Evaluating website builders
So, you've decided to build a website but don't know where to start, is that it? You're not alone. This is the Internet era, after all, and there are countless reasons why you might want a website of your own. It could be something as simple as an online photo album to share with family and friends, or a blog for your ramblings on whichever topics tickle your fancy. Or maybe your needs are more professional in nature and you're looking at constructing an e-commerce site to sell your one-of-a-kind thingamajigs.
You have options. Lots of them, actually. One of them is to buckle down, learn the ins and outs of HTML, and code your site from scratch. If you don't have the time or gumption for that, there are website builders that streamline the process so that anybody at any skill level can build the site they're looking for. Two of the more popular are Wordpress and Squarespace. Which one is the overall better option? Let's find out!
ROUND 1: Ease of Use
Building a website can be stressful. Or it can be fun. Part of that depends on your skill level, though the onus here falls on Wordpress and Squarespace to streamline the experience so you don't feel like Hulk-smashing your keyboard when things don't turn out the way you want them to. When you dive into one of the paid options, Wordpress spreads its wings beyond a robust blogging platform and into a bona fide website builder, and though it tries to hold your hand along the way, it's definitely geared more toward users who already have at least some experience building webpages.
Squarespace, on the other hand, is a bit more nurturing to first-time or still-green users. The interface is fairly intuitive, allowing you to hop in and create a relatively professional-looking site without a lot of effort or, just as important, time. And if you do get stuck, there are several helpful video tutorials available.
Winner: Squarespace
ROUND 2: Themes and Templates
One of the easiest ways to go about building a website is to take an existing template and tailor it to your specific content and needs. As Squarespace has become more popular, it's library of templates has grown. It's also easy to narrow one down, as they're broken up into categories—Featured, Businesses, Porfolios, Stores, Personal, Musicians, Restaurants, and Weddings. However, there just aren't that many to choose from, only a few dozen by our count. Wordpress has over 1,700 themes, and if that's not enough, you can hit up the web for even more from various marketplaces. They're not organized as well as Squarespace's, and that might account for something if Squarespace had a few hundred to choose from. It doesn't, and given the enormous disparity here, Wordpress gets the nod.
Winner: Wordpress
ROUND 3: Price
Squarespace breaks down its subscription option into three tiers:
- Personal: $10 per month, or $96 billed annually ($8 per month)
- Professional: $20 per month, or $192 billed annually ($16 per month)
- Business: $30 per month, or $288 billed annually ($24 per month)
There is no free tier, though Squarespace does allow you to try out any of the paid options at no cost for 14 days, and without a credit card, which is nice. All three options come with unlimited storage and bandwidth, and both the Professional and Business subscriptions allow unlimited pages (Personal is limited to 20). Integrated commerce is part of each package too, though you can only sell a single product on the Personal tier; Professional and Business allow for up to 20 products and an unlimited amount, respectively.
Wordpress also offers three options. They include:
- Basic: Free for life
- Premium: $99 per year
- Business: $299 per year
It's tough to beat free, though if you're serious about building a website, there are several perks to upgrading to the Premium tier, such as more storage (13GB versus 3GB), no ads, the ability to store videos, a custom domain, and advanced customizations. The Business tier ups the ante with over 50 premium themes included, e-commerce functionality, unlimited space, and live chat support.
Since Wordpress offers a free tier, it should get the automatic win, right? Not so fast. That's certainly an advantage, but to build more than a glorified blog, the paid tiers are the way to go. And when comparing the paid tiers, it's really a wash, as both offer a good value for the money.
Winner: Tie
ROUND 4: Flexibility
With Squarespace, it doesn't take a lot of time to build a good-looking website: You pick a template, fill in the blanks and/or replace the existing content with your own, and you're all set. It takes a bit longer to build a comparable looking website with Wordpress, but while the learning curve is steeper, the level of fine-grain control runs deeper. There are more templates and themes, tens of thousands of plugins to play with, and it's open source. If you're an experienced website builder or programmer, you can get lost in customizations. And if you're relatively new to the world of website building, you'll find that as you grow, there's more you can do in Wordpress—the ceiling isn't just higher, it's pretty much lifted altogether.
Winner: Wordpress
ROUND 5: Support
Wordpress claims it's powering 23 percent of the web. That may or may not be accurate, but there's no disputing its immense popularity. And since Wordpress is so popular, there's a vast amount of knowledge and support out there, both on Wordpress's own support forum and in various corners of the web. There are video tutorials on YouTube, forums for help with plugin coding, and guides galore.
The amount of support for Squarespace isn't as robust, though like the service as a whole, it's about convenience and ease-of-use. You can browse through topics in the knowledgebase, seek community-sourced answers, view several video tutorials, and even go to one-on-one workshops if you happen to live in New York.
We're inclined to call it a draw in this category, and if we revisit the topic in another year or so, perhaps we will. But for now, Wordpress again benefits from being the popular kid on the block—there are simply more resources available to Wordpress users in need of help.
And the winner is...
If you're new or simply inexperienced with website building, you're likely to have an easier time with Squarespace. You're also apt to outgrow (eventually) what it has to offer. That's not to say Squarespace isn't a good option, or even a great one, but Wordpress is simply better with more templates and themes, plugins for nearly every situation, and an extensive support network. The learning curve is steeper, but the reward for toughing it out is the ability to build a website exactly as you want it, without compromises.
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