Squarespace Website Builder Review: The Best Templates 2025?

There have probably been times when you've seen a website and thought "That's definitely a Squarespace site". Elegant, clean, and modern – many of Squarespace's templates have a distinct look that makes their competitors' generic options seem outdated and stale. So, is there more to Squarespace than just eye candy?

We took a closer look at Squarespace's website builder to see what else it's capable of.

Squarespace suits users of any experience level and offers more creative freedom than many other website builders. Like Wix and Duda, it's an all-rounder and combines design flexibility with user-friendliness.

You can easily personalize its stylish templates thanks to the editor's built-in tools, most of which are intuitive.

Squarespace makes getting started easy. Your account is set up in minutes, and since you can try Squarespace for 14 days without commitment, you don't need to provide any payment information.

First, answer some questions about your project, niche, and website goals. Squarespace will then suggest suitable templates based on your responses. If you'd like, you can skip this step and manually browse what templates are available.

Once you've picked a template (more on the selection later), finish the registration process. After that, you'll land in Squarespace's editor.

Squarespace's editor is your website's control center. In it, you'll not only edit content with visual design tools but also manage sales, marketing campaigns, SEO settings, and all other essential aspects of your website.

The editor is generally divided into several sections:

Squarespace has a clear and intuitive structure that separates websites into pages, sections, and blocks. Each page consists of several sections, in which you can arrange and edit blocks and elements.

Squarespace's interface is mostly intuitive. Designing your website's basic layout is easy: New pages and sections are quickly set up, and the drag-and-drop's snap feature makes it easy to move content around.

There are plenty more handy features and shortcuts that make routine tasks simpler: You can quickly duplicate sections, move them up and down, or save them as favorites for quick placement when needed. Most of the platform's formatting options are intuitive too.

But there are a few minor things that bother us. Some tasks are made more complicated than necessary, like switching pages: When you're in edit mode, you can't just jump to another page. You have to exit edit mode, go to the page you want to edit in the dashboard, and then turn editing back on.

Adjusting certain sections and elements can also be a bit tricky. It isn't always possible to edit elements like text and images directly in the website preview. Instead, for some section templates, like testimonials, you manage them in a kind of mini-CMS. This makes sense, but the windows are often small and cluttered.

But that's nitpicking because overall we got along well with Squarespace's interface. This was also due to its fast performance. Even with many features and larger websites with animated backgrounds, Squarespace's editor didn't stutter for us.

Squarespace also offers a smartphone app for Android and iOS devices, allowing you to edit and manage your website from anywhere. Porting was quite successful, and most features from the web interface are also available in the mobile app.

Still, designing a website on a small smartphone screen is a bit awkward. For example, we accidentally moved content while scrolling. Like most website builder smartphone apps, we'd recommend using Squarespace's for quick adjustments rather than major overhauls.

Squarespace impresses with great templates, extensive customization options, and a wide range of elements and section/page templates. You can create cohesive, visually appealing websites and make them your own with just a few clicks.

Squarespace's templates are truly one of the platform's highlights: They're modern, stylish, and vibrant, with much more character than what its competitors offer. But, of course, there are also conservative and simple designs available.

Whether you want to create a subtle and elegant business website or make a bold statement with your portfolio, Squarespace has a template to match your taste.

The filter options for choosing templates are solid too: You can sort through templates by type (e.g., blog, courses, portfolio, shop, one-pager) as well as by theme (e.g., photography, fashion, health & beauty, travel) to find the perfect design.

You can edit site-wide design settings in the "Styles" section. Compared to other builders, Squarespace's options are quite extensive without being overwhelming: You can use harmonized presets or make detailed adjustments.

These aspects can be globally configured:

Squarespace offers a good mix of design presets and detailed settings: You can rely on the style presets, or customize individual sections to your heart's content.

Of course, design settings can also be adjusted at the section level. Which options are available depends on the type of section you're working with.

In standard grid sections where you can drag and drop content, it's possible to adjust the number of rows, spacing, height, and alignment. You can also change the background, and use a variety of animated options in addition to images and video. Effects like parallax are also possible.

In other sections where you can't freely move content, the options are a bit more limited: Layouts are preset, and you can only adjust the background and colors or add dividers.

You can also customize individual elements within sections, like images or text. Typical formatting options are available. Usually, Squarespace refers back to the global design, so it isn't possible to specify fonts for individual texts.

