Squarespace vs WordPress: Which One is Best for Start-ups?

You have a business, and you need a website to promote your company’s activities. Three things would come to your mind: it should be easy on the aspects of the launch, maintenance, and wallet. So, after analyzing these things, you have two good options: Squarespace and WordPress.

Squarespace VS WordPress

Despite having several platforms, these two remain firm favorites. Both have their advantages or strengths. In order to help you choose between the two, let's go through the difference between them and then decide which one suits you the most.

Design, options and Flexibility

When it comes to options for theme and templates, Squarespace and WordPress provide a good amount of custom potentials. However, WordPress is in an advantageous position than Squarespace, considering the sheer scope of design templates, plugins, themes, and other customization aspects.

WordPress being an ‘Open source’ provides everyone with customizing codes to create their tools and plugins. This makes WordPress a hub of myriad options. As for Squarespace, the options in terms of themes, design templates, and tools are good but fall short of WordPress. However, the template and tool are of excellent quality in Squarespace.

Usage

Ease of use is an important thing to factor in while deciding which of the website building platforms are to be be used. As for WordPress, customization is very easy, but to be able to appropriately leverage the customizing options, the coding has to be superior. With WordPress codes, attractive websites can be created using almost any features you could think of.

This is not possible with Squarespace. However, If you can’t code properly or don’t have the developers for the same, then Squarespace can be handy for you. This is a ‘drag and drop’ website builder, where you can tweak and update your website via visual blocks, text, and other mix-and-match features with ease.

Cost

Cost is also an important factor while choosing a website platform. The cost of a WordPress site fluctuates based on your you choices. So, the major costs to factor in are Hosting, Domain name, WordPress Theme, Extra Plugins & Features. Also, WordPress’s updation process is cyclical, which implies that you must also update all of your themes and plugins regularly to secure your site from hackers. If you can’t perform this, then you may need to avail the services of a professional to do this on your behalf.

As for Squarespace, it offers an advantage in terms of simplicity of its costs. Costs differ depending on what you want: a basic or advanced general website or an online eCommerce store. Hence, you can choose the pricing package that suits you the most.

eCommerce suitability

If you want to build an eCommerce store, then the platform should be able to handle transactions ably and securely. On this count, WordPress looks ideal as it’s compatible with any payment gateway from PayPal and Stripe to Skrill. It also has some easy-to-install eCommerce plugins and a wide variety of WordPress themes specifically designed for eCommerce websites.

As for Squarespace, it was compatible only with the Stripe payment gateway initially. However, at present, it also connects with PayPal and accepts a variety of payment options, including Visa (credit and debit), Mastercard (credit and debit), American Express, JCB, PayPal, and Apple Pay. So, even Squarespace is also not a bad option to build e-commerce sites.

Where to Put Your Money in the Squarespace VS WordPress Battle?

Having gone through the basic features of Squarespace and WordPress, it won’t be too tough for you to choose an appropriate platform. However, before doing the same, analyze your ground realities. If you have floated a start-up and want to launch your first website, then which one would you opt for. It is a known fact that for start-ups budget, simple processes and quick launch are pertinent to get their business off the block. So, considering all these factors, WordPress platform suits the most when it comes to start up.

The reason -

Easy and quick installation

Simple to use and manage

High degree of site customization

Extremely friendly to Search Engines

Finally:

Last but not the least, the most important things involved in building a website are time, money, and capability. On all of these counts WordPress scores big.

Ajeet is a senior web developer at WordpressIntegration - PSD to WordPress service provider, where he is responsible for writing custom JavaScript code during the conversion process.