At any given time, building a website used to be a daunting and expensive task. You needed to approach a good web developer and designer, spend hours with them to make them understand their needs, and once the site was ready after a considerable period, you would still have to go through a long process to make changes — the future. Things have changed now. You can now easily create your own site without almost any outside help using Content Management Systems. CMS, as it is commonly called, allows you to use an easy interface and quick steps to create your own site without coding or scripting. Thus, even a non-technical customer can create their own website., There are several CMS available in the market. Two of these CMS are – ubiquitous WordPress and the easy SquareSpace. This article offers an honest comparison between the two to decide which one fits better in different ways.
Let us start:
WordPress and SquareSpace Expenses
WordPress:
While WordPress provides a free and reliable platform for designing your website or blog, you need to pay if you want to go live. You would need to buy a suitable hosting plan to make your site accessible worldwide. There are different plans to choose from: shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated server. Shared hosting is suitable for beginners who have just started and have limited technical knowledge/budget. It’s inexpensive, offers comfortable scalability with unlimited resources (bandwidth and disk space), and is largely managed by the service provider.
If your needs are more specific, you can opt for VPS or dedicated hosting. These plans are more expensive as they offer privacy, increased security, and the availability of dedicated resources. Also, you would need to manage various aspects of your own. Also, you need to pay for the domain name to buy a memorable domain name for your site. So while it’s free to build your site using WordPress, you’ll need to pay for features if you want to make it live and accessible.
SquareSpace:
Squarespace offers a personal plan with all the essential features you need to get online. In addition to the infrastructure, it also includes the resources you need to make your site active. Plans start at $ 8, which may not seem like a big difference when compared to the hosting plans you need when creating a website using WordPress CMS. However, there is a problem when it comes to features. The $ 8 Plan – Personal Plan – allows you to add only up to 20 pages, a blog, and two contributors that can interfere with the site’s owner’s economic goals.
The most disappointing thing is that you can only sell one item on a personal plan. There is no hope then? – You can ask! Yes, there is hope, but that hope comes at a price – that is, the Premium package costs $ 16. You can add up to 20 products to this plan and enjoy unlimited space, bandwidth, and pages. If you need complete freedom, spend $ 24 and sell unlimited products and enjoy unlimited features.
Quality of service, support, and infrastructure differ widely for different hosting providers. Understandably, you want to exercise personal preference when it comes to hosting and domain. Here, WordPress allows you to choose your hosting and domain provider.
WordPress and SquareSpace – Changing the CMS
WordPress:
The WordPress gives you the freedom to move your content without hassle. The easily manageable export tools offered by WordPress are light years ahead of SquareSpace and allow you to export the entire site easily. WordPress’s built-in tools make it easy to export essential data. In addition to text and visual content, you can also back up plug-in themes and the entire data solution using WordPress backup solutions. Once backed up, you can easily export content to other content management systems. Therefore, you retain the power to change the CMS service at any time you wish.
SquareSpace:
In SquareSpace, you can export only some parts of your content as an XML file. Here you can save the blogs and pages of your galleries. This means that if you do not like the SquareSpace service or need to move to another CMS, you will have to go through a long process and ask SquareSpace support to back up entire data in an exportable format. Due to this restricted feature, SquareSpace is clearly behind.
WordPress and SquareSpace For E-commerce
WordPress:
Although WordPress has started as a blogger’s CMS, it has recently expanded its approach considerably to support corporate and e-commerce sites properly. There is a huge repertoire of eCommerce plugins that WordPress offers you. Besides, various WordPress themes are specially designed to promote eCommerce. So you can combine the simplicity of WordPress with the advanced features and functionality required by an eCommerce site that is like getting the best of both worlds.
SquareSpace:
SquareSpace disappoints again when it comes to e-commerce. You can integrate only very few external services to promote eCommerce operations on the SquareSpace website. Also, during the integration processes, some of the original qualities and capabilities of these external applications are lost. Also, you can define only one payment service – Shrill. It is not available worldwide but is limited to only a few countries. If you don’t like Shrill or Shrill isn’t available in the country you want to sell, you have no hope but to change your platform. In addition to limiting its scope, it can also interrupt your future journey of globalization.
The verdict on WordPress and SquareSpace
If you are starting from scratch and need a fast infrastructure solution to claim your online space, SquareSpace is the best option for you. While you enjoy a full journey of pampering and guidance, you should be ready to sacrifice a good portion of freedom. You would need to travel an already carved path and have very little opportunity to carve your own path or even follow another route to the destination.
While it’s good for sites with limited scope or non-business goals, you should be careful about using SquareSpace if you need to create a complex e-commerce site or corporate site with impressive features and specific demands.
While there is some learning while working with WordPress, it offers much more flexibility, and you can decide different aspects of your site. Better design power is the main benefit of WordPress CMS. When it comes to publishing and publishing commands, WordPress does much better than SquareSpace. It enables various themes and features and feature tools additions to manage your site more efficiently.