The Benefits of Squarespace for Small Business Owners

One of the most important decisions you’ll be making when designing your website is choosing the right platform to build your site with. Luckily, there are quite a few platforms on the market to choose from (you can view a comparison of my three favorite website platforms here) and today we are going to be talking about one of the bigger players, Squarespace, and why it’s a great choice for small businesses.  

If you’re not familiar with Squarespace, it’s an all-in-one website platform with a diverse built-in offering. Outside of being an extremely user-friendly website builder, Squarespace also has robust blogging options, ecommerce functionality, membership capabilities, and even offers email marketing and online scheduling. According to WebsiteSetup, at the time of publishing this post, it’s the fourth most popular CMS (stands for content management system, which is just a fancy name for website building software) on the market, with a reported 2.7 million live websites. With this many websites relying on Squarespace, it’s safe to say this platform’s not going anywhere anytime soon. 

My own journey with Squarespace started in early 2017, while I was still working full-time as a marketing coordinator for an Edmonton based small business and was building up my freelance business on the side. I knew that I was almost at a point where I could take my freelance business full time and felt that it was time to actually have a website of my own (up until this point, I was able to find clients strictly through word of mouth and referrals). While I had been building websites for clients using WordPress, I knew for my own website, I wanted something that required minimal upkeep while still having all the functionality I needed. I ended up landing on Squarespace as a platform and immediately realized that this was a platform I wanted to help other businesses get set up on as well. Five years later, I’ve designed over 50 Squarespace websites, have been selected as a Squarespace Expert (a title handed out by Squarespace to a select number of designers who meet their quality standards and have an in-depth knowledge of the platform) and now consider it my preferred website builder of choice. 

Below you’ll find five reasons why I think Squarespace is a great platform for small businesses in particular.

01. Easy and Intuitive to Use

After some basic training, you’ll find Squarespace is intuitive and easy to use. Squarespace uses a drag and drop builder which allows you to make edits to your existing pages and create new pages with ease. You can choose from a large variety of “blocks” (elements like text, images, buttons, videos, forms, etc), add them to your page, and move them around so that they appear on the page in a way that is pleasing to the eye. To view a full summary of all the different blocks available on Squarespace, click here. 

Squarespace also uses a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor, which means that as you're editing your website within Squarespace, the changes are happening right in front of you. You don’t have to publish the changes and navigate to the live version of the page to see the changes. You know exactly what changes you’re making as you make them. For those who are familiar with the classic editing experience of WordPress, this type of editor is a lot more friendly to use.  

02. Mobile Responsive

Did you know that half of the traffic that visits your website is likely viewing it on a mobile device? This means that it's more important than ever to make sure that your website is designed with mobile viewing in mind (not to mention, Google has started using this as a way to rank websites within their search results). ​​​​​​​​

When you build your website on Squarespace, the platform adjusts your design to fit the device it’s being viewed in. Some other website platforms require you to design your desktop layout and then reformat the layout of your design for mobile, but with Squarespace, that all happens for you automatically. 

03. Secure and Fully Managed

This is a big reason why Squarespace is a great option for most small businesses. You do not have to perform ongoing maintenance and security updates to your website when you use Squarespace - this service is included in your monthly plan and handled for you. If you’re currently using WordPress and feeling overwhelmed by the constant plugin and core updates that need to be performed, moving to a fully managed platform like Squarespace can free up time and prevent a lot of headaches. 

04. Search Engine Friendly

Squarespace has plenty of built-in options to make your website perform well in search engines. You’re able to do essential onsite search engine optimization work like customize your page titles, meta-descriptions, and alt images (I’ll be touching on these SEO components in future blog posts). Other built in SEO features include:

• Automatically generates a sitemap in the appropriate format for search engines to easily index the pages and images of your website,

• Free SSL certificate, which is now considered a ranking metric for most search engines.

• AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) capability, which creates a lightweight version of your blog posts that loads faster on mobile devices.  

• Integrates with Google Search Console, which allows you to see which search terms your website is appearing for within Google search results. 

05. Code Injection

This feature is important for website designers like myself because it allows us to further customize the design of a Squarespace website using coding languages like CSS and JavaScript. While Squarespace has a great selection of templates to work off of, my preference is starting from scratch and using CSS and JavaScript to have more control over the design and bring in more functionality. The nice thing about this is that I use these coding languages in a way that doesn't impact my clients ability to manage and edit their website. All of this code is running in the background, invisible, unless you know where to look. 

While Squarespace has some functionality limitations, in most cases, I find that it’s a great website platform for small businesses. By using a website platform that has a fairly minimal learning curve, it means that you can keep the maintenance of your website in house rather than having to contract this support out to a professional. While I love developing long term working relationships with my clients, I think it’s incredibly beneficial for you to have an understanding of how to make updates to your website so that you never feel like you are being held hostage to use an outside provider. 

If you’re interested in testing out the platform, get in touch and I’d be happy to set you up with a no-strings-attached 6-month trial. If you decide to move forward with the platform, you’ll also get 20% off your first year with my partner discount.