Squarespace Is the Best Website Platform for Most Small Businesses
Four reasons most small businesses should choose Squarespace over Wordpress for their website.
There is a debate going on that you may not even be aware of: Squarespace or Wordpress?
As a design and branding agency that works with small businesses and nonprofits, we recommend Squarespace to 90% of our clients.
We get a lot of questions about why we love Squarespace so here is our breakdown:
Is Squarespace customizable?
Yes! Contrary to what some web developers say, Squarespace is fully customizable. There are templates that make things incredibly easy, but Squarespace makes it easy to build a custom site from the ground up (which is what we do for our clients!)
Is Squarespace easy to use?
Incredibly easy. “What you see is what you get” which in this case means, making updates, adding content, and redesigning your website doesn’t have to be done by a host, you can do it all yourself! This is a big reason we love Squarespace for our clients; this may seem like a hot take but we don’t want you dependent us to keep your website fresh and updated (unless you want us to).
How much does Squarespace cost?
Squarespace is incredibly affordable and offers several options for individual, business, and enterprise clients. We think Squarespace is a great option for small businesses because of the low cost and ease of use; you don’t have to pay expensive monthly maintenance or pay a developer to update your site.
Squarespace for SEO and Performance
Basic SEO is very simple to achieve on Squarespace. Squarespace easily integrates with Google Search Console, Google Index, and Google Analytics. Why is this important? Google “crawls” your webpages, categorizing and updating how your website ranks in search results. Squarespace also makes your site “mobile friendly” automatically; adjusting image size, and font alignment to be easily viewed and read on mobile devices. Our best advice for SEO? Keep your site up-to-date. Google deprioritizes out of date website to appear in search results.
What types of businesses is Squarespace good for?
As we mentioned, Squarespace is great for small businesses under $10MM.
Here is a list of some of the types of clients we’ve built Squarespace websites for:
Business Consulting and executive coaching businesses
Restaurants and coffeeshops
E-commerce and brick and mortar businesses
Community banks and financial services (like accounting, actuarial, bookkeeping, etc.)
SaaS businesses (especially those in start-up mode)
Public and private schools, institutions, and online courses
Non profit organizations
Check out our Top 10 StoryBranded Websites blog to see some of these websites in action.
In this week’s episode of Growing a Fruitful Brand, Raj and Ben run down the top 5 reasons we recommend Squarespace for small businesses and why it may be time to consider updating your site.
Watch or listen to the newest episode on YouTube or on your favorite podcast platform.
Are you wondering how your website is performing or if it’s ADA compliant?
We would love to help, reach out to one of our Brand Strategists today, we will audit your site and make recommendations on how you can get more from your website.
Ep. 33:
Squarespace vs WordPress
And why we prefer Squarespace for small businesses
Automated Transcript
Ben Lueders:
I have a confession to make. I'm a professional graphic designer and I love Squarespace. Welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand, where we discuss how to create and grow a brand that makes the world a better place for you, your customers, and your employees. I'm Ben Lueders, founder and art director of Fruitful Design and Strategy here in Omaha, Nebraska. This is my business partner and brand strategist, Raj Lulla. So, you may not know why this is such a big confession to make, but there's this big battle out there about what platform you should build your website on. We're probably going to get a bunch of hate mail for this episode. So, Raj, why does this matter?
Raj Lulla:
Well, first of all, your website is the digital front door for your business. So, in the same way that we would think about putting a sign out in front of our business and making sure that the front area is clean and that the windows are not broken and we've got good signage everywhere and all that, we think of our websites that way. It's the digital front door to our business. Most people have already researched your business. I think it's somewhere between 60 and 80% of the buying decision happens before they ever even talk to you or show up at your business. So, your website could not be a more important piece of digital property.
The battle out there is what platform is best to build your website on. A lot of graphic designers and web developers will tell you WordPress. There's a lot of platforms out there like Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Webflow, and a bunch of other ones. Shopify is another big one for e-commerce. So, there's a lot of platforms out there besides WordPress, but WordPress is the big dominant player in the market. So, you've got more designers and more developers who gear towards that, but there's also some other reasons why they do that that we're going to get into that aren't necessarily for the client's benefit, but are actually for the benefit of the agencies. That's not bad or nefarious.
