Squarespace vs. WordPress: Pros and Cons for Bloggers

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I started my blog on Squarespace for a few reasons. One, I thought the Squarespace sites I’d seen looked more sophisticated. Two, I used WordPress for a job I once had, and I found it confusing and clunky at the time. I wanted a simple drag-and-drop website builder so I could just go live and focus on the writing. Three, I didn’t like the idea of needing a plugin for everything. “Plugins” are not even a thing on Squarespace (I can’t tell you the amount of times I asked a WordPress blogger for advice and they said “maybe there’s a plugin for that?” Plugins are WordPress vocabulary). Four, I thought everybody just used WordPress because it was the option they’d heard of. I have a complex about that sort of thing. This happens in many areas of life, where people just flock to whichever brand has name recognition (or whichever place – why does everyone crowd Zion when Capitol Reef is right there?). I always feel skeptical and wonder “but is it really better, or were they just first? Are you just repeating what you’ve heard from other people?”

Over the years I read advice articles from other bloggers, time and time again, insisting that WordPress is where it’s at. The more I heard this, the more I dug my heels in. Have any of these writers even tried any other platform? How can someone believably compare what’s best if they haven’t thoroughly explored and personally experienced multiple options? I won’t be talking about Wix or Blogger here today, because I have not used them and therefore do not feel qualified to speak on them. 

However, as my blog grew I did start to run into road blocks with Squarespace. I became more and more frustrated. I was always reading that the functionality I was bending over backwards to achieve with code would have been a simple click of a button in WordPress. Finally, it became enough of a problem that I gave up my pride, bit the bullet, and fully migrated my site to WordPress.org. It took me about a month (in between working full time and celebrating the holidays). I thought I was in for a hellish nightmare, but the migration process actually wasn’t bad! I used this step-by-step guide almost exclusively.

Now that the migration is complete, I am so glad I got it over with and made the switch. The longer I waited and the more webpages I accumulated, the worse the process would have been later on. It did turn out to be true that design and SEO elements I was struggling to achieve in Squarespace are as simple as a keystroke in WordPress. That being said, I also ran into a few oddities with WordPress that were never a concern with Squarespace. It’s not like everything is 100% peachy now with WordPress.

Below is a comparison of functionalities in both platforms, coming from the perspective of someone who has actually used both. For reference, I did invest in a paid Kadence theme on WordPress. And, if Squarespace makes updates in the future, I won’t be aware. It’s possible they’ll fix some of these issues after my migration and I won’t be the wiser.

I also hope this list will help anyone who is already planning on migrating from Squarespace to WordPress or vice versa, because I’ve described some exact differences in how each platform accomplishes similar tasks. If you’ve only ever used one, it’s not going to be automatically clear what buttons to press or codes to enter to achieve something that was intuitive to you on the other site.

SEO

Nofollow: Squarespace

As my blog grew, search engine optimization became more of a priority. When I learned that you should mark affiliate links as “sponsored” or “nofollow”, I realized there was no built-in way to do this in Squarespace. This is 101 stuff, and leads me to believe that Squarespace was really not built with bloggers in mind. 

There are ways to get around this and implement nofollow links, but it requires extra work. One way is to use the “markdown block.” Whichever paragraph of your article has the link in it will need to be inserted into a markdown block instead of just typed in a regular text block. Then, you can manually edit the html around the link using a rel tag, like this:

<a href=“[link here]” target=“_blank” rel=“sponsored">Click here</a> to find the product.

If you include a lot of affiliate links, this is extremely annoying. It also doesn’t work for image links. Christy Price does have a workaround for making image block links nofollow, which you can find here. However, you may be familiar with the image block “overlap” or “card” designs where you can pair your image with longer text in unique-looking layouts. If you have a link within that text, Price’s method will not work.

Another option is to add special site-wide CSS that will turn every single link with a specified domain into a sponsored or nofollow link. For instance, you could have it turn every Amazon link into a sponsored link. For this you’d go to Settings > Advanced > Code Injection and enter the code provided by this developer in the footer.

This option is best because it will also target image links, captions, or other weird places where the markdown block method doesn’t work.

