Wix vs Squarespace: What is it all about? Both Wix and Squarespace are the world’s leading website platforms. There are over 3,800,881 live websites built with Wix, while around 3,605,190 websites are using Squarespace.
Setting up a website is easy, given that you have the right resources with you. But the question remains, which platform to use, Wix or Squarespace?
Platforms Overview
Both Wix and Squarespace are website building tools that are created to assist people with no (or very less) coding skills. Moreover, these tools also help in reducing the costs related to website maintenance.
Wix’s drag-and-drop editor makes it easier for beginners to create professional websites in no time. Squarespace, on the other hand, requires a little bit of practice to get used to, but the outcome will be worth your time and effort.
Wix is perfect for almost every industry, including small businesses, cafes, restaurants, and musicians. But when it comes to photographers, designers, or artists – anyone who wants to showcase high-quality images or stunning design, Squarespace is the winner.
Ease of Use
If you’re looking for a quick answer, then Wix outperforms Squarespace in terms of ease of use. But that doesn’t mean Squarespace is complicated.
Wix lets you choose between the Wix editor, where you edit a template and design your website, or Wix ADI, where you answer a few questions, and it will create a personalized website for you. Although you can edit the final design, if you want complete control over your draft, the Wix editor might be the ideal option for you.
Squarespace, on the other hand, isn’t as beginner-friendly as Wix. But it does have a knowledge base where you can get answers to most of your questions.
However, Squarespace gets pretty easy to use once you have spent enough time figuring out what each element does.
Design, Customization, and Flexibility
Wix provides more than 500 templates to choose from, whereas Squarespace has around 110 templates.
However, not all of Wix’s templates are completely responsive. This means that you have to make changes to the mobile and tablet versions of your site manually.
On the other hand, all the templates in Squarespace are created by professional designers and are completely mobile-friendly. When it comes to designing and customizing the templates, both Wix and Squarespace offer the drag-and-drop feature.
Wix Editor lets you customize a template in the way you want. There’s no restriction on where you can put elements. You can replace text and images, add or remove slideshows, everything with just a few clicks.
Squarespace’s drag-and-drop feature is section-based, meaning you can’t just drag anything anywhere. You’ll need to create columns on the grid layout and then make changes to the template accordingly.
As you can see in the below image, the template is divided into several blocks. You can edit any part of the page by double-clicking on it. Depending on your requirements, you can add or delete images/sections.
Wix doesn’t let you do that. If you wish to change the template at any time in Wix, you will have to start again from scratch.
Add-Ons Integration
Once you have created your website, you might want to take it one step further by integrating additional functionalities, such as live chat widgets or shopping carts.
That’s where add-ons come in. These tools allow you to add powerful features to improve your website’s usability.
Wix has its own App Market consisting of more than 200 apps. There are both free and paid apps that can help you manage, optimize, and expand your site’s functionality.
While Squarespace doesn’t have its own app market, most of the necessary features are designed in-house. For functions that are not in-built in the editor, you can check Squarespace Extensions.
You probably know about Zapier’s integration and what Zapier is capable of. Another way to widen the functionality of a website built with Squarespace is through Zapier Squarespace integrations.
It allows you to connect your site with more than 2,000 apps, including MailChimp, Slack, HubSpot, and more. However, Zapier is a different service and will require you to pay an additional service fee every month.
SEO Capabilities
Next in our Wix vs Squarespace battles comes SEO and the SEO-related capabilities of each CMS. Search engine optimization refers to the practices of optimizing your website, so it ranks higher on the search engines.
Both Wix and Squarespace have in-built SEO tools to help you boost your ranking right from the time of development. This includes mobile-friendliness, heading tags, alt text, edit page URLs, and more.
You can use Wix SEO Wiz to get your personalized plan. It will take you step-by-step through everything you need to do to make your website SEO friendly.
While Squarespace used to have a few important flaws in the SEO department, they have now gotten completely rid of them – well, almost. The only annoying thing that remains is that it’s sometimes really difficult to find the right place to add the alt-text for images.
What’s more, is that there are a few older templates that don’t let you customize your page title for the home page. But these are dying out, fortunately.
Squarespace SEO menu: it also shows you how it’s likely to look in the Google search
Website Loading Speeds
Website loading speed is an important factor for SEO, and both Wix and Squarespace have been extensively researched by us in this regard. In general, Wix has slightly faster loading speeds on both desktop and mobile compared to Squarespace.
However, Squarespace performs better in terms of “Time to Interactive”, which is the time it takes for a user to be able to interact with the website.
Both platforms could benefit from improving their loading speeds, and while Wix may have a slight advantage in this area, there is no clear winner between the two.
Similarly, Squarespace has great SEO features built in to help you with everything you need to optimize your website.
eCommerce
When it comes to eCommerce, Wix is more popular than Squarespace. Wix offers three plans for eCommerce stores. All of which, accept online payments, lets you integrate Google Analytics, remove Wix ads, free domain for one year, and $300 ad vouchers.
Squarespace is also a surprisingly powerful ecommerce solution, with professional features you’d expect from the best platform.