Everybody's got to have a business model. Just because it's the platform they're most comfortable on doesn't mean that it's the right platform for you, especially not for small business owners. So, there's this stigma out there that's probably distributed by the website builders themselves that WordPress is the better choice for people who take their business seriously and want to build a serious digital presence. But to be honest, that's not true in most cases. Today, we're going to tell you why.
Ben Lueders:
So we've got to admit, it feels weirdly risky to come out so strongly for Squarespace. We've been building on Squarespace for at least six or seven years, maybe even a little longer than that, but we've never made a video or even posted a blog post advocating in either direction, WordPress or Squarespace. But that was mostly just out of our own insecurity as designers. If we're honest, we've known for a while that this is the best platform for almost every small business. We're tired of worrying what the design community or web development community might think of that opinion.
Raj Lulla:
We love all you guys, but it's okay if we annoy you a little bit, because we're going to talk to our customers today.
Ben Lueders:
So instead, we want small businesses to know why they should strongly consider Squarespace as their website platform.
Raj Lulla:
We have to do the school part right now where we got to do a little definitions of the words. So, let's talk about this. Okay, what is WordPress? You'll be forgiven if you remember WordPress or think of WordPress as a blogging platform from the early 2000s because there's a little bit confusion here. There's wordpress.com, which is the blogging platform that a lot of the big blogs that turned into books or movies came from, and then there is wordpress.org, which is an open source free content management system that basically is just a blank slate that you can put code and design onto.
It's not a website builder in the sense that you can't just, like you could with a Squarespace, go start a website and start plugging in pictures and words and stuff and make it look like a website. You have to know code in order to build a WordPress website unless you're buying a theme from somebody. We'll get into that a little bit. What else? Give us a little more about WordPress.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah. Well, like Raj said, because it's open source, this might be a little nerdy deep dive, but that means it's more like Linux where anyone can create themes or plugins for it. So, that's one of the things that WordPress is known for is all these custom plug-ins that so many different vendors create that can help your site do lots of different things.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, there's plug-ins for stores and for SEO and even for those really super annoying banners that slide across your website.
Ben Lueders:
Sliding.
Raj Lulla:
Don't do that. They're bad. If anything, it'd make people leave your website.
Ben Lueders:
They definitely installed those on some sites a long time ago. Not anymore. So, like Raj also said, WordPress has been around a while. It's been around for 20 years actually. Next week I think is their birthday. 43% of websites on the internet are WordPress. So, it makes sense that we might be ruffling some feathers here, because literally, the majority of the web is WordPress. One of the things that us, designers, love is with the help of developers, they're completely customizable.
You can make WordPress sites do lots of crazy things that maybe WordPress wasn't even meant to do. Raj and I were just chatting right before we start recording that one of our clients, Fusion Medical Staffing, we actually helped build an intranet for their company, but it was built on WordPress. So, WordPress can do some really, really cool and crazy things, anything you can put your mind to.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, it is a great place to build a tool, build anything you want to. In fact, there are probably major corporations in our country that have their website on WordPress or some variation of that and good for them. That's really great. But moving to Squarespace, so if WordPress is open source and totally customizable, has all these plug-ins and stuff, how's Squarespace different? So Squarespace is a platform that was built by a company. It's a little bit more like we think of the founding of Apple or any of those essentially. I think it was a guy in a dorm room, not a guy in a garage, but that idea. It's not open source. So, it's not this nerdy developer thing with everybody building plug-ins for it.
In fact, there's no need for plug-ins in most cases, but you can put custom code in it for things like PayPal, HubSpot, some of those big things that you need to do business. Those are available. It is also completely customizable. Go ahead and cue the hate mail right now because some people will say, "No, it's built on themes." Some of that information's a little outdated for people who have hated on Squarespace for a long time and that's fine, but what they have done now is built a platform that is really completely customizable.
Ben Lueders:
We'll get more into that in a second because that's something that I'm so excited about is how Squarespace has changed in the last few years to be even more customizable and even more powerful. But the one thing I will add to what Raj just shared is that there are people that do create plug-ins for Squarespace. It's not quite the same community, but for the most part, like he said, Squarespace is this all-inclusive experience. So, I compare WordPress to the Linux. Maybe Android might be a better way to say that.
