Squarespace is a platform where you can build a website. It works just like WordPress or Shopify, and it serves as a web builder, store platform, and content management system all rolled into one.
Today we will explore the different packages so we can help you make a decision.
The topics we will talk about are:
- What is Squarespace?
- How much do the packages cost?
- The features of each plan
- Monthly and annual plan comparisons
- Squarespace price versus other platforms
Let us jump in and see what plan is the best for your needs.
What is Squarespace?
Squarespace is a platform where you can build a blog or a store.
With Squarespace, you can do the following:
- Sell products
- Schedule appointments
- Create a checkout process
- Use a point-of-sale system for offline sales
- Use extensions
The Squarespace platform also allows you to have access to:
- Dozens of website templates
- Connected services
- Expert website builders
- Website analytics
You can also buy a domain name from the platform, which makes it a complete all-in-one platform for your website development needs.
How much do the packages cost?
Squarespace offers four types of plans. These plans have different limitations and features, and customers can pick the best one that has everything that they need.
Whether you are a newcomer in e-commerce or a veteran, Squarespace offers flexible plans that you can play monthly or annually.
The four plans are:
- Personal
- Business
- Basic Commerce
- Advanced Commerce
The personal plan costs $16 per month. This plan allows you to create a website but not an online store. It also does not come with a professional email from Google.
The Personal plan is best used by individuals who only need a blog. It is great for affiliate marketers or those who want to monetize their website through ads.
The Business plan costs $26 per month. With this plan, you can build a store and create a checkout system. From this plan, you can charge customers for their purchases, sell unlimited number of products, or ask for donations.
The Basic Commerce Plan costs $30 per month. With this plan, you will no longer pay a transaction fee for orders processed in your store.
It is in this plan that you get to use powerful e-commerce analytics, plus you can create customer accounts to allow them to log in anytime and process orders.
The Advanced Commerce plan is the most expensive, and it costs $46 per month. With this plan, you can sell subscriptions, issue and sell gift cards, and then use the advanced shipping tools in the platform. This is also the plan where you can enjoy the benefits of Abandoned Cart Recovery features.
The features of each Squarespace plan
Let us take a look at the features you get for each plan.
Personal
With the personal plan, you will get all the things you need to run a professional website, but not a store.
1. Free Custom Domain
You do not have to pay for a domain name separately. If the one you want is within the cost that Squarespace can cover, then you get it free.
2. SSL Security
Your website will be hosted with secure socket layer. Your URL will start with HTTPS instead of HTTP. What this means is that search engines and browsers are not going to block your website.
If a customer tries to open a website that is not secure, he will receive a warning from his browser. If this happens, he is not going to open that website for fear that it is a malicious site. With SSL, your potential lead will not receive this kind of warning.
3. Unlimited Bandwidth and Storage
Bandwidth refers to the number of visitors that your website can accept on a monthly basis. Many web builders put a limit to this, like a maximum of 25,000 site visits per month.
Storage refers to the amount of information you can store in the servers or storage devices of the web builder platform. In many cases, platforms limit you between 1GB and 200 GB of storage.
Once you hit that limit, you can no longer upload videos and photos, not even new product pages. If you need more space, you have to pay extra.
With Squarespace, you do not have to worry about these limitations. Even if you are at the personal plan, you can enjoy unlimited site visits and unlimited storage capacity.
4. SEO Features for Site Visibility
SEO is critical to make your website visible to search engines. With Squarespace, you can add meta-titles, meta-tags, and H1 tags to improve your website’s visibility in search engines. You can also do this on each product page.
5. Templates to for every website from Blogs to Portfolios
With Squarespace, you will have access to dozens of free and paid templates. Templates are also called themes. What this means is that you do not have to build your website from scratch. All you need to do is to choose a theme, and then replace the photos with your own.
