WordPress Vs. Squarespace – Which One Is Better?

WordPress Vs. Squarespace – Which One Is Better?

WordPress and Squarespace both provide tools to create professional, visually appealing websites suited to ecommerce, article publishing, and corporate and non-profit needs.

What should you consider when choosing between them? Let’s identify the key differences between these platforms to help you determine which one best fits your goals.

Here are seven factors to consider when choosing between WordPress and Squarespace for building a professional website:

Evaluation of WordPress and Squarespace for non-coders.
Comparison of design options between both platforms.
SEO features.
Real-world website performance comparison.
Support for blogging and article publishing.
Suitability for ecommerce and business websites.
Limitations and strengths of WordPress and Squarespace.

Functionality

Key Features
Squarespace
WordPress

SEO Features
Easy to use integrated SEO tools and functionality; good for small businesses and individuals.
Advanced SEO options via plugins; greater flexibility for complex websites.

Performance
Strong Core Web Vitals performance.
Performance is entirely up to users. Plugins and themes can degrade performance.

Customization
Templates are user-friendly for beginners. It can be customized with custom code.
Virtually unlimited customization via plugins, themes, and code modifications.

Usability

Key Features
Squarespace
WordPress

Ease of Use
Simple drag-and-drop interface; ideal for non-coders.
Requires learning individual themes, plugins, and hosting.

Learning Curve
Minimal learning curve; intuitive design for beginners. Gets users online fast.
Higher learning curve, especially for advanced features and customization.

Support
24/7 customer support by email and chat. It also has a support forum community.
Plugins, themes, and web hosts offer varying levels of support.

Business Suitability

Key Features
Squarespace
WordPress

For Ecommerce
Integrated tools for ecommerce, order management, and analytics. Simple setup.
WooCommerce plugin and a vast ecosystem that enables everything an online store needs. Requires setup and configuration.

Blogging and Publishing
It easy to create a blog and categories and push to social media – everything in one place.
Virtually unlimited options for blogging. It can be as simple or advanced as needed.

Cost Efficiency
Predictable, all-in-one pricing.
Costs depend on hosting, plugins, and themes; can be more variable.

Reliability And Scalability

Key Features
Squarespace
WordPress

Software Maintenance
Essentially maintenance-free.
Users must manage updates, compatibility for plugins and themes, hosting, and security.

Security Risks
Secure, closed system.
Plugins and themes are responsible for minimizing the risk of vulnerabilities, which increases risk.

Scalability
Scales for high traffic but limited for complex, large-scale projects.
Highly scalable; supports enterprise-level complexity.

Suitability For Non-Coders And Beginners

WordPress is designed to be easy to install and set up a basic website.

Its “Decisions, not options” software design philosophy means that users are not required to choose technical options and configurations. All features within the core WordPress installation must be useful to at least 80% of users.

WordPress sites can be designed using the native Gutenberg blocks system, which allows non-coders to create websites from scratch without any coding knowledge.

Users can select from pre-made block patterns (page layouts) to create their website designs. It sounds simple, but a user needs to “read the manual” to understand how to navigate to the different parts of their WordPress installation to make all that happen.

Some web hosts integrate a step-by-step page-building experience that makes building a website as easy as answering questions.

Squarespace is a point-and-click solution for creating a website with zero coding knowledge.

The advantage of Squarespace is that it’s “out of the box” and easy to make a website without having to research plugins or web hosts.

Squarespace offers templates that serve as starting points for creating a website and a Build With AI feature that helps users customize their site.

Creating a WordPress website from scratch with zero coding knowledge takes a minimal amount of research about plugins, themes, and web hosting.

The benefit is full ownership of the developed website and control over the associated costs.

But if all you want to do is create a professional website and get going, then Squarespace is an obvious choice.

Should you change your mind, it’s easy to export the Squarespace content as an XML file and import it into WordPress.

