At one point, building a website used to be a daunting and expensive task. You had to approach a good web designer and developer, spend hours with them to get them to understand your needs and once the site was ready after a considerable period of time, you would still have to go through a long process to make any changes to the site. future. Things have changed now. Now you can easily create your own website with almost no outside help using content management systems. CMS, as they are generally called, allows you to use an easy interface and quick steps to create your own website without having to go through any coding or scripting. Therefore, even a non-technical client can create their own website. There are various CMS available in the market. Two of these CMS are: ubiquitous WordPress and the simple SquareSpace. This article offers an honest comparison between the two to decide which one does better in different aspects.
Let us start:
Budget
WordPress – While WordPress gives you a free and reliable platform to design your website or blog, you have to pay if you want to publish it. You will need to purchase 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 are just starting out and have a limited budget/technical knowledge. It is inexpensive, offers convenient 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, higher security and availability of dedicated resources. In addition, you would have to manage several aspects on your own. Also, you need to pay for the domain name to buy a memorable domain name for your website. So while it’s free to build your website with WordPress, you’ll need to pay for the resources if you want it to be active and accessible.
SquareSpace: SquareSpace offers you a personal plan with all the essential features you need to get online. In addition to the infrastructure, it also includes the resources needed to get your site up and running. Plans start at $8 which may not seem like much of a difference compared to the hosting plans you need when building a website using the WordPress CMS. However, there is a catch when it comes to resources. The $8 Plan – Personal Plan – allows you to add only up to 20 pages, 1 blog and 2 collaborators which may interfere with the financial goals of the site owner. What is more disappointing is that you will be able to sell only one item on a personal plan. Is there no hope then? – You can ask! Yes, there is hope, but that hope comes at a price, namely the Premium package priced at $16. You can add up to 20 products on this plan and enjoy unlimited space, bandwidth, and pages. If you need complete freedom, spend $24 and sell unlimited products plus enjoy unlimited resources.
The quality of service, support and infrastructure differ greatly for different hosting providers. It’s understandable that you want to exercise personal preference when it comes to hosting and domain. Here, WordPress allows you to choose your own domain and hosting provider.
Change the CMS
WordPress: WordPress gives you the freedom to move your content seamlessly. The easily manageable export tools that WordPress offers are light years ahead of SquareSpace and allow you to export your entire site easily. WordPress built-in tools allow you to export the essential data quite easily. In addition to your text and visual content, you can also backup your plugin themes and entire data solution using WordPress backup solutions. Once backed up, you can easily export the content to other content management systems. Thus, you retain the power to change the CMS service anytime you want.
· SquareSpace: In SquareSpace, you can only export certain parts of your content as an XML file. Here you can save your gallery blogs and pages. That means if you don’t like SquareSpace’s service or need to switch to another CMS, you’ll have to go through a lengthy process and request SquareSpace support to back up all your data in a format that can be exported. Because of this restricted appeal, SquareSpace clearly falls behind.
electronic commerce
· WordPress – Although WordPress started out as bloggers’ first CMS, lately it has greatly expanded its focus to properly support corporate and e-commerce sites as well. There is a huge directory of eCommerce plugins that WordPress offers you. Also, there are a number of WordPress themes that are specially designed to promote e-commerce. So you can combine the simplicity of WordPress with the functionality and advanced features required by an eCommerce site that’s like getting the best of both worlds.
· SquareSpace: SquareSpace again disappoints when it comes to e-commerce. You can integrate very few external services to promote e-commerce operations on your SquareSpace site. Also, during the integration processes some of the original qualities and capabilities of these external applications are lost. Also, you can set up only one single service for payments – Shrill and it is not available worldwide but limited to only a few countries. If you don’t like Shrill or Shrill isn’t available in the country where you want to sell, you have no hope but to change your platform. In addition to limiting your reach, it can also stop your future globalization journey.
The verdict
If you’re starting from scratch and need a quick infrastructure solution to reclaim your space online, then SquareSpace is the best option for you. While you’ll enjoy the full pampering and guided ride, be ready to sacrifice a good chunk of freedom. You would need to walk a path that is already carved out and you have very little opportunity to carve your own path or even take another route to the destination.
While it’s good for websites with non-commercial goals or limited reach, you should be careful when using SquareSpace if you need to create a complex corporate or e-commerce site with impressive features and specific demands.
Although there is some learning involved while working with WordPress, it gives you a lot more flexibility and you can decide on different aspects of your website. Better design power is the main benefit of WordPress CMS. When it comes to publishing and publishing commands, WordPress clearly does a lot better than SquareSpace. It allows you a multitude of features and functionality, tools, themes and plugins to manage your site in the most efficient way.