Building a website with SquareSpace in 2026

The next review in our series looking at online website builder tools. As with the rest of this series, it’s been done by my 12 year old son, who’s technical – but 12, so doesn’t have any business experience or much experience of online systems.

I recently tried using SquareSpace to create a website for a made-up business, Magenta Interiors, in order to see what it was like as a website builder. These are my findings for anyone who is looking for a good website builder to use to start their business.

To begin with I went to their website and created an account. I was met with no credit card input required, so I just started making my website. After Squarespace asked me a few questions about my business and goals, I was presented with a choice: create my website with AI, or from a template. Now, every other website builder I have used has had an ABSOLUTELY rubbish AI for creating websites, so I thought I’d give Squarespace a go to see if it could break the mould. And break the mold it did! It might’ve been AI who designed my site, but I was given lots of choices for the pages, with a range of stylish layouts to choose from for each one. I could select the font and colour scheme, and it was all going really well. After not too long AI was finished, and I was prompted to add some SEO to my site (which, at this point, I hadn’t yet seen properly). It only took a few clicks for AI to generate alt text and metadata for all of the images and pages that it had given me. Then, I entered the “editing bit” (I don’t know what it is actually called) and things started to go, ever so slightly, downhill.

On other website builders, they automatically give you a skippable tutorial on how to use the interface. On Squarespace they didn’t. I found out later that all of the tutorial videos were on the Squarespace homepage/dashboard, you just needed to scroll down a bit. It would have been fine, if my “Edit” button hadn’t been really buggy. I wanted to edit my site (that seems reasonable right?) but every time I pressed the button that said “Edit”, nothing happened. I Googled it, and you are supposed to just be able to press “Edit” and start dragging text boxes and putting in blocks, etc. But for some reason, for me, it didn’t work. The problem was easily worked around though, I just had to refresh the page and suddenly everything started working. My site automatically came with some “System pages.” These included the 404 page, a lock screen for if one of your pages was password protected, and more. These pages were easily customisable, but looked perfectly fine in their default form anyway.

I could change my site theme easily enough, I just needed to press the little paintbrush icon on the top right of the screen. But I feel like, if I hadn’t randomly clicked it, there was no indication whatsoever on how to change your colours (although this was covered in the tutorial videos I mentioned earlier). One thing that I really couldn’t figure out was how to add links to the header. I could edit the header (once I got the edit button working), but I couldn’t add links to it. This was annoying, because under “Pages” on the sidebar there were two categories, linked pages and not linked pages. For some reason, my “Services” page wasn’t linked, and I couldn’t figure out how to add it to add it to the header. I’m sure it is very easy if you know how to do it, but for me it really wasn’t clear. Even Google wasn’t helping. It was claiming that there was an “Add Link” button that appeared when you edited your header’s navigation, but there really wasn’t (as far as I could see).

Adding a blog was easy. I chose a page layout, then deleted some of the AI example posts that it came with and added my own. You could use the infamous “Edit” button to enter text and images into your blog. There was an option to make your blog a paid subscription as well.

I was given a randomly generated domain name for my site, which kind of sucked (it was “ray-octopus-6dlp.squarespace.com”). I had to pay to have a Squarespace website at all though, and if you chose to pay annually you get a free custom domain for your first year. After that, the domain must be renewed separately in addition to your Squarespace subscription.

Overall, I think Squarespace is an intuitive (once you’ve watched the tutorials) and capable website builder, but it does come at a non-negotiable price (there is no free plan).