You can jailbreak your phone and install all these themes and you can create it just the way that you want it, but then an Apple device, let's say an iPhone, it comes just the way that it should be. It's been designed by designers that know what they're doing and it's very easy to use and the experience is just a really, really high end user experience. So, that's what Squarespace feels like to the average user and to designers like us.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, you're probably not going to see some cybersecurity expert in the movies using an iPhone. They all like the control of being on Android. But for most people, iPhone's a super easy user experience and that's what people like about it.
Ben Lueders:
So we're going to give you five reasons today why we love Squarespace and we think that is the best platform for most small businesses. Number one is that it's easy to use and update. You should not hate having to deal with your website. That is warning sign number one. If you are currently on a WordPress website and you hate logging in, that's not a good sign. It'd be like going home and hating dealing with your house. Maybe that's a sign you should move. Don't get me wrong, there are times we get there where there's stuff falling apart or it's not in the right neighborhood anymore. All the sorts of things that this doesn't feel like the one for us anymore. That's okay, but Google prioritizes sites that update a lot.
So, if you hate updating your website with putting new pictures on there, adding event information, that stuff, then Google's actually going to deprioritize you in listings, because it's going to assume that your business is dying and your audience will too. Outdated sites send the wrong message to people. Because it makes it look like you're not open for business if you're still advertising the Christmas 2017 sale. I know that pandemic math screwed up our brains, but that was a long time ago. Well, and I know this is crazy to think about, because when WordPress was first coming out, it was the easy to use thing compared to having to go in and hand code everything. Having a content management system, it was the easiest thing to do.
So, even for a lot of developers and designers, some might be like, "No, it's fine. This is still pretty easy to use for us." But if you talk to the average business owner or someone who may actually have to update a site, because it's so customizable on the backend, it can be really hard to remember how to update specific parts. There are some old WordPress sites that we design where every once in a while I'll need to go and update something and it's like, "Oh, man, how do I do this again?" Because it was so customizable, it can be easy to break things and stuff. So, that's one of the greatest things about Squarespace is it's just so easy to use an update. How I used to sell people on Squarespace sites is I would just show it to them, show them the backend.
Here's your WordPress site that you're on and then I'd take them to a Squarespace site that I had made or was working on and it's so beautiful. It just looks like your site. Then you click in the corner and it just reveals a little menu beside it. It's all so visual. You can literally click in and edit text. It's all what you see is what you get, WYSIWYG. It's so beautiful. It's so easy to edit and to change. So, it really sells itself. I think the average person, they're going to enjoy their experience and probably use and change and edit their site much more often if they're on Squarespace versus WordPress.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, I want to dig into that idea for just a quick second of Ben mentioned it, what you see is what you get editor. That's the big selling point of Squarespace, is that when you go in, you log into your Squarespace and you click edit on your site. You are actually editing on the site. So, you double click into that text box and change the word. You hit save. That's what's on your website immediately when you hit save.
Ben Lueders:
Kind of scary. It might be a little too easy. We do talk about that.
Raj Lulla:
A little Spider-Man, great power comes great responsibility situation here. Yeah, it's very, very easy to edit. I like to tell people that if you can edit a PowerPoint or a Google Slides deck, then you can edit a Squarespace site competently. You don't need to worry about that. Now again, yeah, that can come with the trade-off of you can mess it up, but the nice thing is just don't hit save if you mess it up and then you don't have to call anybody to help. I will say too, this is the area where we'll talk about how there's some economic factors going into why some shops would recommend WordPress over Squarespace. When we design a Squarespace for you, we actually have a business problem. Your site is so good and so easy for you to update that you don't need us anymore.
Now some folks will still engage us to do their website maintenance because you just don't have time to do it or you don't know what to write or you want a professional designer in your corner. All that's great, but we've also had a lot of small businesses, a lot of nonprofits that take their Squarespace website and they run and run for years until they call us again and they want a full refresh because it's just like, "Hey, it's just time for a change. We want to freshen things up."
Unlike WordPress where you have to pay for hosting, and a lot of times the person who's selling your website has a deal with WPEngine or Flywheel or whoever, they get a kickback on the hosting. That's great for them and they require a lot more maintenance typically. If you want to change something on there, there are what you see is what you get editors for WordPress, but it's a plugin I think in almost all cases. So, that plug-in can break or maybe not work.
