Battle of the (website) builders: who you should trust with your start-up’s site

None of us need to be reminded of how important websites are to the twenty-first century business.

For start-ups and budding entrepreneurs who are just coming into their own, a user-friendly space can mean the difference between gaining a lifelong customer and losing out on potential business. But, thankfully, there’s a lot of advice online about crafting the perfect website.

Actually, scratch that; there’s so much advice that it’s a nightmare to navigate through it all!

You’re going to have a gazillion questions in your head about what your website is going to look like, what it’ll contain, what it will achieve. Take one of the first questions that you’ll encounter during this process — which website builder works best for what I want to create? As basic a query as it may seem, there’s hardly any consensus on the matter.

Two of today’s leading platforms, WordPress and Squarespace, are especially hard to pick from because of how popular and preferred they both seem at a first glance.

Well, consider it a New Year’s gift, but we’ve unpacked the two for you. It turns out there’s a whole world of difference lurking behind the scenes…

Long story short,

Squarespace caters to those of us who don’t know our Java from our C++. It’s easy to get around and has some of the sleekest designs. There aren’t too many in-depth customisation options, but whatever it does put up, is guaranteed to work and look good while doing it.

WordPress, on the other hand, is more suitable if you know your way around more complex backends, codes, and have a very specific idea of what you want to do with your website. There’s thousands of plug-ins for multiple functions — from e-commerce, to building marketing lists, and even powerful forms. There’s a lot of space for you to be creative - but that has its own set of drawbacks.

Squarespace is much easier to navigate

There are several reasons for this, one of them being that WordPress is open-source. This means that anyone can add their own, self-designed themes and plugins to the list of options that other users can choose from.

Thanks to this, WordPress boasts an insane amount of choice (it has over eight thousand themes. Squarespace, for contrast, offers less than 100), but a lot of the user-generated content can’t be fully relied on. Incompatibilities between plugins, different versions of WordPress and various themes arise regularly. It’s possible to work your way around this… if you know how to code.

To avoid this mess altogether, you can take the Squarespace route. Offering dozens of elegant templates that are guaranteed to work, Squarespace is keen on reducing the clutter and making things easier on you. The right to contribute is reserved to a select list of high-profile partners (including Instagram and Apple News) which have resulted in a stylish gallery of themes you can pick from.

However…

WordPress is a lot more flexible

This is actually the underlying reason for why WordPress is harder to work with. It’s designed so that you can do pretty much anything you want with your website (if you know how to code — or employ someone who does), but that makes the process more complicated than if you just had a dozen options available to you. Although Wordpress has introduced many plug-ins for drag and drop building, it still requires some level of UX/UI design knowledge.

Squarespace’s choices are limited by design. They’re all super functional, granted, and the designs are customizable to some extent, but you can’t do anything crazy with it. There’s less space for out of the box ideas, less space to really run wild.

A quick note on customer service

Since WordPress is open-source, there isn’t any helpline you can ring up to solve a query or two. Some of the premium themes and paid plugins do include some customer support, but none of that is backed by WordPress.

Squarespace, on the other hand, has two main options: 24/7 email support and a live chat that runs for a few hours everyday.

This shouldn’t function as a deal breaker by any means; there are several online forums that have already answered any questions you might have. A quick Google search and you should generally be good to go.

The money question

Squarespace doesn’t have a free version, apart from a two-week trial. Rates start at $12 a month, going all the way up to 40$ (reasons to move from the basic $12 version include wanting to set up an ecommerce section or needing more than two contributors).

WordPress does have a free version — but it doesn’t come with very much. For starters, you’ll need to spend to host your site somewhere, and a good host will cost about as much as the Squarespace plan. Additionally, most of the best themes on WordPress come with an extra fee. Once you pay up (it could be anything between $30 to $120), you own it for life, but you still need to pay up. Plug-ins come with their own options of subscriptions or free trials.

Squarespace doesn’t have any such “hidden” charges; once you spend on the package most suited to you, you’re set. It can end up costing significantly less than WordPress as a result, but this is mostly up to you.

The bottom line

If you’re looking for an attractive, easy-to-build site that won’t be much of a hassle to set up and maintain, you can’t really go wrong with Squarespace. If you’re making a virtual portfolio, for example, or something that needs to be elegant yet stick to a rather traditional format, it’s perfect.

However, if the website you want to build is a little funkier than your average online domain, if you think you’ve got some crazy ideas you want to play around with, WordPress’ abundance of options make for a better bet. It’s a lot more work and a lot less predictable, but that’s exactly what gives it the flexibility that Squarespace lacks.