If I had known all of this from the start it would have saved me a massive headache. I had to go back and re-edit all my posts over and over again. Even though I have it figured out now and it’s super easy with Dejaegher’s code, the process of coming to this point was frustrating enough to stick with me and contribute to my wanting to move to WordPress out of sheer spite.

Nofollow: WordPress

Just toggle the “nofollow” or “sponsored” options on for each individual link.

Alt Text: Squarespace

For a long time, image captions and alt text were not separate entities in Squarespace. If you wanted to put alt text on an image for SEO purposes, then you’d have to turn off captions so people couldn’t read it. Or if you wanted to put a caption people could read, you’d better hope that caption also works well as alt text.

Finally, they’ve fixed this and they now have the filename, alt text, and caption all separate. 

Alt Text: WordPress

Not only can you set the alt text, filename, and caption, but you can also add a “description” and all kinds of other image metadata that I’m overwhelmed with.

Excerpts and Social Sharing

On both platforms, creating excerpts about your posts (the part that will show up on your blog archive page so people can read a summary before choosing to click the post) is built-in and easy. To create special SEO descriptions (the preview about your post that you’d like to show up in Google search results) or social media previews, on Squarespace there is a built-in setting you can edit for each individual post or page. On WordPress, you have to download the Yoast SEO plugin to achieve this. Once you have the plugin it’s equally easy.

Pinterest Metadata: Squarespace

On either platform, you can enable Pinterest Rich Pins. However, setting up the metadata descriptions that you want Pinterest to pull from your pins is a *whole thing* on Squarespace. Again it involves using a code block.

First, rather than inserting your image into your post via an image block, you’ll instead need to upload your pin under Design > Custom CSS > Manage Custom Files. After it’s been uploaded, make a new blank line at the bottom of your custom CSS sheet. Put your cursor there as if you’re about to type. Then, click on your image in the Custom Files area. This will populate the line where you had put your cursor with a URL to the image (it will warn of a syntax error; ignore that). Copy/paste this URL, then delete it out of your custom CSS. Now, go back to your blog post. Insert a code block. Input the special metadata text below, copying your image URL into it. Edit the descriptions as you wish.

<img src="Paste the image url here" alt= “Your alt text here" data-pin-description="Your pin description here. #anyhashtagshere">

Note that if you had the Pinterest “Save” Button enabled in Squarespace’s settings, this will no longer work on your pins. The Save button hovers on image blocks, and in order to add metadata to your pin, you used a code block instead. Add another code block at the bottom of the individual blog post to fix this:

<script async defer data-pin-hover="true" data-pin-tall="true" src="//assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js"></script>

I learned how to do all of this from a post written by May Thanda, but her website is no longer live so I can’t link you to the original source.

Pinterest Metadata: WordPress

You can insert your pins as regular image blocks. If you have the Yoast SEO plugin, your social media descriptions will pull for your rich pin excerpts, otherwise your page excerpts will populate. For the meta description, supposedly you could click on your image block and select “Edit HTML” in order to add the data-pin-description tag, but this doesn’t work for me or for any of these people. If you care about using the data-pin-description tag, the best way to handle that is probably to install a plugin.

You will need a plugin to get the Save button to appear on hover. Weblizar is the most used free plugin, but I much prefer the “jQuery Pin It Button for Images” free plugin because I can use custom CSS classes to make sure the Save button only appears on my actual pins, and not on any other random images throughout a page. With most plugins, you can only specify which individual images you do not want the Save button to appear on. This is ridiculous. I have probably a million images on my site, so specifying that I do want the button to appear on 50 images is much easier than specifying one-by-one that I don’t want the button to appear on the other 999,950 images.

People will recommend that you get a paid plugin to handle Pinterest. I do not see the benefit. I tried one of them and it didn’t add any additional value that I can’t get from the free plugins; in fact, it had less functionality than the free plugin. I got a refund.

Design

Image Galleries: Squarespace

The image gallery blocks in Squarespace really started to get on my nerves. In my opinion the carousel block is the most streamlined-looking one aesthetically, but lightbox and captions are not possible. It is also way too small on mobile devices. There is custom code you can use to make the images larger, but then it crops them to fit the gallery container and cuts off your images. The slideshow gallery avoids all these problems, but the slideshow gallery is massive on desktop. It takes up the entire page. Sometimes you can’t see the whole image at once, and have to scroll.