Ben Lueders:
It needs to be constantly updated.
Raj Lulla:
It's not designed to be used that way out of the box as opposed to Squarespace, which is really designed for you to be able to edit it easily. So, a lot of times, web designers and web developers have a financial incentive to not sell you a thing that would be easier for you to use. Again, I think we're probably going to get some hate mail for saying this out loud, but it's true. I would rather only have maintenance agreements with my customers who just want the help rather than having them feel beholden to us. They can't leave if they want to. That's not the healthy relationship that I want to have with our clients.
Ben Lueders:
I think that was well said, Raj. I do want to say really quickly though, it's not like we don't use WordPress because-
Raj Lulla:
Yeah, absolutely.
Ben Lueders:
... I'd say about 10% of what we do is on WordPress thereabouts. So, sometimes WordPress is the right solution, but yeah, Raj is totally right. One of the greatest things about having just a simpler, more easy to use and updated solution is our clients can focus on the things that really matter and we can too. It's like we're not the ones having to constantly update plugins and go behind the scenes and make sure things aren't getting broken, things aren't getting hacked because of security breaches, et cetera. We can just focus on the messaging and the actual design and how things look and feel and sound, which is what we would rather be doing anyways.
Raj Lulla:
Unless your WordPress developer is doing the hosting themselves, literally have servers in their house or use virtual servers on cloud somewhere, then when you call them because your website's down, they're just turning around and calling WPEngine customer service the same way that you would. So, there's a middleman there and we're going to get yelled at for exposing part of our own industry, but there are times when you should do it.
Just like with anything where if you want your real estate agent to negotiate the sale of your house or the purchase of your house because they're the experts and they make it work and it's legal and they fill out all the right forms, that stuff's great. So, there are times when WordPress is the right choice, but if it's not for you, then don't feel like that's your only option. So, number one was it's easy to use and update. There's obviously a lot that's packed into that. The second thing that we love about Squarespace, I'm going to let you do this one because it's about-
Ben Lueders:
Thanks, Raj.
Raj Lulla:
... the looks.
Ben Lueders:
The sites are just beautiful and work really, really well. They're totally customizable. So, as we already hinted before, there's been a lot of changes in Squarespace over the years. We were using it back when it wasn't quite as customizable and we had to really make Squarespace work for us and work for our clients a little bit more. A huge difference that changed a couple years ago is back in the old Squarespace, you had to start with a different theme. These themes, they were really built on different architecture. So, it really mattered which theme you started with because not all of the themes had the same features.
So, you might start with a certain theme and be like, "Hey, I was able to add this thing to my last Squarespace site. Where did that go? Where did that go?" You're digging through the settings and it's like, "Oh, no, you started with the wrong theme and then switching..." Anyways, more than you guys needed to know. But all that to say, this is why I think Squarespace started getting a lot of a bad rap from designers is that you felt like you were being stuck in a box and a little square, a little square space in a sense, and you weren't able to do what you wanted to do, which is just design in a really visual way. So, when everything switched to Squarespace 7.1 a couple years ago, now it's all on the same architecture.
You can start with a template or a theme if you want to, or you can completely start from scratch, which is what we do for our clients and just build it out how you want. It's so visual. It's now built on this whole new framework called Fluid Engine. You literally are able to design like you would in a design program like Photoshop back in the day or Illustrator or nowadays, XD, Figma, designer words. But the point is that you're not limited. You're able to have things overlap and move and they have so many more design tools It's just an absolute joy as a designer to design.
So, when you're hearing your designer, your agency mention Squarespace too, and you're like, "Wait a second. I don't want some templated thing," just know that no, that's not what we're talking about. This is just as fully customizable. For those things where we want to go even beyond what Fluid Engine can do, there is custom code that we can get into as well and we do. We customize the play buttons on a lot of our websites. We customize a lot of different things to really dial them in the way that we want to. So, yeah, I could go forever on that one. That is the one I'm so excited about.
Raj Lulla:
Another little dirty secret of our industry is that a lot of WordPress sites are built on themes anyway.
