You Use Squarespace? I Thought WordPress was Better!

Squarespace or WordPress?

At Kennedy Wood Marketing, we work primarily with Squarespace to develop website solutions for our clients. We often get asked why we use this solution over WordPress and so this article aims to clarify our thoughts.

There are many articles available that compare the two solutions, however, almost all of these come from the perspective of a small business owner developing their own site. In our case, we are developing and managing multiple sites for multiple clients and therefore our objectives differ slightly.

Open Source vs. Closed Source

WordPress is an open source solution whereas Squarespace is a Closed source solution. What do these terms mean? An open-source solution means that its software is freely available for developers to adopt and change as they see fit.

This has resulted in WordPress having a wide array of plug-ins available for their solution. A plug-in is simply a piece of code designed for a specific function that you can add to the existing software. For example, WordPress has a number of plugins available that help you add a picture gallery to your website.

Closed source software is developed only by the company that sells that software product and the code is not available to others. That doesn't mean that plug-ins are not available for Squarespace (there are hundreds), it means that those developers have to work closely with Squarespace to develop their solutions.

As with everything in life, there are trade offs here. On the one hand, WordPress offers hundreds of options (plugins) for developers. For example, there are over 850 picture gallery plugins available. Compare that to Squarespace that has a picture gallery built into the core code and it will probably meet the needs of 95% of businesses.

In addition, if you start to use third party plugins, then you need to stay abreast of any changes that are made to the original software or the plugins themselves. Changes on either side could cause issues either with the functionality of the site or the security of the underlying data.

This is one of the first reasons that we feel that Squarespace is a better option for us as it reduces the administrative overhead of managing multiple WordPress sites (and the related plugins). We also feel it reduces the risk of our customers running plugins that could impact the usability, security and functionality of their websites.

Flexibility & Customisation

The next area to consider is how much you need to tweak the website to get it looking exactly how you want it. For example, let’s take an example where you want a website to present regularly updated blog content.

Squarespace website development is based on templates i.e. pre-configured layouts that are specific to the type of website required. Squarespace has over 100 of these templates to choose from (including those for blogging). These templates come with many of the features that you need for each use case. For example, the blogging templates come with the ability to add content, categorize posts, enable comments and share posts on social media.

WordPress offers the same blogging options as Squarespace and you can customize the look of your site with Themes. WordPress offers over 10,000 free blog themes to choose from. As per our previous section, additional functionality can be added using plugins with the caveats around maintenance that we mentioned previously.

Both Squarespace and WordPress offer the option to modify the underlying code (either the HTML or CSS). We regularly update the CSS code in Squarespace to personalise it to be way we want it to look and feel for our customers. However, this does not impact the ability of our customers to be able to add to their own blogs etc if they wish.

Therefore, it's perfectly feasible to create exactly the same blogging website in Squarespace and WordPress. The same goes for other website categories as well e.g. e-commerce. Our preference for Squarespace stems from a need to reduce the administrative overhead of managing multiple sites and the speed at which we can develop solutions for clients that meet their needs. Both of these criteria help us keep costs down for our clients.

KWM is Squarespace Circle member, the benefits of this allow us to offer extensive benefits to our clients. These include discounts on annual fees, membership of the features request board, exclusive content and Beta testing. All of which helps give us an edge for our customers.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of configuring your website in a way that maximizes its ranking on search engines such as Google. There are many different factors that determine whether a site ranks well or not (a main one being the quality of the content on the site). However, both WordPress and Squarespace have features to help you improve your ranking.

Squarespace allows you to customize many of the items in your website (titles, images, urls) that are important to SEO. Squarespace will also build a sitemap for you based on your site. However, Squarespace does not offer plugins to directly help you with SEO (a much quoted difference between the two solutions). This means that to use Squarespace effectively, you need to understand how SEO works and be familiar with its best practices (which change on a regular basis.)

This is why Kennedy Wood Marketing is able to use Squarespace and generate sites that perform extremely well in search rankings. We have the SEO expertise required to tweak Squarespace sites ourselves and assess their performance.

WordPress has the same ability to customize the options that we described above. In addition, you can use plugins such as Yoast SEO that will simplify and optimize your site for search ranking.

Again, in summary, you can have a great website that is fully optimized for SEO in either Squarespace or WordPress. It’s how you get there that matters. In our experience, our clients are not SEO experts, they simply want their business to rank well on Google. We have been able to deliver that across multiple business categories with the solutions we have built in Squarespace.

Conclusion

At Kennedy Wood Marketing we have been able to deliver simple and complex website solutions for small local businesses and large multinational companies using Squarespace. Other large companies that use Squarespace include HBO Documentary Films, National Geographic Kids and Lyft.

We find that the available templates and the customization options available help us meet our clients needs quickly, at a competitive price and without a large maintenance overhead. If you would like to discuss your needs to get your business online or you want to expand the functionality of an existing website, contact us here