Nothing to maintain, ever
No core updates, no plugin updates, no PHP deadline by email, no attack surface of your own to defend. The biggest item here, and the one developers mention least.
Squarespace is the right answer more often than I would like
Not a hedge to look reasonable. There is a large band of small businesses for whom paying me £1,950 would buy nothing a subscription does not already do. The useful part is where the ceiling on a closed platform sits, and the four things that move the line.
- My floor is £1,950, 2–3 weeks
- Squarespace plans, roughly £15–£40/mo
- Code injection needs the Business plan
- No custom fields, no server-side code
Who should stop reading and go and buy a subscription
Under about eight pages. One person editing it. Work arriving by recommendation or through a marketplace. Nothing that has to talk to another system. If that is you, take out a Squarespace plan, spend a fortnight on it and put the £1,950 somewhere it earns. Not a cheaper version of the same job. A waste of the money.
My bias has a shape. I sell builds, so the incentive to draw this line somewhere convenient is obvious, and the only answer is to argue from mechanisms rather than adjectives. I also refuse work under about £1,500, which is stated on the facts and caveats page.
What Squarespace is better at than I am
Not politeness before the argument. Six things it does that a build from me either does not do or does worse.
The image pipeline is already right
It resizes on upload, serves modern formats and sets sensible srcset unasked. Oversized images are the most common cause of a slow site, and here the problem does not arise.
One bill, and that is the bill
Hosting, CDN, certificate, forms, updates and the software in one monthly figure. With me it is three lines: a build fee, then hosting, then whatever support you choose.
Editing is nicer on day one
Drag a block, see the result, set the mobile layout separately. A custom editor wins by the tenth edit and loses on the first, and the first decides trust.
It fails less badly
A platform outage is everybody's problem and gets fixed by people whose whole job that is. A site that goes white because two plugins disagreed is yours.
You can start this afternoon
No brief, no discovery, no waiting for a slot in somebody else's calendar, no deposit. If the site has to exist next week, that settles it.
The two-minute test
Answer these as the business is now, not as you hope it will be. The aspirational answer is how people end up paying for a build that does the work of a template.
01
How many people will edit it?
One owner is a solved problem and Squarespace solves it well. Three people with different jobs, one of whom should not be able to publish, is a different question.
02
Would you draw your content as a spreadsheet?
Twelve services with a price band and a duration. Forty properties with a postcode and a bedroom count. Content with columns wants fields.
03
Where do the enquiries come from?
Marketplace, directory or word of mouth, and the site is a credibility check a template makes perfectly well. If people search and compare three firms first, it is doing commercial work.
04
Does it need to talk to anything?
A CRM, job management, accounts, live stock, availability that is genuinely live rather than a request form. The honest answers here are an embed and a Zapier connection, and both work until you have six of them.
05
What phone is your customer holding?
Not the one you are reading this on. A three-year-old Android on rural 4G is where the platform's script budget stops being negotiable.
06
How long does it need to last?
Three years of subscription is real money, and a build you own is still yours in year six. But if you cannot say what the business looks like in eighteen months, buy the reversible thing.
One editor, no repeating fields, work from a marketplace and nothing to integrate: buy the subscription. Two or more the other way and the arithmetic has changed. A single exception usually has a cheaper fix than a rebuild.
The ceiling, and where exactly it sits
Elsewhere I say that on a closed platform there is a ceiling to what anyone can change, and that I will tell you where it is instead of billing you to hit it. That line is on the Core Web Vitals page and it is easy to write. Here it is named.
One caveat over the whole table. Squarespace moves, 7.0 and 7.1 differ, and several of these limits are gated by plan rather than by the platform: code injection needs the Business tier. Check it against Squarespace’s own plan comparison rather than a table published by somebody selling the alternative.
- Vitals: what you can fix
- More than people assume. Oversized uploads, background video, four typefaces where one would do, the embeds you added, and pages carrying thirty blocks nobody reaches. On most sites I am shown that is the bulk of it, and none needs a developer.
- Vitals: what you cannot
- The platform's own JavaScript and CSS. You cannot defer it, split it or drop what your page never uses, and you do not set cache headers or decide what loads first. Interaction to Next Paint bites hardest, because it tracks script weight.
- Structured data: what you can add
- Your own JSON-LD, by code injection, on the plans that include it. A supported route rather than a workaround, and how most competent Squarespace SEO gets done.
- Structured data: what is fixed
- Whatever the platform already emits. You cannot edit or remove it, so markup that disagrees produces a contradiction rather than a fix. Injected markup has no tie to the page either: nothing stops it describing a price the page never mentions.
- Page structure
- Titles, descriptions, heading levels, alt text, canonicals and a sitemap are handled, and mostly correctly, which is more than a neglected WordPress install manages. What does not bend is the shape: URLs sit under the collection that owns them, a navigation folder is a menu rather than a page, and there are no fields, so a service is words on a page rather than a record you can sort.
- Anything server-side
- There is none. No endpoint of your own, no scheduled job, no query against your own data. Forms post to Squarespace and out to a spreadsheet or a mailing list. Past that you are joining services with Zapier, which is a web app nobody designed.
The four things that actually move the line
Not quality, and not bespoke design. Both are arguments rather than mechanisms, and a careful owner gets a fast-enough site out of Squarespace. These four are where the platform stops being capable at any price.
A second and a third editor
Roles, capabilities and revisions have been in WordPress for most of its life: write without publishing, and put a page back to how it read this morning. As far as I know Squarespace has no page-level version history. Check that yourself.
Content that has fields
As data, a service is one record with a price band, a duration and whoever provides it, and every listing and filter updates itself. As Squarespace pages it is forty pages maintained by hand, and that shows the third time a price moves.
Structured data that cannot drift
Generated from the content rather than typed beside it, so the markup and the page cannot disagree, including on pages added next year by somebody who has never heard of JSON-LD.
Speed on the device your customer has
Change everything you can change inside the editor first, because that is usually most of the problem. If a mid-range phone on a poor connection still fails, the ceiling is real. An audit at £650 says which of the two you are in.
The third is the newest and the least understood. Being named by an assistant is a different job from ranking, and it leans on the structured parts of a site rather than the designed ones. That is the argument of the SEO and AI search visibility page.
What my answer costs that the pitch leaves out
WordPress is not free of consequences. Core, plugins and PHP all move, often on somebody else’s schedule, and a site nobody has updated for two years is a liability rather than an asset. Care plans exist for that and start at £65 a month on top of hosting, with every figure on the pricing page.
Nor is the build free: £2,400 for a custom WordPress build, and £4,500 with a shop in it. So the comparison is a few thousand pounds plus an ongoing cost, against roughly £15 to £40 a month with nothing to look after. Unless one of the four above applies, that has an obvious answer and it is not the one that pays me.
One further admission, since it cuts against the trade. A WordPress site on a page builder, with forty plugins and a theme bought for fifty-nine pounds, can easily be slower and harder to maintain than the Squarespace site it replaced. That is why I build custom themes and keep the plugin count in single figures.
What to read next
If the test pointed at a build, what one involves and where each tier sits is on the website design and build page. Custom WordPress and WooCommerce covers the case where a team edits it weekly.
Questions people actually ask
Is Squarespace bad for SEO?
No. Titles, descriptions, headings, alt text, canonicals and the sitemap are all handled properly, and on the plans that allow code injection you can add your own structured data. The real limits are narrower than the myth: you cannot remove the markup the platform already emits, you cannot control what loads first, and you cannot invent content types. Most Squarespace sites that rank badly rank badly because of the writing, not the platform.
Can a Squarespace site pass Core Web Vitals?
Often, yes. Fix the things you control first: oversized uploads, background video, four typefaces, third-party embeds and pages stuffed with blocks nobody scrolls to. That is usually the bulk of the problem. What you cannot touch is the platform's own JavaScript and CSS, so Interaction to Next Paint on a mid-range Android on a poor connection is where the ceiling shows. If that is a real share of your visitors it matters. If it is not, it barely does.
Would you build me a Squarespace site if I asked?
No. I do not sell Squarespace builds, and I would rather point you at the platform than take a margin on a template. What I will do is audit one for £650 and tell you which problems are yours to fix and which are the platform's ceiling, which is a much cheaper conversation than a rebuild. If the report says the site is fine, that is the answer, and you keep the report either way.
How much does each one cost over three years?
Squarespace is roughly £15 to £40 a month depending on plan, so somewhere around £540 to £1,440 over three years, plus a domain. Check the current plans yourself, because they move. A custom WordPress build with me starts at £2,400, plus hosting, plus a care plan from £65 a month if you want one. It is not close on price. It only becomes close when the site has to do something the platform cannot do at all.
Can I move from Squarespace to WordPress without losing rankings?
Mostly, if the redirects are done properly. Squarespace exports a WordPress-format XML file that carries pages and blog posts across reasonably well, though its own documentation lists exclusions, and the last time I read it those included products, events and album pages. Read that list before planning around it. The part that decides your rankings is a redirect map from every old URL to its new address. Expect a few weeks of wobble even when it is done right.
Which is easier for me to update myself?
Squarespace, for the first month. It is genuinely pleasant and you will not break anything. A custom WordPress build is easier by the tenth edit, because the editor only offers the things your site actually has, and adding a service is one short form rather than a page you assemble out of blocks again. If you enjoy tinkering with layouts, Squarespace will suit you better, and I would rather say so than sell you an editor you resent.
What about Wix, Shopify and Webflow?
Wix sits where Squarespace sits, with a different editor and the same class of ceiling. Shopify is a better answer than WooCommerce for plenty of shops and I will say so when it is, though to be clear I have built a Shopify app rather than client storefronts. Webflow gives more structural control and sits closer to a developer tool, but I have not shipped a client site on it, so treat my view of it as a view rather than experience.
Is WordPress not just a different kind of lock-in?
Less, but the risk is real and it is not the platform. You get the files, the database and the licence to run them anywhere, and any competent developer can pick the work up. What locks people in is what gets built on top: a proprietary page builder, forty plugins and a theme framework whose layouts do not survive being switched off. That is why I build custom themes. Ask any developer what leaves with you, and get it in writing.
Tell me the situation and I will say which side of the line you are on.
Get a quote in four questions
hello@madebykestrel.co.uk · replies inside one working day
This page, measured in your browser
Your deviceLCPMeasuring…
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How long until the main content appears. Google wants under 2.5 seconds.
INPMeasuring…
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How quickly the page answers when you tap. Under 200ms is the target.
CLSMeasuring…
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How much the layout moves while loading. Under 0.1, ideally zero.
Real numbers from your device and connection, not a screenshot of a score I chose. Nothing is sent anywhere. The measurement happens in your browser and stays there. If one of these ever reads amber on my own site, you will see it, which is rather the point. I audit these for £650.