WordPress vs SquareSpace

SquareSpace is a wonderful tools for startups and businesses on a budget to build a beautiful and high-performing website.  But, SquareSpace isn’t a CMS.  It’s a website builder.  Here are some important differences between WordPress and SquareSpace you should consider before making a choice for your business.

It’s Apples VS Oranges Bicycles VS Race Cars

SquareSpace is a website builder, like Wix. You are essentially leasing your website and constrained by what its owners will allow it to do.  WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) so you have as much control as you’d like and you OWN it—forever.

WordPress is King among CMS

As a content management system, WordPress is king. It already powers about a third (32%) of every website on the Internet, and for good reason.

It holds 59.5% market share. A distant second place, Drupal has 5% market share. 60.7% of all websites using a known content management system in 2019 use WordPress. Of the top 1 million websites, WordPress powers 316,805 of them. SquareSpace powers 12,331.

Unlimited Designs > 9 Template Families

Everything on SquareSpace is based on a template, which you can customize, but not totally redesign. There are 9 template families offered by SquareSpace currently. WordPress has literally thousands of themes available and professional web designers have the ability to build you something totally custom.

SquareSpace is Not as Extendable

SquareSpace doesn’t support much in the way of extended functionality or third-party integrations the way WordPress does via Plugins.  There are more than 54,000 free plugins on the WordPress.org repo and thousands more paid plugins available. Developers can also write custom ones very easily to accomplish client-specific tasks or integrations and then release that code (with client permission, of course) for the community at large to use, as we’ve done in the past.

SquareSpace is (Ironically) Sticky

Exporting functionality is limited with SquareSpace to make their solution more “sticky.”  Ironically, the export feature supported is to export your SquareSpace website to WordPress.  Lol.

WordPress, on the other hand, comes with import and export functionality built-in and many more options added via plugins.

That means, if you go with SquareSpace, you can only move to WordPress. If you go with WordPress, you could move to just about any other CMS you want in the future.

Is WordPress Secure?

WordPress is open-source, unlike SquareSpace, which means anyone can download the source code and look for vulnerabilities and, because it’s so popular, it’s a favorite target for hackers. However, because it’s so popular there are all sorts of security systems you can choose from to make your site secure. You just have to install them. The top ones are WordFence and Sucuri.

These can make your self-hosted WordPress site enterprise-level secure. That’s why big names like TechCrunch, Wired, Bloomberg, Sony, Walt Disney, BBC America, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Mercedes-Benz, the U.S. Department of Defense blog, and even the White House use WordPress.

So, is WordPress secure?  It is if you secure it.

Flexible Pricing; Scaleable Hosting

WordPress itself is free to download, use, and build upon. You only pay for web hosting—which you can choose from. That gives you a lot of flexibility and scalability as you can choose from all sorts of web hosting providers and plans around that world.  With SquareSpace you can choose from a few different subscription plans.

It’s Nobody’s Fault

Comparing these two is a little unfair.  Again, WordPress is a CMS.  SquareSpace is a website builder.  SquareSpace has limited the choices to make their solution simple for the vast majority of their target audience.  WordPress has opened up their API and even the core code development to a community of developers around the world so it can be configured to do pretty much anything–if you know what you’re doing.