Squarespace

Squarespace is a popular web development and hosting platform for small businesses looking to build their website or e-commerce site. Continue reading to learn more about what Squarespace can do for small to medium companies looking to create an online presence. We also cover use cases for Squarespace, compare similar tools, and give practical advice on how to get started with Squarespace. 

If your customers can’t find you online, chances are you’re losing out on your best business opportunities. Tools like Squarespace can get you up and selling very quickly, even if you’re not an experienced web developer or do not have the resources and time to hire an experienced developer. With a choice of beautiful website templates, Squarespace lets you use a simple drag-and-drop interface to customize your site to reflect your brand.

The business and commercial plans let you sell products, services, or digital downloads online, take bookings, make appointments, and much more. Squarespace provides information for inventory management, facilitates online payments, and integrates with major shipping partners to arrange deliveries.

It’s a one-stop solution for business owners who want to get started with selling or managing their business online.

Squarespace doesn’t have a free option, but the no-credit-card-required free trial lets you evaluate the software and begin building your website. You can’t publish the site or link it to a domain during the trial period, but you can preview it and experiment with all other features.

All subscription plans include web hosting and an SSL certificate, and the annual subscription includes the first year’s domain registration fee. You can explore the right pricing plan for your business needs here. 

Squarespace is ideal for small to medium businesses who don’t want to spend a lot of time and money to get a commercial website up and running. Even if you have no previous experience with website development, you can create an attractive and fully functional site within days.

Squarespace caters for most types of business, and offers functionality for:

• Creating an online store
• Showcasing portfolios
• Advertising services
• Offering memberships and subscriptions
• Taking bookings and making appointments
• Hosting videos, downloads, text and audio for online learning platforms
• Offering discounts
• Marketing campaigns
• Blogging

It offers good search engine optimization and site analytics. Site security is excellent, and Squarespace has a first-class record when it comes to keeping your site up and running at all times. Support is available via email or online chat, and they have a reputation for resolving issues quickly and efficiently.

All pages are automatically optimized for mobile, which adds significantly to SEO ratings.

It’s a one-stop solution for any business that wants to:

• Develop an online presence
• Sell goods or services online
• Attract site visitors through SEO-optimized blogging

If you’re based in the United States, you can also use Squarespace for your point of sale, accepting either cash or credit cards.

Here are a few suggestions to improve your website:

• SEO optimization: If your site is not optimized for search engines, no one will find you. Squarespace has provided an excellent article on how to make sure your site is SEO-optimized.
• Include social media buttons: Social media buttons are a great way to interact with your visitors. Read this article to find out how it’s done.
• Speed up your site: If your site loads too slowly, visitors will get bored and give up. Google also penalizes slow sites when it comes to search engine ranking. You can measure your site’s loading speed with the free tool GTmetrix.

If your site is too slow, Squarespace has provided good advice on how to improve its loading speed.

You can speak to an IT expert to see if Squarespace is the right tool to address your business needs and/or also hire a Squarespace expert to build the website for you. 

Squarespace is a great solution for small to medium businesses that want a commercial website. It may not be the best solution for simple informational websites or for very large online retailers.

Comparison of options for simple informational websites

Squarespace doesn’t offer a free option for simple websites. If you don’t need to link a domain to your site, and you’re not too concerned about search engine optimization, the following platforms offer free options that allow you to set up a website using a simple-to-use interface:

• Wix
• Weebly
• Wordpress.com

However, if you want to connect to a custom domain, all of these sites require a subscription fee. 

Comparison of options for large retailers

Squarespace was primarily designed as a website builder, with eCommerce options added later. If your business is very large, you may like to look at a few of the dedicated eCommerce sites to see if they are a better fit. These sites sacrifice the ease of use typical of Squarespace in favor of more comprehensive retailing solutions.

These web hosting services offer more comprehensive features for large commercial applications. However, Squarespace is improving in this area with each new release, so this may not always be the case.

Let’s compare Squarespace to popular eCommerce sites Shopify and BigCommerce. This comparison ignores Squarespace’s plan, as it’s not suitable for business use.

Since Squarespace offers a no-strings-attached 14-day trial period, most businesses begin with this to get a good feel of whether Squarespace is the right solution. You can’t link a domain or publish your pages during the trial period, but you can see previews for both desktop and mobile. 

You can convert to a subscription at any time during the 14 days, but if you don’t, the pages you’ve created will be lost.

To get started, go to the Squarespace home page: https://www.squarespace.com.

You may like to first scroll down the page, where you’ll see more details of what Squarespace can offer. When you’re ready, click the ‘GET STARTED’ button on the top right, which always remains visible. This begins your 14-day trial and lets you start setting up your site.

You’ll then be asked to make some choices, which will let the site decide which templates may best suit your needs. If you want to, you can skip all the choices. This will simply offer you the full list of available templates. 

Once you’ve created your account, you’ll see the site dashboard, and you’ll be able to start customizing your pages with your text and images.

At this point, it’s well worth watching some of the get-started videos, which are linked from the Squarespace support page. They’ll take you through every step of the editing process, so you’ll soon become proficient at creating a beautiful website.

If you’re a retailer, you can set up your products manually using the editor, but this is time-consuming. If you have lots of products, it’s best to use the CSV import feature to import them in bulk. This is especially true if you would like to extract the products automatically from your inventory system.

Once all this is done, you can go ahead, publish your website and start selling. 

Most SEO experts recommend publishing a regular blog on your site. This Squarespace article explains how to create and maintain a blog.

Unfortunately, you can’t directly migrate your existing web pages to Squarespace, since it stores pages in its custom format. You will have to go through the steps of creating the website layout from scratch from one of the Squarespace templates, and it may not look the same as the old site. Fortunately, the page creation process is quite quick and simple. 

What you can do is:

• Transfer your domain to Squarespace
• Import your blogs from WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr
• Import your products directly from Big Cartel, Etsy, or Shopify, or import them indirectly via a CSV file from other platforms.
• Import podcasts from WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr

It’s worth reading this Squarespace article, which guides you through the process of migration.

Online payments are processed via either Stripe, Paypal or Apple Pay, so you would need to be registered with one of these financial services.

You can include extension blocks in your site to embed external content such as:

• Flickr, Instagram or Dropbox galleries
• Youtube or Vimeo videos
• OpenTable restaurant bookings
• Google Maps
• Tracks and playlists from SoundCloud
• Post syncing from Facebook and Instagram
• Shipping cost calculation based on UPS rates
• Domain and email connection from Google, GoDaddy and Namecheap
• Form connection on your page via Zapier to Slack, ConvertKit and Salesforce
• Images from Getty or Unsplash
• Amazon affiliate tracking
• Visitor activity tracking for targeted Facebook ads
• Google Analytics tracking
• Subscriber list building with Mailchimp
• Post sharing on social media

Third-party extensions are available to connect your site to various external services, including:

• Accounting systems
• Inventory systems
• Print-on-demand services
• Marketing channels
• Shipping services
• Dropshipping

Squarespace allows you to bulk import product details from a CSV file, so you can easily extract data from your existing inventory system. The latest version allows up to 10000 products per import, each with up to 250 variants (e.g. color, size). Older versions are more restrictive.