Categories
At one point, creating a website used to be a daunting and expensive task. You had to approach a good web developer and designer, spend hours with them to make them 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 changes in the 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, allow you to use a simple interface and quick steps to create your own website without having to do any coding or scripting. Therefore, even a non-technical customer can create their own website. There are several CMS available on the market. Two of these CMS are: the ubiquitous WordPress and the simple SquareSpace. This article offers an honest comparison between the two to decide which one performs better in different ways.
Let us start:
Budget
WordPress – While WordPress offers you a free and reliable platform to design your website or blog, you have to pay if you want to publish it. You should buy 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 limited technical / budget knowledge. It is inexpensive, offers comfortable 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, greater security, and availability of dedicated resources. In addition, you would need to manage various aspects on your own. Also, you have to pay for the domain name in order to purchase a memorable domain name for your website. So while it is free to build your website with WordPress, you will 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 needed to get connected. In addition to the infrastructure, it also includes the resources necessary for your site to be active. Plans start at $ 8, which may not seem like a big difference compared to the hosting plans you need when building a website using the WordPress CMS. However, there is a problem when it comes to resources. The $ 8 Personal Plan allows you to add only up to 20 pages, 1 blog and 2 contributors that can interfere with the financial goals of the site owner. What’s more disappointing is that you will be able to sell a single item on a personal plan. So is there no hope? – You could ask! Yes, there is hope, but that hope comes at a price, that is, the Premium package priced at $ 16. You can add up to 20 products on this plan and enjoy the unlimited space, bandwidth, and pages. If you need complete freedom, spend $ 24 and sell unlimited products along with the enjoyment of unlimited resources.
The quality of service, support, and infrastructure differ greatly for different hosting providers. Understandably, 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 offers you the freedom to move your content smoothly. The easy-to-manage export tools that WordPress offers are light years ahead of SquareSpace and allow you to easily export your entire site. The built-in WordPress 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 the entire data solution using WordPress backup solutions. Once the backup is done, you can easily export the content to other content management systems. So you retain the power to change the CMS service anytime you want.
· SquareSpace: In SquareSpace, you can only export some parts of your content as an XML file. Here you can save your gallery blogs and pages. That means if you don’t like the SquareSpace service or need to switch to another CMS, you will have to go through a long process and ask SquareSpace support to back up the entire data in a format that can be exported. Due to this restricted appeal, SquareSpace clearly falls behind.
E-commerce
WordPress: Although WordPress started as the first CMS for bloggers, lately it has significantly expanded its focus to provide adequate support for corporate and e-commerce sites as well. There is a huge repertoire 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 advanced functionality and features that an eCommerce site requires which is like getting the best of both worlds.
· SquareSpace: SquareSpace disappoints again when it comes to e-commerce. You can integrate very few external services to promote e-commerce operations on your SquareSpace site. In addition, some of the original qualities and capabilities of these external applications are lost during integration processes. Also, you can set up only one service for payments – Shrill and it is not available worldwide but is limited to a few countries. If you don’t like Shrill or Shrill is not available in the country where you want to sell, you have no other hope but to change your platform. In addition to limiting your reach, it can also stop your future journey towards globalization.
The verdict
If you are starting from scratch and need a quick infrastructure solution to reclaim your space online, SquareSpace is the best option for you. While you will enjoy the complete pampered and guided tour, you must 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 chart your own path or even take another route to your destination.
While good for websites with non-commercial purposes or limited scope, 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 offers you much 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 posting and publishing commands, WordPress clearly outperforms SquareSpace. It allows you a multitude of features and functionalities, tools, themes and plugins to manage your site in the most efficient way.