What’s important to note is that ecommerce doesn’t stop at the shopping cart.
Both Wix and Squarespace let you accept online payments for services and product subscriptions. Wix throws in a whole bunch of additional apps that can improve your cash flow: Wix Events, Wix Bookings and Wix Restaurants just to name a few.
Squarespace offers three plans for eCommerce. The first one provides very limited features and is not recommended for businesses who want to sell a lot of items.
In the other two plans, you don’t have to pay transaction fees. Besides, you get access to powerful eCommerce analytics and can sell directly on Instagram.
Help and Support
Being a professional enterprise, both Wix and Squarespace offer great customer support.
Wix offers support through email, social media, forums, and has a dedicated support center. You can also get in touch with the Wix support team over the phone (available 24/7 in English). As of now, Wix doesn’t have any live chat options.
Squarespace, on the other hand, has a live chat facility (from 3 AM to 8 PM EST, Monday to Friday) and provides 24/7 support through emails.
However, there’s no phone support available. But you won’t have to wait for too long to get replies to your emails. Squarespace has a policy of responding to every email within one hour.
However, Wix’s in-editor support is better than that of Squarespace. It answers all your questions on the same page, unlike Squarespace, which takes you to a different page to read the guide.
Blogging Platform
Wix has increased the number of blocks in its editor: now you can add files, tables and even GIF. You can even add a song from SoundCloud.
But we still miss some features, such as social media bars. If you want to insert a missing element, you have to use the HTML code option. Also, you won’t find an undo button in Wix’s blog.
A major downside to Wix’s blogging tools is the commenting feature. You can’t pre-moderate new comments – they will just appear on your site right away.
What’s more is that commenters have to create an account with your website before they can leave a comment, which causes unnecessary friction. There are some commenting apps available but the ones we’ve tested felt quite clunky.
The Wix blog editor: it’s clean, but missing a couple of building blocks
Squarespace, on the other hand, could (almost) be a contender to WordPress. You get most, if not all, the blogging features you might need such as categories, post scheduling and more. And that’s not even all. Squarespace also offers integrated hosting for your podcast in case you’d like to start one.
You will also be able to easily add a contact form, a newsletter or a map: none of these features are available in Wix’s blog editor. People can leave comments without being logged in and you can even connect an external service like Disqus.
Even if Squarespace provides lots of blocks, some are missing (a table for instance): you can only add them to your post using HTML code.
Mobile App
The Wix Owner app offers many features to manage one or several sites. Be aware that editing your site from a mobile phone (menu, page architecture, design…) is only available for sites created in Wix ADI.
But you’ll still be able to create some content, like blog posts or a new product listing for instance.
On your Dashboard, you have shortcuts to the main features of the app: Contracts, Orders, Subscriptions, Blog Posts, Analytics, Products, Marketing Campaigns, and so on.
Some highlights include:
- Analytics and Reports, where you can trigger alerts to inform you when there are significant changes in your trafic (or your sales).
- The blog section, where you will be able to create or edit your posts, manage your page settings and monitor your traffic.
- The inbox, which will display all your messages from site members and customers.
With the Squarespace app, you can also create a website or log in and manage an existing one, although we have to say the app looks much more simplistic.
Nonetheless, unlike Wix, you can modify all your pages directly from the app. However, we would have liked a drag-and-drop option to rearrange the order of the pages inside the menu.
We liked the drag-and-drop option in Analytics: you can easily rearrange the cards as you want (traffic overview, activity log, visits by country, traffic sources, popular content…).
The commerce section, however, is pretty basic: you’ll see your orders – pending, fulfilled or canceled – and your inventory. To find support, click on “Settings” in the bottom menu then “Help”: you will have access to user guides and your support tickets.
Pricing
Both Wix and Squarespace are SaaS tools, meaning that you have to pay a monthly fee to use them.
Wix offers a total of eight premium plans. Four for websites and four for businesses & eCommerce. If you want to accept payments from customers, then you should pick a business plan.
If you are creating a website to show your skills, build your brand, or for your personal use, pick a website plan.
Irrespective of which plan you choose (except combo), you will receive $300 ad vouchers. The lowest package (Combo – $13/month) allows you to connect your domain and offers 2GB bandwidth & 3GB storage.
Meanwhile, Squarespace offers four premium plans. As mentioned above, if you want to build an eCommerce store, then the basic ($26/month) and advanced ($40/month) are an ideal choice.
Both Wix and Squarespace offer a 14-day free trial. So, you are not bound to pay unless you really like the tool.
The final verdict
Wix
and
Squarespace, is there a clear winner? It would seem so, even though it’s a close call.
Wix is generally a better, more versatile tool, with more flexibility for a wide range of websites (see some examples here). Squarespace, on the other hand, scores points for their blogging feature and their fully-responsive templates.
Unlike Squarespace, Wix lets you tailor your site to work for a small business like Hotels, Event-based sites, or Restaurants as they have the templates and the apps to make them top-notch. Out of the two, we’d say Wix offers the best website builder for small business.