Another annoying thing about the carousel is that there is no space between the images, so it can look all merged together and messy. Thankfully you can find code to fix this on the Squarespace forums. 

One cool thing about galleries in Squarespace is that you can include images and videos side-by-side in the same carousel or slideshow. This saves a lot of space. Sometimes I don’t want two separate lines of media, one being a gallery of images and then separately, a random video stuck underneath it. 

Image Galleries: WordPress

The various gallery options in WordPress all have caption functionality, all have lightbox functionality, are an appropriate size on both desktop and mobile, and they don’t look weird when you have both horizontally- and vertically-oriented images in the same gallery. I feel so spoiled now! One annoying thing I found (at least in my theme) is that linked images cannot be marked “sponsored” in the carousel gallery, though they can in other types of galleries. I tried to edit the HTML version and insert rel=“sponsored” myself but it wouldn’t let me. *Summer 2022 Update: a recent theme upgrade fixed this issue.

At least in my theme, galleries are for images only. Videos cannot be included. This has resulted in me excluding some videos from my blog posts for design reasons, even though I wanted them for content reasons. 

As a side note while we’re on the topic of videos, an annoying thing about the individual video block in my theme is that you cannot adjust the width or padding. As a result they tend to take up too much space on the page. The way around this is to insert the video into a row block, and then adjust the padding of the row. But then you’re going to have to put your paragraph block in the other half of the row, and if your paragraph is longer than the height of the video, the text will not wrap underneath.

Image Focal Point: Squarespace

One thing that I do love about Squarespace, and that I didn’t realize was apparently such a novel thing, is the ability to set image focal points. It’s a built-in function with Squarespace. When you upload a “featured image” in Squarespace, this will be the large banner/header image across the top of your blog post. It’s also what shows up as a thumbnail when people are scrolling through your archive of posts, and it should populate in the article preview if someone shares your post on social media. When you hover your mouse over the image, a little circle will pop up. You click where on the image you want the circle to stick. That will be the focal point. If you do not set a focal point, then the header/thumbnail may focus on some irrelevant part of the photo. Typically you want the center of the image to be a person or a mountain, not the random bush off to the side. 

Image Focal Point: WordPress

As far as I can tell, this is impossible to implement. I haven’t figured it out yet and it’s making me extremely frustrated. There is a plugin called WP Smart Crop that does not work for me (perhaps my theme or another plugin is interfering with it). ShortPixel has a setting to enable Smart Crop but it also isn’t working. In your media library you can click “Edit Image” and then crop it so that the part you want is centered, and then select to apply this change only to the thumbnail, not every version of the image. This also doesn’t work, it’s like the thumbnail version won’t take effect. So far the only solution I know is to cut the image up before you upload it, so that the part you want centered is actually in the center to begin with. Obviously this creates other problems, like having an oddly-shaped or too-small cropped image that gets stretched and grainy in order to fit the container. Or, having extra copies of the same image in your media library taking up space. Or, that I would like the header image to remain vertically oriented and full-size on mobile, but if I’ve uploaded a cropped one with 3:2 aspect ratio with desktop in mind, there is no way to use the original photo for mobile. This is happening at this very moment, on this post. I bet you have no idea what’s even happening in the header image right now.

*Update: to make the WP SmartCrop plugin work, the folks in the forum for my theme said not to set my featured image as my hero image background. Instead, in my Customize > Appearance settings I need to set Post Title Layout to “in content” rather than “above content”, toggle “show featured image”, and set it “behind” the title. This is because the plugin works on images, but not backgrounds. This fixed the problem for my blog posts! However, it did create a new layout for my posts that I wasn’t planning on. Luckily I still like how they look anyway. And, on my category pages (for instance “Arizona”) there is not any way to implement this. The hero image for category pages has to be a background rather than an image. If you run into similar problems but you have a different theme, I’m sure the fix will vary.

Image Quality: Squarespace

My images always looked crisp, clear, and beautiful on Squarespace. This was automatic. I never messed with code or cropped my images prior to uploading to make this happen. They maintained quality even when forced into headers or other containers.

I am sure this contributed to my slow site speed, but that’s a compromise I’m willing to make for pretty pictures. 

