These days I develop websites using either WordPress or Squarespace. When I started out 18 years ago, I hand coded sites in HTML, then added CSS when it became widely supported, eventually moving on to Dreamweaver, a WYSIWYG website builder, while continuing to dig into the code. Well, that’s ancient history.

So here we are in 2018. For me, for my clients, it comes down to WordPress and Squarespace. Both have the capability to help us create beautiful, functional websites.   And while both are great, each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

How to choose? Let’s break it down…

Flexibility

The real power of of WordPress is its extensibility, ranging from simple social sharing icons to robust membership site plugins to e-commerce themes and tools.. We can create almost any kind of website you desire. WordPress is an open source platform – it’s free and open to everyone to not only use, but to customize. Developers and programmers create tools such as templates (themes that control the visual appearance of your site) and plugins (code that adds specific features / functionality to a website).  If you can dream it, you can find it. Sounds hard to beat.

However, it can be a double edged sword since it’s impossible to police the quality of all the tools created. And the better ones are often not free. It takes time to cull through everything, and there isn’t always support available when you need it.

Squarespace has less flexibility because the software is not open source like that of WordPress. But everything is closely controlled, monitored and tested to ensure they work 100% of the time. So that means less breaking, hacking, frustration.

So while WordPress has more flexibility than Squarespace hands down, there is a downside.

Ease of Use

The WordPress learning curve is steeper than that of of Squarespace. If you want to update and manage your own site once it’s launched, Squarespace is going to be easier (and more fun). The Squarespace editor is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) . Make changes, see the results in action.

Support

Because WordPress has such a large community of developers, so many plugins etc, there can be information overload.   And it is often difficult to find relevant, decent help.

Squarespace has great email support, 24/7. They also have excellent tutorials.

Ongoing maintenance

While WordPress is more powerful, there is a great deal of maintenance required to keep a WordPress website in good shape through all the many updates of not only the platform itself, but also the themes and plugins.

Squarespace, being a closed environment, controls all aspects of the platform and manages all the updates.

Pricing

A wordpress site will cost more than a squarespace site to develop, often as much as 2 – 3 x more. It’s just far more time consuming and complex.

Summing up…

For most of my clients, Squarespace is now the platform of choice. It has beautiful, polished themes, tested and quality controlled, and 24/7 help.

However, if you want or need a very sophisticated website with particular functionality that is not available or is quite limited on Squarespace, WordPress is recommended. And in terms of e-commerce sites, Squarespace has some limitations (for example the number of products you can sell), while WordPress has countless themes, tools and no limits on products.

Website design and user experience have much to learn from philosopher’s Martin Heidegger’s thinking. The idea that people interact with objects in order to accomplish certain goals comes directly from Heidegger, who also held that this tendency to fixate on future goals results in a state of being ahead of ourselves.

 Heidegger calls the act of dealing with an object’s shortcomings “coping.”

“We discover [an object’s] unusability…not by looking at it and establishing its properties, but rather by the circumspection of the dealings in which we use it.” ─ Heidegger

Users don’t have the time or desire to simply “cope” with your website.  What makes a site unusable?  Here are 5 characteristics:

1. Page Overwhelm
   

   Effective websites keep the visual options to a minimum.  If you have more than 3 major pieces of information or options on a page, you’re likely overdoing it. For example, focus on the 3 BIG benefits you can deliver.  Think of what you help people get more of, or get less of.

2. Websites that do not adapt to their viewing environments (in particular smartphones)
   

   Your website may look great on your computer, but have you checked it on a variety of devices and in all the major browsers? When you do, you may be in for a shock. It’s imperative to make sure your site is responsive. If not, the majority of users will bounce right off – most notably because the majority of users are now viewing your site on their smartphones.

3. Rotating Banners
   

   Are rotating banners appealing? They used to be. Are they effective – a definitive NO. In fact, after the first banner, users rarely click additional images – they don’t have enough time to read the banners and they get frustrated when they can’t control what they’re looking at.

4. A lack of social media links -> an inability to interact, to have a conversation
   

   Social media has emerged as one of the most important marketing platforms in recent years (like it or not!). If you want to be progressive, current and open to embracing new ideas, it’s critical to include social media links on your site. Moreover, social media is a quick way to demonstrate to your visitors that your business is active and interactive.

5. Slow site speeds
   

   If a page doesn’t load in 2 seconds, there’s a greater probability of site abandonment. What to do:

   • Don’t upload overly large images
   • Create clean, semantic, standardized code and optimize it for performance
   • Use a reliable, quality web host. If you’re using wordpress, make sure your hosting company has “managed wordpress hosting” – it REALLY makes a difference.