Comparison Of Design Options

Both WordPress and Squarespace excel as platforms for creating professional websites.

Squarespace offers non-coders options for easily creating websites. Customers who require a more unique web presence can hire Squarespace experts – independent design professionals vetted by Squarespace – who can apply custom code and extend what is possible with the templates alone.

WordPress offers thousands of templates, plugins, and themes that publishers at all skill levels can use to create literally any kind of website. The design options offered through the WordPress ecosystem are unparalleled by any other platform.

Squarespace provides tools and templates for easy customization to beginners with no coding abilities. Users with advanced needs can choose vetted Squarespace experts for custom coding or customize it themselves.

WordPress provides a vast ecosystem of plugins, themes, and templates, supporting users at all skill levels to create any type of website with virtually unlimited design options.

For example, there are website builders like Elementor that provide a drag-and-drop site creation interface where page elements are simply placed on a page.

Other page builders like Blocksy make it easy to design high-performance websites using WordPress’s native Gutenberg block design system.

SEO Features

WordPress contains all the fundamentals of optimization for search engines without the need for SEO plugins in its original configuration.

It ships with the ability to make XML sitemaps, configure title tags and meta descriptions, generate clean URLs with permalinks, and rewrite URLs automatically when they change.

Its SEO functionality can be extended with plugins that automate technical tasks that make the site more easily discoverable and crawled.

For example, SEO plugins add Bing’s IndexNow technology, add structured data, embed Google Search Console data with the admin panel, add local search optimizations, image optimization, keyword tracking, and more.

Squarespace offers similar SEO functionalities that are integrated with every website.

If there’s a difference between WordPress and Squarespace, it’s that Squarespace offers virtually everything necessary to handle SEO within one unified interface.

Whereas in WordPress, SEO can be split between what’s in the core, built into a theme, provided by an SEO, and plugins.

Squarespace is an SEO winner because of its ease of use and simple implementation.

It offers a unified and organized approach to SEO that’s helpful for small businesses and individuals with limited coding experience. It’s also useful for agencies that manage clients on Squarespace.

WordPress offers more choices and greater freedom to extend a site and is capable of optimizing the most complex web presences.

How Each Platform Handles Structured Data

Lastly, adding Schema.org structured data to webpages makes them eligible for rich results in Google, which prominently highlight websites and draw extra attention to ranked pages.

WordPress doesn’t natively support Schema.org structured data within the core CMS installation. However, it is widely available through third parties as a standalone plugin and a feature of SEO plugins.

Most publishers who are concerned about SEO will install an SEO plugin and benefit from the built-in Schema.org structured data support.

According to the HTTPArchive Web Almanac, 41% of websites now use JSON-LD structured data, and 60% of pages use RDFa and Open Graph.

That relatively low usage percentage falls short of the 80% usage threshold required for WordPress to add a feature, which may explain why Schema.org structured data is not a built-in CMS feature.

Squarespace generates six kinds of structured data:

Blog post.
Event.
Local business.
Organization.
Product.
Website.

While the above structured data cannot be edited or removed, any other structured data not provided can also be manually inserted by page or on a sitewide basis if applicable. For example, recipe bloggers can manually add Recipe structured data.

Squarespace users with more complex needs can take advantage of the ability to leverage “coding blocks” to directly add HTML to the webpage.

Structured data deployment on WordPress is more flexible and comprehensive than Squarespace, and it has significantly more SEO options because of third-party plugins and themes.

Website Performance

Website performance influences the user experience, which, in time, can result in signals of satisfaction, helpfulness, and popularity that search engines look for as part of their ranking algorithms.

The WordPress CMS core is coded to high-performance standards and improves with virtually every new version release.

The WordPress Core Performance Team monitors and works with different developer teams to ensure that best practices are followed, resulting in faster-performing websites.

While the WordPress core is fast and high-performing, advertising scripts, tracking apps, and third-party themes and plugins can degrade core web vital scores.

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