Image Quality: WordPress

My images look like crap now, particularly when they are assigned as the featured image. All my header images look very grainy and warped, to a noticeable degree. I hope I can find a way to fix this because it is still important to me to have quality images. To see what I’m talking about, click on the images below to zoom in.

I do have the ShortPixel plugin installed in an effort to increase page speed and loading times, and to enable next-gen formats. However, I configured the settings in a way that should help maintain quality, and I even told it to “exclude” particular images that were looking extra bad when served from their CDN. Excluding the image didn’t seem to help, so it seems to be a WordPress problem. I noticed this the very first day I started migrating over, and still haven’t been able to achieve the same level of quality that I had on Squarespace. My main solution has been to upload very large file size images as my featured image, which does help, and I just pretend I don’t care about page speed.

Highlighted Text or Background Colors: Squarespace

In Squarespace, if you want a paragraph to have a background color so that it pops out like a special information box, again you must use a code block. I used a few different resources like this to find code I liked:

Highlighted Text or Background Colors: WordPress

On WordPress, highlighting text or adding a background color to any block is a built-in feature in the settings.

Table of Contents: Squarespace

In order to link internally to another section of the same page, you’ll need to use a markdown block. Let’s assume when people click on a link in your Table of Contents at the top of the page, you want it to jump down to a particular title/heading of a paragraph below. You’ll need to insert that title using the markdown block instead of the text block. Surround the title with the following code:

<span id="here">Title</span>

You can input whatever you want instead of “here”. Then, go back to the top of your page. Highlight the text you want people to click on. Instead of linking that text to a URL like you normally would, link it to #here. Don’t forget the hashtag.

Table of Contents: WordPress

In WordPress, every single block on your page has a dropdown menu setting called “Advanced”, and within that, “HTML anchor”. This is where you’d enter “here” (or whatever you want the anchor text to be). The second part is the same as it would be on Squarespace. Highlight the text where you want to create a link, and input #here instead of a URL.

My theme has a Table of Contents block built in, as well, so I don’t often need to use anchors.

Blocks

The term “blocks” is used on both platforms now. Since I wasn’t on WordPress prior to August 2020 when they replaced the Classic Editor with the Block Editor, I am not sure what it was like to use the Classic Editor. Squarespace has always used blocks from the start. 

Everything in Squarespace is drag-and-drop; you can usually just stick blocks right where you want them. In WordPress it’s more finicky, even with my theme’s Pro Blocks installed. There was a learning curve to figure it out. At first I was frustrated that instead of just dragging two elements side-by-side, you have to insert a row block and then insert internal blocks within that, and then adjust the padding to get it to align correctly. 

Before the transition, one of my fears was that I would not be able to replicate some of my favorite design elements. This fear was unfounded, laughably so. WordPress has way more block types than Squarespace. In addition to your typical text block, image block, quote block, gallery block, etc, my theme on WordPress includes a plethora of extra unique design blocks. Not only can I replicate what I had before, but I can improve it. This has been fun to experiment with! Most of them are also extremely customizable, whereas with Squarespace blocks you often just get what you get and deal with it.

One of the blocks in WordPress that I’m most grateful for is the Post Grid Carousel. Using this block, you can link to another relevant internal post on your site in an attractive way, with the thumbnail, title, and excerpt all together in a card. You could even link to multiple posts in a nice carousel. On Squarespace I was Macgyvering together something similar by inserting separate image, title, and text blocks and then manually inserting a link to the other post. Squarespace does have a Summary Carousel Block that can do something similar to the Post Grid Carousel, but you must choose the posts featured in it by tag. There is not a way to pick the exact individual posts that you want included. On WordPress, you have both options. You can individually pick the posts, or pick by query.

One special block Squarespace has that WordPress doesn’t is the Amazon block. In your settings there is a place to enter your Amazon Associate ID to link your site to your Associate Account. Then, anytime you insert the Amazon block, you can search for a product to link to right there in Squarespace. You don’t have to open Amazon separately, search for a product, and copy the link over. The result is a nice-looking linked image of the product that actually fits your website’s design, instead of the basic universal look of an Amazon ad. There are still some issues with it though. Depending on how many Amazon blocks you put next to each other, they can line up weird. If you want two per row on mobile instead of one per row, that requires special code for some reason.