As mentioned, in some sections a grid system is used, within which you can arrange elements by dragging and dropping them. In other sections, the position of your elements is more fixed.

Page management in Squarespace is also user-friendly. All pages are listed in the "Pages" menu and divided into linked (visible in the navigation menu) and unlinked pages. The latter are useful for the website and system pages like the legal notice. You can adjust the position of individual pages by dragging and dropping them.

It's possible to create subpages, but only in a limited way. The feature is somewhat hidden, so you'll need to go to the page selection menu and click on "Dropdown" to add it to your navigation menu. With this, you can group multiple pages, but the main entry isn't a unique page.

Squarespace offers countless templates for entire pages and individual sections.

With that said, a few standard templates are missing. For example, you'll need to create a gallery or a slider for customer logos yourself, and we couldn't find a dedicated template for promotions.

Squarespace's template collection offers most features that a classic business website or industry site needs. Here's an overview of Squarespace's page and section templates:

Squarespace is great in terms of the types of elements it offers for placing within drag-and-drop sections. In addition to basics like text and images, you'll also find integrations, products, filters, and more.

The built-in search tool helps you quickly find the element you're looking for.

However, there are a few things missing: Squarespace doesn't have a dedicated block for tables or tabs, and for before-and-after photos, you need to use plugins or user-defined code.

Here's a comparison of the elements Squarespace has:

Squarespace offers access to free stock photos from Unsplash and paid premium stock photos from Getty Images.

There's also an image editing mode. In it, you can crop and rotate images, adjust settings, and apply filters.

Beyond its website editor, Squarespace impresses with a well-stocked toolkit that goes far beyond the basics a regular website builder provides. From powerful blogging tools and extensive ecommerce options to solid SEO and marketing features, Squarespace offers everything needed for a professional and versatile website.

Squarespace handles blog management on two levels: blog pages, such as your blog's homepage, and individual blog posts. You can add a new blog page in the page management section:

In the blog editor, you get access to all features found in the website builder's editor. You're given a relatively free hand to design blog posts and can include text, images, videos, as well as products, integrations, and many other things.

You can also save drafts and schedule your posts to be published at a specific time. Categorizing blogs with tags is possible and Squarespace supports geo-tagging too.

Another handy feature: Squarespace has a built-in monetization option. This allows you to create different subscription models that give paying customers access to certain benefits.

However, the design options are limited compared to traditional pages and sections. You can't add sections or drag and drop elements, but only work within the text template. It also seems impossible to create different blog templates with fixed elements (e.g., an author box).

When it comes to blogging, Squarespace could be a bit more flexible.

Squarespace's SEO options are good. You can adjust page titles and URL slugs for individual pages in the "General" tab of the page settings menu. While you're there, click on SEO to add an SEO title and description or hide individual pages from search results by using the noindex tag.

Unfortunately, there's no way to customize the robots.txt file, as it's the same for all Squarespace websites and users can't access it. Aside from that, Squarespace covers most SEO settings:

Creating multilingual websites is easiest with the Weglot integration, but unfortunately, it's not free.

If you want to make your website multilingual without paying extra, you'll need a workaround. You can create a homepage with links to different language versions of your site and then set up a dropdown menu for each language with the same pages. You can duplicate your pages and manually translate each's content.

Unfortunately, this solution isn't very practical since you need to manually adjust each page's content and use your website's first menu level as a language menu. Also, not all content can be translated—checkout pages, for example, will always be in your website's primary language.

You also need to add an online store to your Squarespace website as a page first. Managing it works similarly to other collections (like blogs). You can adjust your shop's layout and design in edit mode, while managing products in the main editor.

Squarespace supports a variety of product types. Besides physical products, you can sell services, downloads, gift cards, memberships, videos-on-demand, events, courses, and access to your blog posts.

Product management is straightforward and covers all essential features and settings. You can tag and categorize your products and create different variants of the same items. Through the product menu, it's also possible to add images, set prices, and specify quantities and SKUs.

You manage your store in the "Sales" panel. This is where you can keep track of your orders and inventory, manage payment, shipping, and tax settings, and much more.

Squarespace supports Stripe and PayPal, and POS payments through Square (only in the US). You cannot sell in multiple currencies and have to choose one. It is possible to manually define tax rates for countries where your customers live, however.

You can manually configure shipping with flat rates or weight-based prices, or directly integrate providers like UPS or FedEx. In addition, many other shipping extensions like Easyship or SendCloud, are supported,

The discount features are solid: You can create both discount codes and rules, and offer percentage or fixed amount discounts, as well as free shipping. It's possible to limit discounts to specific products or categories and restrict when customers can use them.