Ben Lueders:
Raj, you're not supposed to say that.
Raj Lulla:
Yes, there's a theme builder called Divvy that a lot of people use. So, if you ever hear from a developer or a designer that it's like, "Well, we do WordPress because it's totally customizable," it's like, well, yes, but anything that you can put code into is more or less fully customizable. In Squarespace, you can affect the code. Like Ben was saying, even just the design software of it now is fully customizable. So, that's a big misnomer. Honestly, if somebody's trying to sell you a WordPress site, ask if they're using a theme. It doesn't mean you shouldn't buy it. Because if they're doing that so they can save you 80% of the cost of doing a completely custom site with a developer and all that, then that's fine.
If you want to use the WordPress plugins, want to be on that platform because that's what you're comfortable with and you don't mind it being on a theme, that's totally great. But a huge, huge portion of WordPress sites are on themes anyway and then they're just customized like you would with graphics and photos and that stuff. So, there's not really a big debate there anymore, even though people pretend like there is. Another couple of things that are worth mentioning in the design and function part of Squarespace is that Squarespace is really responsive for mobile. It's built in that way. In fact, if you are logged into your Squarespace site, there's these little icons at the top to switch between desktop view, mobile view, and that allows you to see how it's going to appear on different screens.
Ben Lueders:
So cool.
Raj Lulla:
Then you can move stuff around based off of which screen it's on. Again, this is a thing that Google deprioritizes sites that are not mobile friendly. So, by the way, if your site is not mobile friendly, whether it's built on Squarespace or WordPress or custom code or whatever, that is a big deal. In fact, that's why we don't like some out-of-the-box website builders like Wix and Weebly. Traditionally, in the past, they have been really hit or miss when it comes to the different sizes of websites. So, what's called responsiveness. To be honest, it's been a while since I've used them and maybe they've improved, but basically, when I run across a Wix or Weebly site, I can typically tell, especially just by changing the size of my window, if it's behaving as smoothly as a WordPress site or a Squarespace site.
So, that's one thing to look out for. Webflow is actually a really great platform. I wouldn't be surprised if in five years we are doing a similar episode of saying, "Hey, why we're switching." But at the same time, Squarespace keeps evolving and keeps pushing the product. There's cool stuff like even text animations and that stuff now that they're allowing. I think that Webflow and Squarespace are both just really great choices and we have a fair amount of expertise in Squarespace. I think it's a great choice for most people.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, one thing I'll say on that mobile front is that in the olden times of Squarespace, where I think they were getting more of a bad rap, you could switch between the mobile and the desktop view, but you had to be really careful how you built that desktop view because you couldn't really customize the mobile view easily. So, it was like, "Oh crap, I better switch where the image is on desktop. I don't like how it looks, but it's going to look better on mobile." You had to do a lot of switching.
The cool thing now, this is new with Fluid Engine, so this is just in the last year, you're able to literally design your site in desktop, you see what it does on mobile, and then you can completely rearrange things and it stays. If you don't like where that image went or how things overlapped in mobile or whatever, just switch it around and it saves.
Raj Lulla:
It's very cool.
Ben Lueders:
If there are designers listening and I hope there are some, I hope this gives you a reason to give it another shot. Give it another try, go play with it. It is so much fun. For non-designers, just know that this is a great platform that can present your company, your product in the best possible way on the widest amount of platforms and devices.
Raj Lulla:
Now, Ben mentioned in the previous point that these are one-stop shop kinds of sites. You can do your blogging, your podcasting. You can even have an e-commerce store on your Squarespace site. I do recognize that if you are a pretty serious e-commerce brand, it might be that Shopify's a better platform for you and that totally makes sense. There might even be a couple of other. If you're a course creator or something like that, there might be better choices for you. But one of the things I want to point out there is that it's not just a choice between Squarespace and WordPress if you're an e-commerce brand. Again, don't feel like, "Oh, if I'm going to be a serious business, I have to have a WordPress."
No, it might be the Shopify's best spot for you if it's not Squarespace or WordPress. So, just wanted to throw that out there because there are different types of businesses that we wouldn't necessarily recommend Squarespace to everybody. For most small businesses, especially service-based small businesses, definitely. But for e-commerce brands, if you also have really robust sections where you need to do logins and all that stuff, although again, Squarespace is catching up there.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, that's true.
