Squarespace Review 2025: Does It Live Up to the Hype?

Squarespace at a Glance

Squarespace Pros, Cons, & Things That Could Be Better

Squarespace is widely known for its clean, visually appealing, and minimalist designs. But is that all it’s good for? I tested Squarespace’s features thoroughly to see if there’s more to the platform – short answer, there is!

Squarespace is great for creatives, freelancers, and small-to-medium businesses who want modern, polished sites. Its intuitive drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to build blogs, portfolios, e-commerce stores, and small business sites.

However, I wouldn’t recommend Squarespace for everyone. You’ll probably find it somewhat restrictive if you’re a professional designer looking for full control over your site. It’s also quite pricey but it gives you value for your money.

So, is it a wise investment for you, or should you start looking elsewhere? You’ll find the answers in this Squarespace review – read on.

Great Aesthetics, Limited Customization

Squarespace has 180+ templates, grouped into 19 style categories (like “photography” or “entertainment”) and 9 functional types (like blogging or e-commerce) for easy browsing.

Squarespace’s templates are customizable yet minimalistic – they don’t clutter pages with unnecessary elements. Their strategic combination of fonts, colors, images, and white space effectively guides visitors’ attention to key content.

If you don’t like any of the available templates, you can design a tailored site with Squarespace Blueprint AI. However, if you don’t have design experience, you might accidentally mess up the balance of elements when customizing your site. So I suggest starting with small changes and taking it slow.

Design and Customization

Squarespace has pre-configured blocks for text, images, buttons, newsletter signup forms, social media feeds, scheduling tools, and restaurant menus. It also has pre-made sections for portfolios, testimonials, events, donations, and products, making it easy for you to start designing your website.

In the Squarespace editor, elements snap to a grid system to maintain consistent spacing and alignment. You can approach layout creation in two ways: either use pre-designed section layouts and customize them to your needs, or start with a blank section and build your layout from scratch using columns, spacing, and content blocks.

All of Squarespace’s templates are mobile-responsive, and you can also switch to mobile view from the editor at any moment. Squarespace lets you change your mobile site separately from its desktop counterpart, so you can fine-tune the mobile experience as much as you want.

Squarespace Delivers on Core Features, With a Few Limits

Squarespace leans toward simplicity rather than complexity, which makes it a good fit for most users. Adding features is straightforward. You can set up a calendar, appointment booking, or an online store with a few clicks. Meanwhile, built-in design tools, like integrated image editing, video backgrounds, and custom fonts, reinforce Squarespace’s visually driven approach.

That said, Squarespace’s all-in-one approach comes with a few trade-offs. Some tools require additional costs, and its third-party app ecosystem is small compared to competitors like Wix. Still, most users will find Squarespace’s free, built-in tools more than enough to create a professional and polished website.

Create Your Own Template With Squarespace Blueprint AI

With Squarespace Blueprint AI, you’re no longer limited to choosing from premade designs. It gives you more flexibility and control over the look and feel of your website.

Squarespace Blueprint AI guides you through creating a website by asking about your goals and preferences. The process starts with choosing your site’s personality and purpose, then moves through selecting content sections and design elements. You can:

• Choose from various pre-designed section layouts
• Set your brand’s tone and style
• Select color schemes and typography that match your brand
• Add and arrange content sections based on your needs

While you won’t start with a fully designed template, you’ll get a customized framework that you can build upon with your own content.

Comprehensive Features for Small and Large Online Stores

Squarespace lets you add a store and create products directly from your dashboard. If you have an existing store elsewhere on the internet, you can save time and import your products via a .CSV file. You can group products into related collections, set custom pricing for variations, add forms to collect shopper details, and replace the default ‘Add to Cart’ button text with something more engaging.

For multichannel sellers, Squarespace lets you send product details to your Meta Business Manager catalog so you can sell on Instagram and Facebook shops. You can also link and display items from Etsy and Amazon.

Other e-commerce features included allow you to:

• Accept payments in a variety of ways (PayPal, Stripe, Square, Apple Pay)
• Get automatic tax calculation with TaxJar integration
• Sell digital, physical, and subscription-based products
• Offer customizable discounts and promotions
• Sell gift cards and store credits
• Create mailing lists
• Send abandoned cart recovery emails
• Sell subscriptions, courses, and memberships
• Create customer accounts
• Collect and display customer reviews on product pages
• Sell via social media
• Get an automatic shipping fee calculation via Fedex, USPS and UPS (only for the U.S.)
• Create shipping zones
• Schedule in-store pickup
• Display product statuses like limited availability or out-of-stock notifications
• Enable in-person sales with Squarespace’s Point of Sale (POS) system

Squarespace also has its own payment solution called Squarespace Payments. It lets you accept and manage one-time purchases, subscriptions, and donations – all within your dashboard. It supports credit and debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Afterpay, and ACH Direct Debit. Plus, for an extra fee, Squarespace Payments offers instant payouts within 30 minutes.

