Which is better WordPress or Squarespace? Comparing Price and Value

Choosing the right tools to build your website is extremely important to help you achieve your goals online.

For some people, making this choice might be a little bit challenging because they don’t know which tool offers better flexibility, functionality, ease of use, and more value.

In today’s post, you are going to learn which is better WordPress or Squarespace, to help you build your website.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular web content management system that powers millions of websites on the internet.

In the beginning, it was created as a blogging platform; as time went on, it evolved to help people publish other web content, from simple blogs to complex e-commerce sites and a lot more.

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace is one of the best all-in-one website-building platforms that allows people to build professional websites with a few clicks by using pre-built website templates and drag-and-drop elements to create and modify webpages without needing to code or have extensive technical knowledge.

Which is better WordPress or Squarespace, to build a website?

When choosing between Squarespace and WordPress, I will say Squarespace will be the winner. Because it is always considered the easiest to use for building websites compared to WordPress. WordPress makes it easy to build a website, but not as easy as Squarespace.

Here are some of the factors that make Squarespace the easiest.

User interface:

With Squarespace, you will be able to customize your website with a drag-and-drop builder that makes the process simple and easy to create and customize your website. Squarespace is designed to be accessible and straightforward for beginners.

Integrated platform:

With Squarespace, you don’t need to buy a hosting plan or domain. Squarespace is an all-in-one solution, and it takes care of everything for you, so you don’t need to worry about anything like hosting, design, or some other necessary functionalities.

Templates:

People who are using Squarespace to build their websites have access to some professional design templates that are mobile-responsive, so users can choose templates according to their needs and preferences to customize their websites without dealing with complex settings.

WordPress

On the other hand, it is a little bit more complex than Squarespace, but not that much.

Remember, we are talking about wordpress.org, not wordpress.com. For instance, to build a WordPress website, you will need to buy a hosting plan and domain.

Which is better WordPress or Squarespace, for blogging?

WordPress and Webflow both allow people to add blogs to their websites.

When it comes to determining whether WordPress or Squarespace is better for blogging, it depends a lot on your goals, needs, preferences, and technical knowledge.

Let’s dive deeper into the comparison in the lines below to help you understand the blogging features and templates of both platforms, so you can make your own choice easily.

Squarespace for blogging

With Squarespace, you can create a blog post with just a few clicks and design it without being a web developer expert. It provides a beautiful design template that is mobile-responsive to make sure your blogs look great on any kind of device.

While Squarespace allows you to create and manage your blogs easily with drag-and-drop elements, it might have some limitations if you want to go deeper into the customization compared to WordPress.

WordPress for blogging

Since the beginning, WordPress has been a blogging platform. It has evolved so people can create different kinds of content. First, it offers all the standard options you might have with Squarespace, plus advanced options.

With WordPress, people have unprecedented flexibility to create blogs; they have access to a lot of themes and plugins to customize their blogs and add some more functionalities and design elements. which makes it better than Squarespace, because with Squarespace you can’t add third-party elements like plugins; you have to go with what they provide you.

WordPress makes it easy to organize, categorize, and display blog posts efficiently. When you use WordPress for your blog, you will have access to robust SEO plugins and features to help you optimize your blog for on-page SEO and also for search engines.

Which is better WordPress or Squarespace, for SEO?

SEO is one of the most important things you need to do to drive traffic to your website and increase your revenue. You might be spending money on ads, but to stay in business for a long time, you should have SEO as a backup plan.

Yes, it does take time, but it is organic traffic that will cost zero dollars to get a new customer every day.

Wait, I don’t say SEO is free to do, because you will need to pay for some SEO tools to help you grow and improve your journey.

What I mean is that when you rank on the first page of Google, chances are excellent that people are going to visit your website every day, even when you don’t run ads. Both WordPress and Squarespace allow for SEO capabilities.

Squarespace for SEO

Squarespace offers built-in SEO tools to help you cover the basics like meta tags, clean HTML layout, meta description, title, and customizable URLs. But, unfortunately, you don’t have the flexibility you have with WordPress to add third-party plugins to help dive deeper into your SEO journey.

One of the best things about Squarespace is that the template you are going to use to build your website is naturally mobile-responsive, which is important for search engines to index your pages and also for SEO ranking.

If you already have experience with SEO, Squarespace might be a good idea for you, and it is also straightforward for people who are new to SEO by offering just the basic SEO features.

But for a better SEO experience, it has some limitations, which unfortunately make it a little bit less competitive with WordPress.

WordPress for SEO

When it comes to SEO, WordPress might be what you are looking for. Its flexibility to add third-party plugins and other functionality to help you improve your SEO is what makes it stand out from the rest of the content management systems.

WordPress offers all the basics that Squarespace offers, plus more advanced options to grow your website and take it to the next level. You have full control over your website; you can add third-party plugins or edit the source code of your website.

Whatever is best for you, you can do it. Some plugins, like Yoast SEO, Rankmath, and All-in-One SEO, will help you not only work on your SEO but also become a better SEO expert.

According to my experience with WordPress, with these plugins, you will have almost everything you need to do on-page SEO, which is one of the main SEO ranking factors.