It’s not a huge loss. I’d rather reduce communication with third-party sites anyway, so I rarely used the Amazon block. I prefer to create my own ads using image blocks.

Plugins

On Squarespace, there are some built-in features that you can easily set up right there in the platform, whereas on WordPress a lot of seemingly basic tasks require installing yet another plugin. I was correct in predicting how annoying it would be to have to download a plugin for every simple thing. Plugins are the number one cause of sites breaking, and they can slow down your site. There are some cases where I’d much rather just input a simple line of code in the backend and call it a day. I also don’t want to be on the email update lists for all these plugins.

Quote: Unlike WordPress, Squarespace is a closed system, which means that your site is unlikely to break because there are no third party plugins, themes or software that could cause issues on your website. The chance of your Squarespace website disappearing or breaking out of the blue are next to nil.

– Wolf / Wild

On WordPress, you’re advised to get a plugin to enable Google Analytics. Why? On Squarespace you just enter your analytics ID in the settings and there you go, your site is hooked up and associated with your analytics account. I don’t want a plugin for this. Still, because I read that setting up analytics manually in WordPress was inadvisable because of theme updates, I did download the plugin at first. Ultimately it didn’t provide any value that I couldn’t get from the Google Analytics dashboard itself, and it was likely slowing down my site. I deactivated the plugin and just input the code in my theme files.

On WordPress, you need plugins in order to create signup forms, send out newsletter emails, or to build a product store. All of these features exist in Squarespace natively.

To set up redirects, in Squarespace you just add some code. For WordPress I was Googling the best way to handle redirects, and once again every single article lists a bunch of plugin solutions before you finally find a little sidenote about how to do it without a plugin. I went into my Cpanel to insert code into .htaccess. This was incredibly easy and it worked like a charm. I don’t understand why this isn’t everyone’s first move? Why all these distracting plugins?

On the flip side, the same way you could make the “everything requires a plugin” argument against WordPress, you could also make the “everything requires custom coding” argument against Squarespace as we saw above in the SEO and Design sections. I am grateful that there is likely to be a solution to almost any problem I’m having in WordPress as long as I’m willing to install a plugin. With Squarespace, I would sometimes spend hours searching for a way to achieve something with code, and I’d still come up empty handed. The things I wanted may have been technically achievable, but I would need to take coding classes and really dig in to figure it out. I suppose this may not be a problem if you’re not a blogger and if you’re ok with having a simple, streamlined site, which Squarespace helps you achieve with ease. It’s when you start caring about SEO or customizations that you start discovering red tape.

Squarespace’s support team will not help users with anything coding-related. Your question may not even be about custom code, but if you have tangentially used custom code on the page you happen to be asking questions about, you’re likely to get a “sorry, we can’t advise if you’ve made customizations”. On the one hand I get it, because their job is to help with Squarespace functions and if you’ve put all kinds of weird dastardly coding in there, that’s not their responsibility. Instead you’ll have to ask your peers in the forums. To be fair, some of the people who answer forum questions regularly are geniuses. By comparison, though, when I email support or post on a WordPress forum for a certain plugin or theme, I find that the administrators themselves are very proactive about replying and will even offer specific coding ideas that you might try entering into your custom CSS to help achieve your goal. This is likely a manpower thing. With Squarespace, there is only one team fielding all questions – the Squarespace team. With WordPress, you might be contacting the creators of a certain plugin or theme; WordPress itself isn’t always being directly bombarded with everyone’s questions.

I did find Squarespace’s forums more easily searchable than the WordPress ones. For some reason I have a lot of trouble finding my exact question when I try to search the WordPress forums. I end up having to post a new thread to ask it, knowing that I can’t possibly be the first person with this question.

Self-Hosted

The number one reason everybody says you should switch to WordPress.org is because “you own your content”. It is false that you don’t own your content on Squarespace! When you upload content to Squarespace, you still own it. You do, however, give them permission to use it in ways necessary to provide, improve, promote and protect their services.

That falsity was one of the reasons I never took anybody seriously who wrote posts about WordPress being better. If you’re not getting that part right, what else are you missing?