Raj Lulla:
But if you need the guts of your site to go really, really deep and you need all of these plug-ins and integrations and that stuff, then WordPress might be a better choice for you. But if you're like most small businesses and you're not spending millions every year on marketing to optimize your SEO down to all the nitty-gritty things and you're not pulling in an HR recruiting software because you're recruiting hundreds of people a month, all of those things, then you probably do not need a WordPress website. It's like buying a Ferrari that you are just going to drive to work and it's just expensive to maintain. It might really impress your coworkers and your cubicle, but it's not worth-
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, you need to know who you are. What do you need this actually for? Yeah, there could be some specific custom app type thing that reason why you need something else. Maybe it is something like Shopify. Actually, we're working on a Shopify website right now for eCommerce brand.
Raj Lulla:
Great.
Ben Lueders:
That's the right solution for that thing. I guarantee you Apple's website is probably not built on Squarespace, nor should it be. It's not necessarily for everybody, but it's for a darn lot of people. Most of our clients are on Squarespace.
Raj Lulla:
Here's a big reason why. They are more affordable to build in a lot of cases. If you can get somebody who can build you a WordPress for the same price as we can build you a Squarespace, then one of two things is probably happening. They are using a theme like Divvy or something like that to build it as fast as we can do a Squarespace or they're using outsourced developers overseas. I personally don't really care for that business model for a few reasons. One is the security of I don't like to just send stuff overseas and work with people that I can't meet face-to-face. That may be an old-fashioned mindset, but I don't like just sending work overseas because it's cheaper. We have an entirely American workforce working for us, and I like it that way. It's all people that-
Ben Lueders:
Made in America.
Raj Lulla:
... we know, we trust, and we support their lifestyle at a fair wage. That's how we do it. I would say maybe one other scenario that you would get of why somebody would make a WordPress site as affordably as we can make a Squarespace is if they are using it as a loss leader to make all their money on the backend. I talked about there's people who sell hosting, maintenance, all that stuff. So, they might even build your WordPress site for free because they're going to charge you $1,000 a month in hosting and maintenance. I mean, you can look up the standards for our industry about the average of what a designer makes, about the average of what a developer makes. Those numbers don't really change.
Everybody's going to make about the same amount of money. They're just going to make it in a different way. Like I said, we prefer to pay local labor, American labor. So, that we know that we're not having anybody in a server farm or a coding farm overseas. Again, not that all situations are like that. It's hard to know without going there if it's a legitimate operation or they're using themes. They're using shortcuts in some way to deliver the same product to you. But again, everybody in this industry is making roughly about the same. So, they're just doing it in whichever way. We've chosen what we think is the easiest site for you to edit, the thing that keeps you as not reliant on us as possible, and that we know that the people involved in making it are treated fairly.
So, that's one reason why we love this platform is it's more affordable to build and you should see that in the bottom line. When we make a WordPress site, it is going to be more expensive for you, because we use American developers. We could use outsourced developers overseas. We just choose not to.
Ben Lueders:
Related to this whole affordability thing, some of that is in how all-encompassing one-stop shop it is. So, one thing to keep in mind is WordPress, like we mentioned, WordPress is a free content management system, but it doesn't include your hosting. You have to get hosting somewhere else. You have to get your domain names someplace else, and you have to manage all these different logins and all these different things. Whereas in Squarespace, you can buy your domain name from Squarespace and it's hosted in Squarespace. Your website content management system is hosted in Squarespace. You can have everything-
Raj Lulla:
You own those things, by the way.
Ben Lueders:
You own those things.
Raj Lulla:
I'm pretty sure Squarespace's domains are purchased through Google Domains. So, you're not held to Squarespace. If you decide you want to take your URL somewhere else, you can. Squarespace isn't holding you hostage there.
Ben Lueders:
Absolutely.
Raj Lulla:
So it's important to know that.
Ben Lueders:
Absolutely.
Raj Lulla:
We get that question a lot.