Built-In SEO and Marketing Tools

Squarespace lets you collect leads with announcement bars and pop-ups, connect Instagram and TikTok to share content or add social media feeds, track your site’s performance, and create email campaigns.

While Squarespace lets you collect, manage, and segment unlimited email subscribers, you can’t send emails for free. So if you’re on a tight budget, it’d be better to integrate Mailchimp and use its free plan instead.

There’s also a Marketing Kit on Squarespace’s iOS app for creating branded promotional assets using images and videos from your site. You can resize, edit, and share these assets across your website, social media channels, and email campaigns.

Your Squarespace site also includes SEO tools that help search engines find and understand your content. These include automatically generated sitemaps, clean URLs, mobile-ready pages, and structured data markup. There’s also a checklist to guide you step-by-step if you don’t know much about SEO.

What’s more, Squarespace lets you set or tweak page titles and descriptions, hide pages from search engines, and choose images to show when sharing page links on social media. If you’re willing to pay extra, you can hire a Squarespace SEO expert and get actionable advice to help you improve your search engine listings.

Well-Rounded Blogging Tools That Cover the Basics

Squarespace’s blogging tools let you save drafts, schedule posts, add tags, and categorize blogs. You can choose to show the author’s name and profile, change fonts and colors for individual posts, and add a comment box to encourage discussions. It’s also easy to add image galleries, videos, product showcases, and newsletter signup forms to make your posts more engaging.

Your blog posts also have SEO options and social sharing tools you can leverage. You can set meta titles and descriptions for search engines, set up how your blog post will be previewed on social media sites, and send blog posts out as newsletters when you publish them.

Get More Features With Squarespace Extensions

Squarespace Extensions are third-party tools that integrate directly with your website to add functionality beyond the built-in features. They cover areas like shipping and fulfillment, accounting, inventory management, and marketing. You can connect with services like Printful for print-on-demand products, QuickBooks for bookkeeping, or ShipStation for order fulfillment.

Unlike Squarespace’s built-in features, Extensions often require separate subscriptions, although some usually have free tiers. The marketplace is smaller compared to Wix’s apps or WordPress plugins, but you still get enough options to tailor your site to your specific needs.

Automate the Online Booking Process with Acuity Scheduling

Squarespace’s Acuity Scheduling tool lets you take appointments, manage your availability, send automatic reminders to customers, and create intake forms.

quarespace seamlessly integrates Acuity Scheduling so you can add it to your site with a few clicks. Acuity does require a separate subscription starting at $16 per month, though you can test it with a 14-day free trial. If you’re working with a tighter budget, Wix offers a built-in booking tool at no additional cost.

You can read more about Squarespace’s scheduler in our expert Acuity Scheduling review.

My Experience With Squarespace

Over the course of a week, I built and refined a website on Squarespace to see how the platform holds up. There was little friction moving between design, content, and settings. Squarespace provided a good balance between ease of use and professional-quality results, which made experimenting with features feel rewarding rather than overwhelming.

Getting Started With Squarespace

When I started my Squarespace trial, I was impressed by how streamlined the onboarding process felt. Instead of dropping me directly into template selection, Squarespace first asked me about my goals and website type through a quick questionnaire. This helped narrow down relevant templates and set the right direction from the start.

Squarespace gave me two options: choose from professionally designed templates or use Blueprint AI to generate a custom design. The template library is well-organized into categories like “Photography,” “Local Business,” and “Online Store,” making it easy to find relevant options. Each template shows both desktop and mobile previews.

I tried Squarespace Blueprint AI first. The tool asked for my site’s title and personality type (options like “Friendly” or “Professional”), then generated text and design elements to match. While the AI-generated designs weren’t as polished as premade templates, they provided a solid starting point that I could customize further.

Customizing My Squarespace Website

Squarespace’s Fluid Engine editor combines moderate creative freedom with smart design guidelines. Moving elements feels natural, and the interface shows helpful alignment guides to keep everything looking professional.

Squarespace maintains quality regardless of your design choices. Whenever I made significant changes to layouts or color schemes, the results remained polished. The built-in AI writing assistant also helped generate content for different sections, though I found myself editing its suggestions for a more personal touch.

Setting up an online store on Squarespace was straightforward. I had already indicated that I wanted a store on my website, so the AI created one. All I had to do was navigate to Products & Services > Products on my dashboard to manage my products. I could also add new stores easily from the Website > Pages menu.

The only minor frustration I had while customizing my website was remembering to save changes manually, as there’s no autosave feature. However, Squarespace warns you before closing an unsaved tab.

