative that is brought to the table now is Webflow. The platform is specifically designed for developers and designers with a certain base of coding skills. Therefore, this platform is less user-friendly than most competitors. And you should keep in mind that Webflow doesn’t support any eCommerce features yet, so you will not be able to sell things online.

But why choose Webflow over Squarespace? As mentioned above, Webflow is only suitable for tech-savvy users by giving you greater control over your site look, therefore, you get more flexibility than any other website builder. In addition, your website design can be exported as code, which means you can integrate your design into other applications. And that’s why Webflow’s backup tool is available.

Final Words

In this article, I have pointed out the top 7 Squarespace alternatives and the reasons why they are worthy of being the best choices. All the Squarespace alternatives are excellent in some ways but making the right decision depends on your demands. Hopefully, this article has the information that you are seeking and has helped you make the right choice.

If you’re currently having a Squarespace site and might want to move to a more robust one, it’s important to carefully choose a proper shopping cart migration service that can meet your expectations.

Good luck!