If you want to dive deeper into SEO and become an SEO expert one day, I would strongly recommend you go with WordPress.

But if you are already familiar with WordPress, you can go with Squarespace because you have everything in one place (I’m talking about the basics of SEO), even though you have some limitations, so there is no need to add third-party plugins, which might be a little bit of extra work.

Squarespace vs. WordPress: which one is best for e-commerce?

If you want to have an e-commerce website, WordPress might be the best option for you because of its flexibility to add some third-party plugins.

If you are going to choose between Squarespace and WordPress for e-commerce, there are several factors to consider.

Let’s see:

WordPress for e-commerce

WordPress is great for e-commerce websites, especially when paired with WooCommerce, which is one of the most popular e-commerce plugins and provides extensive customization and flexibility for online stores.

When using WordPress for your e-commerce website, you will have access to numerous plugins and themes available, so you can customize your website according to your needs and specifications.

With WordPress, you can add payment gateways easily without paying any transaction fees; only the one your payment processor charges you. You can have a lot of payment gateways on your website so that people can pay you easily, and you won’t miss any opportunities.

It will be a great idea for you to choose WordPress if you want to have access to extensive customization, scalability, and a highly personalized and feature-rich online store.

Squarespace for e-commerce

Squarespace allows people to build e-commerce stores; it offers an intuitive interface for setting up an online store without technical expertise.

However, in comparison to WordPress, it is extremely limited when it comes to e-commerce.

If you want to integrate payment gateways, you will have access to only three. You will undoubtedly need to have this on your website; otherwise, customers won’t be able to pay you.

Paypal
Stripe
Apple pay

You can choose Squarespace for your e-commerce website if you are a beginner and want a simple setup process without dealing with separate services.

For a small e-commerce store, it might be a great idea to go with Squarespace. But keep in mind that Squarespace has a transaction fee of 2–3% besides your credit card processing fees unless you upgrade your e-commerce plan to a more expensive one. which is bad.

Squarespace vs. WordPress: which one offers a better price?

Squarespace offers straightforward prices, while WordPress’s prices are a little bit unpredictable. But it doesn’t mean Squarespace is cheaper than WordPress; it is the same for WordPress, so we can’t say it is cheaper than Squarespace either.

Squarespace pricing

It offers pricing plans that include hosting, design templates, and customer support.

That being said, the prices are straightforward, starting at $23 if you are paying monthly, but if you are paying annually, the price starts at $16 to $49 per month, which might be a lot.

Squarespace provides a 14-day free trial, but it doesn’t offer a permanent free plan as most of the other content management systems do.

WordPress pricing

WordPress itself is free; it is a self-hosted platform, so you will only need to pay for domain registration, hosting fees, and some other fees for themes and plugins.

For instance, a domain might cost you around $10 per month, but some hosting providers offer free domains when you buy a plan with them.

For instance, Hostinger is one of the best hosting providers, and they offer free domains.

Their plans start at less than $4 per month, and they also offer free domain registration.

For themes and plugins, WordPress offers a bunch of free themes and plugins you can use to create a great-looking website.

But if you want to have more functionalities and flexibility, you can pay to get the paid version of your themes and WordPress plugins.

For instance, Element Pro might cost you around $59 for 1 year, and Astra Pro might cost you around $47 for 1 year. If you have both paid versions, you’ll be able to create great and super-professional websites.

It might cost you around $150 per year to manage your WordPress website, while it might cost you more than $150 for just the basic plan with Squarespace without buying advanced features.

WordPress’s pricing might vary widely depending on what you want and your goals.

Squarespace vs WordPress: Maintenance

With Squarespace, you don’t need to worry about maintenance because they automatically take care of that for you, as well as some tasks like updates, security, and backups.

This will surely save you time and reduce the amount of maintenance you need to handle by yourself, so you can rest assured.

Even though this ease of use is convenient, it also means you have less control over the finer details of maintenance compared to WordPress.

On the other hand, with WordPress, you are going to be responsible for security, backups, and updates, which means you have full control over your WordPress website. You will need to regularly update the WordPress core, plugins, and themes to ensure security and functionality.

For backup and security, you will need to use third-party services or plugins; for example, Wordfense is one of the best for security.

To be clear, Squarespace simplifies maintenance by handling most tasks for you, but with less customization. With WordPress, you have more flexibility and control over your website, but it requires more hands-on maintenance to keep it secure and updated.

Conclusion

To sum it up, choosing between WordPress and Squarespace depends on your personal goals and needs.

If you don’t care about flexibility and just want to create a simple website as quickly as possible, Squarespace might be a good idea to go with, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create a simple website with WordPress as quickly as possible.

Keep in mind that if you choose Squarespace, you will lose control over your website’s content and won’t be able to customize it as you want it to, which means you will face some limitations if you want to take your website to the next level in the future.

But you will save time on maintenance and try to secure your website yourself.

If you want to build a complex website where you will be able to customize it as you want it to be, even though it might require a little bit of technical knowledge, WordPress should be the one to choose.

Be aware that with WordPress, you’re going to be responsible for whatever happens to your website because you’re going to be the one who’s responsible for the security and backups of your website.

After reading this blog, according to you, which one is better, Squarespace or WordPress?