It’s as if Squarespace popped up out of nowhere a few years ago and instantly grew immensely. It makes sense – they got the funding, created huge ads (including Superbowl ads), and created designs tools which make web design simple.
In fact, Squarespace makes having a website very simple.
Did you notice we didn’t say “owning a website” and instead said “having a website”?
You see, Squarespace is nice for man businesses because there is very little overhead. For the small price, you get a site hosted on their servers, maintained by them, with a nice design system.
Content Ownership with Squarespace
But you don’t own the content there. They do. Which means they can shut down your site on the fly, at any time, with no warning, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Sure, you can export your content to WordPress. Well, some of it. But that doesn’t help if the site is shut down.
Content ownership is important for businesses. Think of it like someone who runs their business off of Instagram promotion. The moment their account is suspended or a glitch deleted a profile, that business is dead in the water.
But having the content on your own website, which you control from nearly top-down (talk about that in a moment), means that if your social media account goes away, your content does not.
The design tool of Squarespace is impressive, don’t get us wrong. But it’s not nearly as flexible as page builders are for WordPress. Even some of the free page builder plugins offer more out of the box than Squarespace’s design tool. Plugins like Visual Composer, WP Bakery, Beaver Builder and Elementor. Each is powerful and easy to design in their own ways.
Content Ownership with WordPress
When it comes to WordPress the coin is flipped. With WordPress, you own everything, including the software that runs the website. I mean, you don’t legally own it. But you own is in the control sense. You can do what you want with it, like modify it, change the look of it, etc.
You own the content that’s on the site, where the data is stored and how it looks. The only part of the website you do not own is the actual host of the files. Unless of course, you’re technical enough to host it yourself (which is possible too).
With WordPress, you can keep a complete backup of your site somewhere else, like Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox or wherever. That means if your hosting company shuts down for some reason you can migrate your site elsewhere.
Making the Decision
Making the choice between Squarespace or WordPress is not something we can make for you. All we can tell you about are the benefits of WordPress. Whether that’s content ownership, design possibilities, integrations, reputation, and so on.
At the end of the day, the decision must be yours. You have to do the research to see what’s best for you.
If you’re not a fan of having to maintain a website or think about any of the technical stuff, ever, then maybe Squarespace is for you.
But if you want to join over 30% of the Internet and have your website driven by the most flexible and powerful content management system available, then maybe WordPress is for you.
If WordPress is your answer and you need a business theme, a restaurant theme or even a hotel theme, then we have you covered and then some!
