It is a very common situation for a small business owner (be it a creative venture, a healing profession or any kind of entrepreneurial adventure) when they look around on the website market they will come across this debate: WordPress versus Squarespace.
I love how Squarespace looks
First of all, I love Squarespace. I love the design, I love how they advertise (Keanu Reeves was gorgeous on his motorcycle, no debate on that). They always come up with cool creative persons in their advertisements that makes me feel like, I want to be one of them!!! And I want to have a website they have!!! Yeah well this is the whole goal of advertising, right?
I like the simplicity of the admin area of Squarespace and it is truly optimized for the user. You don’t have to decide what payment service you will use, it is all there!
WordPress can be a mess. Not all theme is good, so if you chose a bad one you might experience hard times. And there are all those plugins, so a lot of decision has to be made. Well yes, WordPress is an open-source system, so a lot of people are involved in the development. It can be messy, that’s right.
It can be messy, but it can be clear as well if you know what you are doing. And also any design can be achieved with WordPress, so it can look as clean as a Squarespace site. Well actually a Squarespace site, if it is not set up properly, can look messy as well. No magic bullet, these things only work if you know what you are doing.
I am not going to go into details about the two platforms, you can find good articles about that, so let’s get to the point: I am going to give you my honest opinion about when you should use WordPress. I am talking about the self-hosted WordPress, so wordpress.org and not wordpress.com. It is my personal opinion so others might have different ones. It is ok, we all have different perspectives and things to consider.
When you should choose WordPress over Squarespace
- you need more than one website (it is more affordable with WordPress to manage more websites).
- it is important for you to be flexible and add special functions to your website. With WordPress plugins, you can add almost any function to your website, for an example see the draw a card page on my website. This page shows a random image and it was set up with a free plugin and I didn’t need to hire a developer for this or write custom code.
- You know you will need help. Lot of people involved with WordPress, so it is easy to find someone.
Now I would like to add a little note when you can choose Squarespace
I would always choose WordPress:o)))
I love the community around it
I am biased
You can choose Squarespace when you need one standard website to showcase your talent, products, services and you won’t need any special functionality. You might want to blog as well, but Google is not your biggest concern. You feel capable enough to set up your own website. You can try it out for free, look around and see for yourself if this is something you are ready to do.
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