Squarespace is one of the few trusted online web developer platforms. This online platform enables developers and amateurs to make use of the numerous functions and features it has to offer. It is specially tailored for designers having specific demands. This makes it user-friendly and unorthodox. Squarespace came into existence in 2003 and in these 19 years, it has become one of the best content management websites giving tough competition to other content management systems of its genre. Before reviewing the features of Squarespace, let us start with a brief overview of this premium website builder.
What is Squarespace
Whether you are a blogger or a professional website developer, Squarespace has the right tools to offer. To make the design process easier, accessible, and time-efficient, it helps in creating appealing, functional, and effective websites with the least effort. The availability of numerous professional templates makes the work easier and more interesting.
You can customize Squarespace to get a unique personalized look. A Squarespace designer can create personalized Squarespace templates for his website. With Squarespace themes ranging from clean and sophisticated to playful and hip, you will be able to get the exact look you desire. You can create Squarespace themes that will help your website or blog stand out among all the contenders.
While working with Squarespace you can move every page element, and expand, or shrink it to get the perfect look. While other platforms may say they’re point-and-click, only Squarespace comes close to achieving seamless control over the design process.
There is a multitude of features that can be credited to the ease of using Squarespace. Out of them here are the features that make Squarespace stand out.
Squarespace Features
Templates and Designs
As a web developer, you need to have a variety of templates to match the needs of your clients. Squarespace does this for every kind of design need. You can avail the contemporary look provided by countless templates designed by experts.
Switching from one template to another is just a click away if you change your mind at the last minute. You can select templates for a webpage, blog, calendar, or any other specific needs that can be edited.
You can edit font, colors, and any other settings to customize a page. Content layouts and CSS are also customizable. Use TypeKit and Google fonts as per your creativity. I love the chart block and video background features that add life to my websites.
Working with Images
Images say a lot more than words. Squarespace endorses this fact and provides superb support to manage and incorporate images in the page content. The drag-and-drop feature to manage images is a great help. It includes a responsive image code to take care of the appearance of the images on different devices. You can use anyone from the 40 million + images from the Getty collection at a nominal price.
The progressive loading of images is great for your visitors since the page’s top images load first giving a good user experience and holding the visitors for a longer duration
Squarespace ensures speedier delivery of the images through its content delivery network. A highly user-friendly image editing interface is available in the form of an Adobe editor and the flexibility of defining image focal points. Images can be edited and when the image appears on the visitors’ device it gets displayed in the right size whether as a thumbnail or a reduced image. Another amazing feature that reduces the work a lot is importing image metadata if you have defined it in the image management tool.
SEO Options and Tools
As far as SEO is concerned Squarespace is the cleanest among all since it doesn’t require the visitors to install any plugins to visit the website or blog created with Squarespace. The Pages are created with HTML code preferred for being indexed by any search engine. The flexibility to manage page titles allows you to give titles at any level to fit the required SEO criteria.
The generation of automatic sitemaps takes away a lot of effort from a web developer. Automatic tagging of images, pages, and links is the best for SEO.
Website Plans
Squarespace offers multiple website hosting plans. It has customized the plans for four different categories that include Personal, Business, Basic, and Advanced.
Personal and Basic
You get all the latest features of next-gen websites. Available at budget pricing, it allows you to add pages, images, or videos on a chosen template. You can also run a basic online store without any need to invest in costly e-commerce plans.
Check the pricing and features of Personal and Business plans.
Basic and Advanced
If you need a web hosting plan primarily to open an online store, then both these e-commerce plans will meet your needs. Check the pricing and feature comparison of both these commerce plans.
Pros
- It is an all-in-one platform for a variety of web development tasks like designing, layout, editing, image management, SEO, e-commerce, Social Linking, analytics, etc.
- It comes with good Marketing tools as the Internet space gives tough competition to be on the top. It tests the marketing skills of the blogger or businessman. Squarespace provides ways to beat that tough competition by providing new techniques and tutorials.
- With an excellent user-friendly interface routine tasks like editing and adding content, opening new pages, adding blog functionality, editing the design template, moving elements around, etc doesn’t require exceptional expertise. Your skills on any editor application are sufficient, thanks to the user-friendly interface providing all the help.
- CSS customization is a great feature that gives experienced and advanced developers an edge over others. You can get the best of all by tweaking the CSS.
- If you don’t have a better hosting plan or you are new to website creation, no worries. Squarespace hosts your website for you, rather than having to go somewhere else and look at various plans.
- 24/7 community support is a timesaving assurance that can lead you out of any roadblocks.
- Virtually no learning curve to start using it. You save a lot of time and energy with its hands-on experience throughout the tutorial process.
- It does allow for Code Injection and has a developer toolset. If you are quite comfortable with applying 3rd party features, you can use a developer to integrate them. It defeats the main purpose of using an inclusive drag-and-drop website builder.
- Squarespace comes with already integrated E-Commerce, which means you can add store data at any given time.
Cons
- The changes in the templates are not very easy to make unless you have in-depth knowledge of coding.
- Finding some advanced options may be a hard-hitting task.
- There are some inherent issues with the calendar.
- It may be difficult to find support for 3rd party plugins used in some of the desired templates.
- Prices of plug-ins are higher than their competitor websites.
- Discounts are not available on plug-in purchases.
Squarespace: Review Summary
If you are looking for attractive designs and advanced features, Squarespace is the best website builder tool available to date. They offer 24/7 technical support, a secure platform to build your website, and unlimited bandwidth and hosting at a reasonable price.
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