Additional Ease of Use Features

Squarespace AI Features

In addition to Blueprint AI, Squarespace has other AI tools designed to simplify the website-building process. However, it lacks an AI site assistant and an image generator, both of which come standard with competitors like Wix and Hostinger Website Builder. Still, Squarespace provides a solid lineup of AI features, including:

• Business name generator. This tool quickly generates brand name ideas based on your input, giving you results sorted by different personalities and tones of voice.
• Domain name generator. Squarespace can help you find and register a matching domain name using your business idea or generated name.
• AI writer. Generates new text or edits existing copy based on prompts.
• AI background creator. Squarespace provides AI-generated, design-curated background images tailored for sections.
• Product description generator. This tool creates SEO-optimized, on-brand product descriptions from product details to help convert visitors into buyers.
• Video description generator. Squarespace can automatically summarize your video content with AI-generated descriptions for easier navigation and consistent tone across your site.
• AI course descriptions. You can generate engaging descriptions for online course pages, lessons, and chapters, making it easy for students to browse them.
• AI blog posts. The AI writer can draft blog outlines and posts and help you brainstorm ideas.
• AI SEO tools. Within the SEO Appearance settings, these AI tools can auto-generate site descriptions, identify missing metadata or alt text, and provide optimized recommendations.
• AI email copy generator. Integrated into Email Campaigns, this AI writer crafts email content based on your campaign goal and target audience, aligning with your brand tone and messaging strategy.
• Client proposals generator. Squarespace can create client-ready proposals tailored to each client or project.

Create Localized Versions of Your Site With Ease

If you want to reach an international audience, Squarespace lets you localize dates, navigation controls, and form field labels on your site. All you have to do is head over to settings on your account dashboard and click on Website > Site Languages. Squarespace supports content in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.

While this tool isn’t an automatic translator (you’ll need a third-party extension like Weglot to translate custom text), it’s still handy for making your site easier to reach in different markets. Plus, when you localize your website, Squarespace also translates important metadata, which can help you rank higher in international search engines.

The Support Team Is Prompt and Helpful

Squarespace has email and live chat support, a community forum, a help center, and support via X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook Messenger. Most channels are available 24/7, with the exception of live chat, which operates Monday through Friday from 4:00 AM to 8:00 PM ET (English) and 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM CET (French and German).

There are also expert designers and developers you can hire from Squarespace’s Circle community.

To speak with a live chat rep, I had to go through Squarespace’s AI Assistant first. I simply typed “Can I speak with a live agent?” and the AI immediately opened a support case. After filling a form and selecting live chat as my preferred option, it directed me to a rep in less than two minutes. I asked if I could prevent search engines from crawling my site, and the agent gave me a straightforward and helpful response, plus a link to a detailed guide.

Next, I tried the email support system. Since Squarespace doesn’t make its support email readily available, I had to speak with the AI Assistant once again. However, this time around, I selected the “Send an email” option after filling the form.

The support agent responded to my ticket in under 14 hours, well within the advertised 24-hour response window. The response was helpful and included a guide.

Squarespace vs Competitors

While Squarespace is well-known for its sleek templates and design-first approach, there are several other website builders that may better fit specific needs:

• Wix. If you’re looking for maximum flexibility and creative control, Wix gives you 2500+ customizable templates, a free-form drag-and-drop editor, and 800+ apps. While it has more design freedom than Squarespace, it can be a bit overwhelming for absolute beginners.
• Hostinger Website Builder. If you’re on a tight budget, Hostinger is one of the cheapest options around. Plus, its AI tools make it fast and simple to build a website. It’s less feature-rich than Squarespace but great for personal projects or small businesses looking to save.
• SITE123. If you’re after absolute simplicity, SITE123 is one of the easiest builders to use. It’s more beginner-friendly than Squarespace, but you’ll sacrifice design variety and customization.
• Shopify. If you’re running a large online store, Shopify is a better fit. While Squarespace supports e-commerce, Shopify caters to global businesses with its multi-storefront creation, e-commerce automations, and Shopify POS hardware for syncing online and in-person operations.

Not the Cheapest, but a Fair Price

Squarespace has four pricing plans – Basic, Core, Plus, and Advanced. Each plan includes a free custom domain for the first year and lets you sell unlimited products and memberships. This is a standout feature, since many competitors restrict e-commerce tools on their lower-tier plans.

The Basic plan works well for a simple portfolio website without e-commerce needs. For online stores, the Squarespace Core plan is better. It removes transaction fees, allows unlimited contributors (versus two with Basic), and adds Meta ads integration, store analytics, and built-in promotional tools.

The Plus plan stands out mainly for its expanded video storage (50 hours vs 5 hours on Core) and slightly lower credit card processing fees.

The Squarespace Advanced plan goes further with unlimited video storage and more reduced transaction fees, making it best suited for larger or international e-commerce operations. That said, the Core plan is likely more than enough for most online businesses.

With no free plan at all, Squarespace isn’t the cheapest site builder on the market, especially if you pay per month. Although paying for an annual plan will save you a ton, there are still cheaper options. That said, Squarespace’s prices are fair for the quality of the service it provides. Plus, you can try Squarespace risk-free with its 14-day free trial before committing.