Ben Lueders:
We don't even utilize all of the services in Squarespace, like Raj is hinting at. They have obviously blogging. They have their own email marketing platform. We haven't even tried this yet, but they have their own membership online class interface that you can do, masterclass all built in. They obviously had e-commerce for a while, and it's getting better and better. They're always improving these things. Our podcast is published through Squarespace. You can do that. It's crazy how much stuff... So, again, we're talking about being more affordable. These are all things that you could be farming out to different places. I mean, it's just all included in your Squarespace hosting fee.
Raj Lulla:
Which by the way is about $200 a year. A year, not a month.
Ben Lueders:
It's crazy.
Raj Lulla:
So when you swipe your credit card for your Squarespace site, about $200 a year.
Ben Lueders:
So there's a lot you can do with that. Like we've already alluded to, for example, we don't use Squarespace email marketing for our company. We use HubSpot because that works better for us. We did our own research, blah, blah, blah. But it might be fine for you or someone you know. I know a local artist who has a Squarespace website that she built herself and I helped her a little bit on the side, but she uses their email marketing and it works perfect for her and has all the right tools for her. There's built-in analytics and all this stuff.
So, there's a lot of things there. Individually, each of those services may not be the very, very best or robust in the world. If you're a huge company, you just need certain types of insights or features. There might be other platforms for you, but you do have access to this one. So, if you're doing nothing and you're like, "I need to start blogging," it's like you got blogging.
Raj Lulla:
Exactly.
Ben Lueders:
I should launch a podcast. You can do that here.
Raj Lulla:
So we've even used some of the more robust tools early in the days of our new blog. We switched between HubSpot and Squarespace, and HubSpot is significantly more expensive. Not $200 a year.
Ben Lueders:
If you're into spending money.
Raj Lulla:
But we ended up moving it back to Squarespace because of the customizability factor.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, it's hard to say.
Raj Lulla:
But yeah, we just couldn't get the HubSpot thing to look the way that we wanted. As a designer strategy firm, we knew that that was important. So, we're sacrificing a little bit on the HubSpot functionality side, but we have so much more control over our own brand and platform, and that was worth it to us.
Ben Lueders:
Absolutely. Yeah, we really could go on about this all day. It's a huge question, but last couple of things here. Number four is that Squarespace sites are pretty secure by nature. Any website is vulnerable by nature being on the internet. But if you think about what we talked about before, WordPress sites are 43% of the sites on the internet. So, like Android and Windows, they're really big targets. One of the reasons why Apple has not had the big problems with viruses and malware and that stuff over the years is that 98% of corporate machines were Windows and it's still a huge number.
So, what are you going to go after, the big companies using Windows, or are you going to go after the small creatives using Apple? Now, that mix has changed a little bit in the marketplace and there are certainly some architectural differences between the platforms, but WordPress sites, big target or big platform, big target.
Raj Lulla:
A lot of that's because of the plug-ins too. When you open up your content management system to all of these third-party plug-ins that sometimes they expire, they need updating, I think that's a lot of times where the hacking and stuff has come in. We've had WordPress sites that have been hacked before. It's no fun. I think that's a lot of where some of the big security risks come in with WordPress. So, again, for a lot of developers and stuff that we know that understand this world and are really on top of these things, there's definitely great measures that you can do.
So, this is not to say you have a WordPress site, you're going to get hacked and it's all going to be terrible. That's not true. Again, we do work in WordPress. We have many sites on WordPress, but Squarespace is really secure. We have not had security issues like we have with WordPress.
Ben Lueders:
So last one here is that Squarespace sites are great for most businesses under $10 million. So, I guess one thing we should just say here is we take our own medicine here. We have our site on Squarespace.
Raj Lulla:
You're not supposed to tell them that.
Ben Lueders:
No, no. This is for other people. Of course, ours is WordPress.
Raj Lulla:
Yes, we've been on Squarespace for a while now.
Ben Lueders:
For many years.
Raj Lulla:
For many years.
Ben Lueders:
Five at least.
Raj Lulla:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Ben Lueders:
There's a couple of reasons for that, but one was we got hacked on WordPress and we were using one of the large name hosting providers out there that we thought would help keep us safe. Now, I don't even know that it was their fault.
Raj Lulla:
Probably not.
Ben Lueders:
It probably had a lot more to do with plugins.