6. Contributors
Contributors are staff accounts. In the Personal plan, you can assign two contributors that include yourself. This contributor can make changes to the website, post blogs, or answer customer comments on your behalf.
7. Mobile-Optimized Websites
Your website will be shown in a mobile-friendly format if your site visitor is not on a desktop. This is important because a desktop site is difficult to navigate on the phone.
With a mobile-friendly website, site visitors would find it easier to navigate your website, and they are going to stay longer. The longer a person stays, the better Google is going to rank your page.
8. 24/7 Customer Support
As a paying member, you can contact customer support any time of the day. Squarespace does not offer phone support. You can only contact a service representative via chat and email.
9. Basic Website Metrics
This analytical tool allows you to see your traffic information, site paths, where your traffic is coming from, popular contents on your site, and other basic information.
10. Squarespace Extensions
This is the marketplace for apps and plug-ins. This is where you can find third-party apps that can help you make your store better. These apps are either free or paid. Examples of these are email subscription forms, banners, discount coupon makers, and a whole lot more.
Business
In the Business plan, you will get everything that is offered in the Personal Plan. However, the Business plan allows you to have unlimited contributors on your website.
This is also the plan where you can build a store and ask customers for payments.
1. Professional Email from Google
With the business plan, you will also get a G-Suite account. This is free only for the first year. If you decide to add other members on your G-Suite account, you have to pay for these extra services.
2. Premium Integrations and Blocks
This refers to apps and plug-ins that you cannot find elsewhere. One example is a reservation app if you have a website. This feature also allows you to sell your items on Instagram.
3. Complete Customization with CSS and JavaScript
With this feature, you can avoid having a website that looks like everyone else’s. If you know how to code, you can add Javascript and CSS codes to make your website look better and more personalized.
4. Advanced Website Analytics
This is far better than basic analytics. With this feature, you can have site visitors join your mailing list, invite them to RSVP events, and you can also see powerful sales and conversion metrics. With powerful statistics, you can make better business decisions.
5. $100 Google Adwords Credits
Many entrepreneurs are afraid to test advertising on Google because of the cost. With Squarespace, you would receive $100 worth of advertising credits on Google. With this, you can jumpstart your marketing campaign for free in the Google universe.
6. Promotional Pop-ups and Banners
You can use the free pop-up function in the system. You can also use these pop-ups to get email subscriptions. With this, you can build your email list without buying an app and paying for it separately.
7. Fully Integrated E-Commerce
The Business plan allows you to build a complete online store. You can add shipping rates, charge taxes, manage your catalog, and even fulfill orders. This is a completely functional store and you no longer need to buy other apps to make your store work.
8. Transaction Fees
At this plan, Squarespace is going to charge you 3% of the transaction cost. This is on top of the money you have to pay to your online payment processor.
9. Sell Unlimited Products
Some webstore builders limit your product count only to 25. But with Squarespace, you do not have to worry about this. You can put hundreds of products on your store if you like.
10. Accept Donations
Apart from taking payments, you can accept donations from your website. This is great if you are running a store that is not for profit.
Basic Commerce
With the Basic Commerce plan, you get everything from the previous plan but you will no longer pay any transaction fee. This also gives you access to better feature such as the POS and more powerful analytical tools.
1. POS
You can use an app on your mobile phone so you can make sales while in person, and still have that sale processed and recorded in your Squarespace dashboard.
2. Customer Accounts
This feature allows your customers to create an account. The benefit is that they can sign in and make transactions faster because the system already remembers them. It also allows you to communicate with them, build relationships, and market new products through their email addresses.
3. Checkout in your domain
On the Business Plan, the customer is going to check out on the Squarespace. But with the Basic Commerce plan, the customer will stay in your website’s URL, making it look more professional.
4. e-Commerce Analytics
This one has all the features of the previous two plans, but this can show you more data like your best-selling products and your conversion rate.
5. Merchandising tools
This is a tool that allows you to display products that are related to each other. You can use this to do cross-sell and upsell marketing strategies.
