How easy is SquareSpace to use?

A question I am so often asked, is what website builder tool or platform should a small business or sole trader use when they’re just starting out and want to build their own website. My answer now a days is usually SquareSpace, depending on a few factors, so I thought I’d do a series of tests on the leading platforms, so as to help you compare which was best for you.

Today I’m starting with SquareSpace.

How much is SquareSpace?

The cheapest tier on SquareSpace is currently £12pm IF you pay annually… if you want to pay monthly, it’s £16pm. As someone who runs a web development agency, I’d say that was super cheap as I’d need to charge you that in hosting alone (if you’re not sure what hosting is make sure you’re subscribed to read a definition in another email another day), and then you’d need to pay me a lump sum to actually build your website in the first place. But I appreciate any monthly cost isn’t to be sniffed at and when you’re just starting out, £16pm can still sting. If you pay annually, the cost will include your domain name, if you don’t you’ll need to pay for that separately (which they’ll walk you through).

SquareSpace give you 14 days from when you create an account to get your website all set up, and to be honest, if you’ve thought about your content at all and prepared any photography and copy, you’ll probably sit down and do it in a few hours. Actually setting up the site is all done for you, it’s just populating the pages which can take a while – it’d be easy for me to say you’ll do it in an hour, but in reality I know how tricky it can be to choose the right photo for the right spot when you’re doing something for a real business rather than just going through the motions for a test or demo.

Getting started with SquareSpace

So the first thing you do with SquareSpace is choose your design. They’ve got an AI template builder or you can just choose a template. I thought choosing a pre-built template sounded easier and I wanted this guide to focus on the easiest way to get you up and running, so I went with that.

To be honest, their designs are a bit funky, but I thought I’d stick with it:

I selected Quincy as I could imagine a lot of my clients liking the familiarity of a big hero image:

Once I’d selected it, I was kinda on my own for a moment there… The first thing I did was try clicking on some text on the screen to edit it but nothing happened… so then I headed to the side menu… and then I saw an “edit” button at the top of the page.

I’d say you can select the Edit button or the “Setup Guide” link at the top of the left hand menu to get started. If you go with the Edit button, then mouse over the header of your page and you can change the top of your site, which is pretty much the main key area as it’s where you’ll write your name and include your navigation. I had the option to upload a desktop and mobile logo, but keep in mind this could COMPLETELY change the look and feel of your design so if you’ve got a logo already, only choose a design template that’s going to compliment it.

When it comes up updating your navigation, you can’t do that until you’ve created the pages you want in it. So clicking to edit the actual links at the top isn’t something you can do initially – you need to sort your pages out and come back to that.

You can play around for ages with the stylings, changing fonts and spacing – but if you’re just starting out you might just want to leave it as the design had it, rather than mess it up and then not be able to get it back to how the designer thought it looked best.

Creating and managing pages in SquareSpace

By default, SquareSpace will set you up some pages. You can delete these, or edit them. Also be aware it may create you a page with sub-pages – such as the Work one in my example above. When I went to edit that, at first it was just showing me (in the left hand panel) the 2 sub-pages it had created as work items – in this case, portfolio items called people’s names (I guess it was a wedding photography site template) – which could be confusing if you felt you were wanting to edit an actual “work” page. A “Work” page is actually just a page that lists individual items of work. Clicking the + symbol at the top of that left hand panel lets you add more projects / items of work, or clicking on the cog lets you change the title of the work page and it’s SEO settings (more on that later).

Adding a page in SquareSpace can be very prescribed, in a good way, where you select what sort of page you want to add and you go from there. Or you can select to start a blank page and add blocks of content.

In the left hand panel, you select whether your page is one that sits in the Navigation, or is “Unlinked”. You can click on a page and drag it to reorder them, and you can actually drag something from the Navigation list to the Unlinked list if you accidentally build it in the wrong section or decide to move it.

To delete a page, which you especially might have to do if you want to be rid of one of the pages it makes by default, you mouse over it from the main left hand panel (which you can get back to by clicking “WEBSITE” at the top of the left hand side) and click on the bin icon:

Creating a blog in SquareSpace

Something that can be hard to find in SquareSpace is how to create a blog. Ends up, you just have to create a new page, and from the list of page types, scroll down to “Collections” and select “Blog”.

SEO in SquareSpace

This is much better than it used to be, as you didn’t used to be able to give pages their own title tag and meta description (I don’t think) and now you can, so that’s great. You can also choose if search engines should be blocked from a page. Simply click on the cog icon next to each page and select the SEO tab. To learn how to formulate the best title tags and meta descriptions, take one of my SEO courses.

Creating a mailing list in SquareSpace

To make SquareSpace a real “one stop shop” you can create a mailing list of contacts within SquareSpace, and tag and manage those contacts. You can choose to send them newsletters, or promotions, all based on their interactions or the way you’ve categorised them. It has the feel of something that will hit some brick walls if you really tried to push it as far as something like MailChimp, which is designed for the purpose of emailing, but if you’re just starting out and looking for something easy, then this might be more straightforward than a full CRM / specialised mailing list system.

Other features of SquareSpace

I really like that you can customise your 404 page, so you can lead people to somewhere else if they land on a URL that doesn’t exist:

You can also password protect pages, on a page by page basis, which is a nice little extra. There’s an announcement bar – ideal for letting people know, site wide, when you’re closed for Christmas, add pop ups, and you can enter your own code into the header which means you can add tracking code such as Google Tag Manager. Developers can also add their own custom CSS.

SquareSpace in summary

Any hosted solution – by which I mean, a system where a developer doesn’t have access to all the code and you don’t have to pay for hosting – is going to be a little prescriptive in what it’ll let you do, but I think SquareSpace is a really good compromise. It can do A LOT – I haven’t even talked about how you can add a shop and memberships and even courses. If you want the freedom to do anything you want on your site, then SquareSpace might frustrate you, but if you don’t want to spend the earth and you just want to get up and running then give SquareSpace a try. The interface is very slick and whilst it borders at times on “too cool for school”, I think you get into it. I certainly didn’t encounter any bugs or lagging so it was a good user experience. I’d be interested to know how you found it?