Raj Lulla:
There's probably some slider plugin that I had.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you're the normal business owner in the $1 to $10 million space, especially $1 to $5 million space where you don't have just buckets of cash to be constantly making sure that somebody's updating all your plugins and keeping your hosting exactly right and all those things, it's nice to be on a platform that is just built for you to be secure and then also have all of the other options. We talked about blogging. You can do a little store, you can have some email marketing, all those things for 200 bucks a year. Yes, there's the cost of designing and putting up the site, but after that, the maintenance cost is really, really low. You can call a designer once every year, a couple of years to freshen things up for you, but your cost of ownership I think is going to be a lot lower.
So, especially if you're a service-based business and you're getting consultations scheduled or even booking things, so we use HubSpot to book, but Squarespace actually has a bill... Again, another thing that they own a company called Acuity that does scheduling. So, if you want to schedule your time, you can even have somebody have to pay to schedule your time. So, those free consultations or those paid consultations, again, for most especially service-based businesses, small businesses, Squarespace is the right choice. It's just such a great platform.
So, I just want to run through those reasons again of why you should consider it. It's easy to use and update. The sites are beautiful and they work well. They're more affordable to build in most cases. They are secure and they're great for small businesses to build, to set and forget until you update and want to write some content. Then it's easy to get in there without what you see as what you get editor and you don't have to worry just about anything else.
Raj Lulla:
Expiring plugins or hackers or all that stuff.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, you want to be able to focus on the parts of the business that you know and you love. As an agency, we want to do the same thing. We want to be able to focus on what you're saying, how you're presenting yourself, your overall brand, your brand image. Worrying about all these other things, behind the scenes things is not our thing. I know that for most of you listening, it's not yours either. So, we've just been over the years, really impressed at how Squarespace has improved, improved and improved and pushed out just more and more value.
It really hasn't gotten any more expensive, but the value has just gone up and up. Every time that I start looking over at Webflow or some other new thing coming out, I find myself realizing that, oh man, Squarespace is keeping up with these technology changes. So, we're big fans and we're not ashamed to say that we love Squarespace and we think you might as well.
Raj Lulla:
I should probably offer a small bit of full disclosure. I own one share in Squarespace. I know that's really going to sway your decision here, because if you build your website on them, I might get a third of a penny. No, I did buy a share when they did an IPO, but just like all IPOs, I immediately lost money afterwards.
Ben Lueders:
That's what this is all about really.
Raj Lulla:
If it'll make the difference, you'll sell that share in a heartbeat, because Squarespace really is the right solution for 90% of small businesses, especially service-based businesses between $1 and $10 million. If you need help with your website, we would love to help you. Whether you want to go with WordPress or Squarespace or anything else, again, we'd love to help you. We love those folks in our industry who make other choices, who do use WordPress, who do use overseas developers, all those things. It's just not the way that we've chosen to do business. We have found that Squarespace with the way that we create it with American labor is a great solution for 90% of small businesses.
Ben Lueders:
I just remembered one little piece of homework I want you guys to do. So, in the show notes, we've dropped a link to a blog post that we wrote a couple months ago, our top 10-story brand sites. I was looking at this, and nine of them are Squarespace. Only one of them is WordPress. I want you to click on that, look through those sites, and see if you can guess which one is WordPress. I think you'll be surprised. It's hard to tell.
Raj Lulla:
I love playing that game on sales calls, but because people say, "Oh, Squarespace isn't as customed." So I'll show them sites, and then the reaction I get the most is, "That's a Squarespace site?" So they really are that customizable. I think that's a great homework. It's a little challenge. See if you can tell the difference between the sites. If you can, it's probably a good thing to be honest, because you'll be really, really impressed with what you can do on a Squarespace.
No matter which platform you choose, your website is your digital front door and it is so important to have presence there that you love, that you love using, that you'll update often, because I know that you are trying to grow a great business or a great nonprofit. So, go update your website, love using it no matter what platform you're using, and let's grow something good together.
Ben Lueders:
Thanks for joining us today on Growing a Fruitful Brand. If you found today's show helpful, don't forget to subscribe and consider sharing it with someone who might also enjoy it. If you'd like to work with Fruitful on a branding website or messaging project of your own, you can always reach out on our website, fruitful.design. So, until next time, don't forget to grow something good.