But that's not the end of Squarespace's ecommerce features. You can also integrate print-on-demand services via Printful, sell products directly on Facebook and Instagram, and connect your Squarespace catalog with the Google Merchant Center.

There are many other handy sales tools, like suggesting similar products to customers or managing waitlists for currently unavailable items.

Squarespace's ecommerce platform isn't as flexible as dedicated systems like Shopify or BigCommerce, but it offers far more than what you'll find among the shop features of typical website builders.

Squarespace has a huge range of features, and we can't cover them all in detail. Here's a brief overview of some of what we haven't mentioned yet:

Overall, there's hardly a feature Squarespace hasn't thought of. Here's a comparison of the platform's advanced features:

Squarespace has a rich help center that's loaded with tutorials and support articles, divided into categories like "Websites," "Commerce," and "Digital Products."

The articles are very text-heavy and could use more screenshots, but there are almost always corresponding video tutorials.

Squarespace also offers some webinars and Q&A sessions, a well-stocked YouTube channel, and a forum where you can ask the Squarespace community for advice. Overall, Squarespace provides a good amount of quality support content, and we could quickly find answers to most of our questions.

If you can't find answers in the help center, you can contact customer support directly. They're available Monday to Friday from 10 AM to 2 AM via the live chat. However, at the time of our review, coverage was spotty due to high demand.

Alternatively, you can email Squarespace and get a response around the clock. We received a satisfactory answer in about three hours.

However, in some user reviews, Squarespace support is often criticized: Many customers report slow response times and a lack of knowledge, especially with technical issues.

Squarespace offers four plans: Basic, Core, Plus, and Advanced. You can pay monthly or annually, with yearly subscriptions being a bit cheaper.

All plans include a domain (free for the first year), SSL protection, and all basic features. The differences between the plans mainly concern the range of features they come with since resources, like bandwidth, aren't limited.

Here's an overview of all Squarespace plans along with their current pricing and conditions:

How does Squarespace compare price-wise to other website builders? Because direct comparisons between providers are difficult we look at the annual practical costs in two scenarios:

Price comparison 1: Simple website, ad-free, own domain possible

Squarespace's Basic plan is priced in the lower mid-range of the website builders we reviewed. It's good value for money since you get much more than you would with the similarly priced alternatives from IONOS or Jimdo.

Price comparison 2: Online store, ad-free, own domain possible

The Business plan is also priced around the middle, which isn't bad considering the many shop features. However, don't forget the 3% transaction fee – it might be cheaper to go straight for the ecommerce plan.

Squarespace offers a free 14-day trial and doesn't require payment details to start. Unfortunately, there's no free plan.

Unhappy and want your money back? There's no refund for monthly subscriptions, but with an annual plan, you have 14 days to request a refund.

If you're choosing a website builder, you probably want to create an impressive and professional website with as little hassle as possible. Squarespace is perfect for this. With it, you can quickly design a sleek, modern website that really stands out.

Squarespace's design templates are much more stylish than what the competition offers. Its customization options are robust for a builder, and there's a wide selection of harmonized page and section templates: All you need to do is add your content. Plus, there are extensive ecommerce and blogging options and plenty of industry-specific features.

But Squarespace isn't perfect. Multilingual websites can only be created by purchasing an integration or with a clunky workaround. Customers don't rate its support very highly, and unlike alternatives like Wix, there's no free version. Also, while Squarespace is more powerful than typical builders, it's not as flexible as a CMS like WordPress.

Still, Squarespace is far superior to most other website builders from our review. It's one of the best all-rounders on the market, offering an ideal balance of user-friendliness, design quality, and features.

We created a demo page using Squarespace's builder, which you can view here: Squarespace Demo Page

We create a demo website using each builder in our comparison and include the following content: A homepage featuring Hero, About Me, Services, Testimonial, Pricing, and FAQ sections, a portfolio page, a blog, and a contact page.

Luckily, Squarespace provides suitable section and page templates for all this content. So, we just had to pick the right templates and add our content.

What do customers think of Squarespace? We checked out trustworthy review sites and gathered recurring feedback for you:

Is Squarespace not the right choice for you? Maybe one of these alternatives will work:

Check out more of the best alternatives to Squarespace here:

Have you decided to build your website with Squarespace? Our step-by-step guide shows you how to do it: