All data on the internet has been arranged into websites people can visit. They are categorized according to the type of website namely news, technology, blogs, etc. There are a lot of tools available to make websites of your own. Squarespace and WordPress are leaders of this market.
Squarespace vs WordPress
The main difference between Squarespace and WordPress is that Squarespace is more consumer-oriented and much easier to use without the need of knowing how HTML or CSS code works on the other hand WordPress takes time to learn and it also requires knowledge of coding to be fully in control of the website that is being created.
Squarespace is an American company that provides the services of website building and hosting. It is very intuitive and offers several pre-built templates to choose from and several other one-click additions to templates to customize websites. It has more than 3 million subscribers and is a public company that trades on the New York Stock Exchange.
WordPress is a content management system and blog hosting service. It is highly popular and is used by the majority of popular websites in the backend to keep themselves running. WordPress requires an internet hosting service which it also has separately. WordPress has plugins that can massively expand functionality and features available.
Comparison Table Between Squarespace and WordPress
| Parameters of Comparison | Squarespace | WordPress |
| Foundation | It was founded in 2004 by Anthony Casalena. | It was released on 27 May 2003 by founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. |
| Editing | It has an editor that displays the complete website with drag-and-drop features while building it. | The editor has drag-and-drop features but the full website is not displayed. |
| Code | There is no need to know code for using Squarespace as it is designed for normal consumers. | There is a significant level of technical and coding knowledge required to use and maintain WordPress. |
| Nature | It is a public company whose shares are listed on the New York stock exchange. | It is a private software that is owned by a company called ‘Automattic’. |
| User Support | It has a dedicated 24×7 customer support cell that answers queries and supports requests. | It has forums that are created by users that answer a lot of queries but no dedicated support center. |
What is Squarespace?
Squarespace is a website building and hosting platform that is filled with easy-to-use creative and intuitive features. It gained popularity because with Squarespace people can easily create websites of their choice by either choosing out of the many templates that it offers or by creating a new template using drag and drop features. Setting up a website with the help of Squarespace is very fast and convenient.
Squarespace was set up as a blog-hosting service in 2004 and for two years until 2006, he operated it alone before it expanded. It is a public company and started trading on the New York Stock exchange on May 19, 2021. The developers have added features that allow the acceptance of payments through the websites built on Squarespace since 2013, making it a competent e-commerce website builder as well.
Squarespace has a very huge marketplace for templates and themes which users can buy to use. Squarespace gained popularity in recent years because of its pre-built beautiful themes. It automatically applies color themes appropriately all around the website which makes it hassle-free. Squarespace has a subscription-based business model with plans both monthly and annually billed. Squarespace also sells domains, which also add to its profits.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a content management system, website builder, and hosting platform that is the biggest content management service in the world. It is also modified and used in WordPress.com which is the parent company’s blog hosting and creation platform. Every WordPress-backed website has a theme that is chosen by users and managers of said website. Users can choose from a wide array of themes available.
Another great feature supported by WordPress that vastly improves its functionality and makes it very dynamic and user-friendly is the availability of plugins. Plugins are extensions that add different functions to a website and offer different customizations such as SEO tools, changing the look and size of text, arrangement of content on the website, music, and video, etc.
WordPress offers the perfect landscape for website management for teams, as different user profiles with different levels of access can be created and monitored. Different plugins can be used on different accesses of the same website and these can be changed without needing to reboot the whole website. The high popularity of WordPress is in part due to its high modularity. Its open-source nature means it’s constantly getting more and more developed by users and has a large forum for support and development.
Main Differences Between Squarespace and WordPress
- WordPress has a much larger user base as compared to Squarespace and hosts about 409 million websites as compared to Squarespace’s 3.79 million subscribers.
- Squarespace requires a payment to be used at all whereas WordPress is free but requires payment for more VIP features.
- Squarespace plans are more costly as compared to WordPress plans and the latter can be hosted on several different domains which change prices.
- WordPress can be freely customized as it is open source whereas Squarespace is not, therefore its users rely on the developers for more features.
- Squarespace is much easier to use and makes websites public quickly whereas WordPress configuration is time-consuming.
Conclusion
For many years businesses have been using WordPress for creating and hosting their domains on the internet but Squarespace in recent years has emerged as a strong competitor because of its ease of use because even though WordPress is much more functional and loaded with more features, its use requires a lot of time to be learned which might not always be available, creating a market for Squarespace.
Both platforms are excellent options for users looking to create websites. Squarespace is more suited for blog creation whereas WordPress has higher functionality for overall content management. Squarespace is still an individual tool whereas WordPress is used by many large organizations.
References
- https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-2937-8_1
- https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=lwyDNLIEkfkC&oi=fnd&pg=PT23&dq=wordpress&ots=oBzgfc7UKO&sig=s9DJIs1d4HM7WKk_qgIL1zo1jXY