6. Instagram Sales
With this feature, you can sync your products with your Facebook store. You can also tag your products on Instagram, which gives you the ability to sell your items on both social media platforms.
7. Advanced Commerce
With Advanced Commerce you will get all the benefits of the previous three plans, plus the ones shown below.
8. Abandoned Cart Recovery
You can send automated emails to customers who filled their cart but did not continue with the purchase. This can improve your conversion rate, or find out what made the customer abandon his cart.
9. Gift Cards
You can sell gift cards on your store. Customers can buy these cards and send them to their loved ones. Their loved ones will use these cards to buy items form your store.
10. Subscriptions
You can create recurring revenue streams by selling plans that customers have to pay monthly or annually. This is great if you are selling digital products or food products that customers need on a monthly basis.
11. Advanced Shipping
With this feature, you can use apps that would show real-time shipping rates. You can use this feature to see shipping rates from USPS, FedEx, and UPS. You can also control your shipping options by using zip codes.
12. Advanced Discounts
You can create discounts and coupons and program them the way you want them to work. You can limit their use, or you can make them work only if some conditions are met.
13. Limited Availability Labels
This is a feature where you can use the sense of urgency to improve your conversion rate. With this feature, you can post announcements or bars on specific products that show how much stock is left. This is an effective method to drive sales to customers who do not want the fear of missing out.
Monthly and annual plan comparisons
Here is a table that shows the price differences on all the plans if you pay monthly or annually.
Monthly | Annually | Total Monthly Payment per Year | Total One-Time Payment per Year | |
| Personal | $16 | $12 | $192 | $144 |
| Business | $26 | $18 | $312 | $216 |
| Basic Commerce | $30 | $26 | $360 | $312 |
| Advanced Commerce | $46 | $40 | $552 | $480 |
If you choose the monthly plan, you will be billed every month, but at a higher cost. On the annual plan. Squarespace is going to charge your card one time per year, but you can already enjoy the services for the whole year.
If you have the budget and if you plan to really make your online business work, you have to get the annual plan.
In the Personal package, you can save $48 per year if you take the annual payment package. For the Advanced Commerce, you can save up to $72 per year.
If you are merely testing the water and you are not yet sure if your website is going to last, take the monthly plan. Cancel anytime if you no longer want to continue your website.
Squarespace price versus other platforms
How does Squarespace compare to others? Let us take a look at the price ranges and what these other platforms can provide.
To make the comparison apples to apples, we will only compare the most basic plans.
Squarespace | Shopify | Weebly | Wix | Ecwid | BigCommerce | WordPress | |
| Price per Month | $16 | $29 | $0 | $4.5 | $0 | $29.95 | $0 |
| Can build a website? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Can build a store? | No | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
As you can see, not all web builders are created equal. Some may not charge you for building a website, but you cannot build a store.
While WordPress is free to use, you have to pay for webhosting service to get your site up and running. The two most commonly used webhosting platforms are Bluehost and Siteground. These two cost between $4 and $6 monthly.
As you can see, Shopify, Ecwid, and BigCommerce are the three platforms where you can build a store and a website at the base plans. Ecwid is free, but the service you get is that you can put up your store only through integration with social media channels.
You can learn more about Ecwid here, and more about BigCommerce here.
With Squarespace, you will pay $16 per month but you cannot build a store. You have to get the Business plan to be able to build an ecommerce store. This more affordable than Shopify and yet it does not have the complete benefits that Shopify offers.
Summary
Recently, the company launched the Squarespace Extensions, a marketplace where you can buy apps and use them on your website
Squarespace is a great alternative to Shopify and other platforms if you are in a tight budget. It costs $3 less if compared to Shopify, and you can save more if you pay it annually.
Squarespace is also great if you plan to host webinars and charge customers for membership. These are things you cannot do with Shopify and many e-commerce platforms.