Why This Brand and Web Designer Chooses Squarespace

As a business owner, deciding on a website hosting platform is just another running to-do on your never-ending task list. It’s often the trickiest decision at the beginning of your online presence journey.

Let this brand and web designer help you out! For me, choosing a website hosting platform comes down to what reaches my client’s goals and suits their needs.

I’ve built on a variety of different platforms through my journey as a web designer. From Shopify to Showit, and of course, the ever so famous, WordPress!

While ultimately, all those platforms have plenty of pros (and cons). Squarespace remains close to my heart. Here are four reasons why I love developing on Squarespace (or a love note to Squarespace, whichever you want to call it):

Simple to use and easy to maintain

As the most fundamental design school lesson says, keep it simple, stupid. And Squarespace does not fall short of that design principle. Their easy-to-use and navigate user interface is why I am a huge advocate of developing websites on the platform. It’s intuitive to the point that someone without any to little knowledge of design and technology can make small changes confidentially. Other platforms also have an overwhelming amount of widgets that you may not need, while Squarespace has the perfect amount you need now and more for when you scale. I would like to note that it’s not as robust as WordPress, but for small to mid-sized businesses and solopreneurs, it provides more than enough. That is why you really need to evaluate what your business goals are.

Optimized for mobile

With the internet being accessible literally wherever you go, your website must be optimized for mobile. At the beginning of 2021, 54.8% of global website traffic was generated by a mobile device. Squarespace is responsive so that means your whole website is optimized for anyone who views your website from their mobile, tablet, or desktop. Not to mention, having a mobile-friendly website puts you in the good books with not only website visitors but also Google. If your website has an all-around good user experience (aka content, design and functionality across all devices), Google will favour your website’s SEO.

SEO best practices are already instilled

You may have read that Squarespace is lacking in SEO but that is further from the truth. Before we dive deeper, I just wanted to note that SEO has pillars. There is on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO. Squarespace actually has built-in SEO features that use all the best practices. While you may need an SEO expert in the future, having these straightforward SEO features right at your fingertips makes all the difference when you’re starting off. Examples of the SEO features on Squarespace are site map, SSL certificate, clean HTML markup, automatic tagging, clean URLs, automatic redirects, search engine and page descriptions, accelerated mobile pages (AMP), built-in meta tags and more. You can read more about what Squarespace does for SEO here.

Security at the fore-front

You’ve probably heard many people say it before: “if you ever open a site up, always choose WordPress!!” When people say that WordPress is number one because you actually own your site. For example, if Squarespace left tomorrow, you would lose your site. But in WordPress’ case, you won’t. But the reason why you don’t technically own your Squarespace site is because their developers are constantly checking if everything and ensuring your website is 100% secure by taking care of the security loopholes. In a more technical term, Squarespace is a closed-source platform and WordPress is open-source. Any open-source software makes their code publicly available for everyone to modify, which allows programmers to modify that code through widgets, hackers from all over the world to access it because as a small biz owner you don’t have the means to outsource a developer to check or learn yourself. And that’s amongst other things. That doesn’t happen in a closed-source software like Squarespace since only in-house developers get access to the code and run the updates for you. Perfect for a soloprenuer or a small team.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg! Squarespace offers many more great features and they are always updating their platform and keeping up to date to have the highest standards in the digital world. This doesn’t mean I dislike other platforms though, I still recommend Shopify, Wordpress and Showit for certain scenarios. But Squarespace still reigns at the top of my totem pole for myself and who I work with.

Give it a try and get 20% off of a Squarespace plan here*! And if you have any questions about your Squarespace website, I offer strategy calls on various topics, one including Squarespace. Feel free to book a call here.

*Affiliate link. If you decide to make a purchase for a Squarespace plan, I receive a commission (at no cost to you, of course!)