WordPress vs. Squarespace
Choosing the right website-building software is critical to the success of your online business. Many different factors are involved, including ease-of-use, cost-effectiveness, quality of support, and enough platform extensibility to make future expansion simple and scalable.
Two of the most popular options for content management these days are WordPress and Squarespace. Either can be used to create a visually appealing, functional, and responsive site that effectively increases conversions and generates leads. But of course, each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. Let’s take a look at some of these to help guide the decision making process.
A website can be beautifully built, engaging, and informative for users. But, will it be easy to add and update content, upgrade features, or customize page elements from the backend? Before committing to using either WordPress or Squarespace, you’ll want to know how customizable and upgradable your website will be as your business grows and changes over time.
Put the Tools to the Test!
Sometimes the best way to understand and actually experience something is to just try it out. This can be done with both Squarespace, who offers a 14 day free trial, and of course, WordPress has the free blogging platform WordPress.com, along with the fully featured open source software that can be extensively built upon, with WordPress.org.
WordPress core software and the ecosystem of themes and plugins that can be utilized for custom layouts and functionality are licensed under GNU General Public License. So, if you know some basics of coding, like PHP, JS, HTML, and CSS, you can modify, customize, and otherwise build upon every piece of the software that powers your site
Custom Squarespace?
As for Squarespace, the software they’ve created to power your website is more proprietary and restricted, which only allows for so much customization. They provide the ability to add custom CSS, and there are also Code Blocks for “custom code injection,” as they refer to it. It’s not an open source project that any developer can easily augment, build upon and even help to improve by contributing to the further development of the core software.
On the other hand, Squarespace does have a developer platform. Those who know code can have more control of the codebase for the sites they build. With some knowledge of command line, you can clone the Squarespace base template, install dependencies, and even develop locally on the provided development server. So when it comes to more extensive customizations, you’ll need some highly-skilled developers on hand.
One great example of an engaging, well-built website made with Squarespace is the corporate site for Bandsintown. The site brings together colorful gradient sections and parallax background images. Though it’s still quite a basic design, this example shines amongst the many other Squarespace sites that simply employ a template without much customization.
WordPress Really Stands Out
This is where WordPress really shines as a fully featured web development platform. There is a variety of pre-made themes and plugins to choose from. If you want something custom, you can also develop your own as well by contracting with one of the many WordPress experts out there.
And rather than only having one particular set of tools for local development, some open source options exist, such as Varying Vagrant Vagrants or XAMPP; and then there are also “Software as a Service” (SaaS) companies like Desktop Server or Local by Flywheel, which provide a graphic user interface for setting up local server configurations.
Being that WordPress powers such a large portion of the web today, it’s pretty easy to find great examples of unique and intriguing sites built with it. One such example that’s a similar space as the Bandsintown site mentioned above is Daybreaker.com. This site features a video header, colorful, sectioned page layouts, and a unique graphical navigation dropdown, and it’s built with WordPress. Though this particular site is made with a custom theme, as I’ve mentioned before, there are many pre-made themes for just about any type of site you might want to build.
In my own experience with working on client sites, I’ve experimented with quite a variety of site building tools, themes, and plugins over the years. It can be overwhelming at first, but what’s nice is that the core WordPress software provides a consistent experience on the backend with an Admin Dashboard that’s used for doing everything from adding blog posts and plugins, to configuring sitewide settings and selecting your theme.
Choices, choices… and Opportunities Abound!
If you’re a developer, you are likely already familiar with these tools, and many others that are available nowadays, as well. And if you’re running an agency, sometimes having more options isn’t always better. But when it comes to choosing what platform your site is built on, more choice means more opportunity.
WordPress now powers more than 35% of all websites on the internet. This isn’t merely because of marketing, but is rather due to the large community of supporters and contributors who help make the project what it is. This means that, not only are there more tools available for building and extending your website, but there’s also a lot more help available as well.
Everything Squarespace Has a Limit
The bottom line is that Squarespace is a highly managed platform with limited options and extensions available. While they do allow for custom code injection, provide developer tools for local development, and also have a “developer mode” function that can be utilized from the backend, even these tools have their limitations.
For instance, if you turn on developer mode and make changes to your template files, then later decide to turn this function off, many of your custom changes will be permanently deleted. Then there’s also the issue of data portability, which is also quite limited with Squarespace. But again, as with any code customizations, WordPress offers complete control over all your content and database information.
Now, if you were to decide to move your website from WordPress to any other CMS, you can fully export all your photos, videos, audio, text, posts, pages, databases…essentially every bit of your content; and you can simply move it elsewhere. However, with Squarespace, your ability to export is limited to just pages, galleries, and a blog page with all its posts. Your other content, including product and album pages, text, audio, and video won’t be exported so that you can easily move it to a different platform.
WordPress Is the Clear Winner
From the variety of tools available, to the flexibility of the core software, with all the support and sheer number of professionals available for custom work, WordPress really is the best choice for custom web development. There’s a much broader adoption of WordPress overall, and the community of users and developers built around it are really what give it such great value. At the center of all that sits an incredible open source software product that can be used to build anything!
While Squarespace does provide some development tools and even has a third party designer/developer matching service, the level of support, customizability, extensibility, and portability doesn’t even come close to what WordPress has to offer.