Still, being self-hosted now that I’m on WordPress.org does give me peace of mind for some ethereal reason that I can’t place. Although I have already experienced 503 “server unavailable” errors, which never happened when my site was on Squarespace servers. Another issue with being self-hosted is that my changes and updates do not appear live immediately. I enabled a setting that’s supposed to automatically clear my server’s cache for a page or post anytime I make an update to that page, but it doesn’t seem to be working. I’ve been having to purge my entire site cache every time I make an edit.

Spam

I think the entire time I was on Squarespace, I got one spam comment. I’ve been on WordPress for less than a week and I’ve already gotten multiple. I do have an anti-spam plugin installed.

Page Speed Insights

One of the issues that finally tipped the scales for me against Squarespace was page speed. Every website building platform will advise that Google PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals aren’t accurate ways of monitoring your site, because they’re judging and scoring your site based on random statistics that are important only to Google and not necessarily to readers. For instance, Google now penalizes your score if your site does not serve images in next-gen formats like AVIF and WebP.  I was docked quite a bit for this when my site was on Squarespace, because Squarespace is incapable of serving next-gen formats and there’s nothing you can do about it: 

Does this actually matter to anybody in real life? Doubtful. Some browsers don’t even support next-gen formats. But if Google cares about this, then you do have to care about it, regardless of what the employees at your site builder platform want you to think. This is because a bad site score could potentially mean that Google isn’t suggesting your pages in search results as often as it otherwise might if you had a good score. At least, that’s the idea. In practice, I was still doubling my website traffic every year and ranking for certain posts on Google search results, even though my PageSpeed Insights score was abysmal. So who knows. But it made me wonder – if my traffic is increasing at this rate now, what would happen if my scores were actually good?

Before switching to WordPress, first I hired a developer to analyze my Squarespace site and suggest changes I could make in order to fix my site speed. He sent me a list of ideas which I implemented. These did increase my score for desktop (it didn’t really do much for mobile), but I was still not getting a “good” score. The top issues I was being docked for were all things that are impossible to change on Squarespace, because they are internal processes within Squarespace itself. Squarespace is so streamlined and easy to use because of some very heavy backend structure. This causes page speed warnings such as “render-blocking resources”, and there is simply nothing to be done about it. There are a lot of complaints on the Squarespace forums about this over the years, but still no solution.

While I was trying to research ways to increase my score, I kept finding WordPress-related solutions. On WordPress, there are many steps you can take to increase your page speed. You can choose a theme that’s known for its speed and download plugins like Autoptimize and ShortPixel. Wordpress also has lazy loading, which Squarespace does not.

After completing my entire site migration to WordPress, I checked my insights again. My score is only negligibly better. It’s disappointing to see this despite all the changes I’ve implemented and “promises” I thought I was made. Plus, when I visit my site in my browser, in practice it actually seems to load slower than my Squarespace site used to. It’s good that I’m not being docked points anymore for things like next-gen formats, but that’s not translating to a better overall score.

I’ve made a big effort to avoid unnecessary plugins, but perhaps all the new functionality options and blocks I’ve been enjoying are creating a problem? Since I only migrated it last week and I’ve still been playing with settings, I’m taking it with a grain of salt for now and will run more speed tests after things have had time to settle on my new server; fingers crossed. I will post an update here if things change.

I’m trying to decide if I want to dedicate any more study to this, or just stop worrying about speed and move forward. By migrating, I’ve made a massive effort (and sacrifice, in some ways) to appease our overlords at Google and there’s not much more I can do. 

I am highly aware that with how new I am to WordPress, it’s possible I am missing something when it comes to the few complaints I’ve made above. If you know a solution about the image focal points, for instance, please share!

Despite the couple of caveats I’ve noticed with WordPress so far, it has overwhelmingly been an improvement on my Squarespace experience already. The first day I started editing and saw how easy the nofollow tag was, I practically dropped to my knees and thanked the heavens. There have been more and more moments like that daily.

If you’re on Squarespace and considering moving to WordPress, it’s not necessarily a “must-do” like some people may preach. There are plenty of things Squarespace does well. For just a normal website, it might be my preferred platform. However, as a blogger, I am indeed glad I made the switch to WordPress and I think it’s a good long-haul decision that will serve me well as my site grows. If you’re a blogger I do think you should seriously consider migrating.

What are your thoughts on Squarespace vs. WordPress? Have you ever made a switch between website builders? What was your experience like?

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