Squarespace - What’s Not To Like?
It's incredible that we have services like SquareSpace. The fact that almost anyone with basic computer skills can setup a reasonable looking website for their business is just wonderful. It does so much, so well. I moved to Squarespace 18 months ago after years of hosting my own Wordpress site and maintaining everything on the server for the simple reason of saving time. Relingquishing all that control was difficult but it works as well as I need it to.
Today I'm looking at a few of the things that have bugged me about SS since day 1 and still do today.
Biased Online Presence
a. A massive amount of Squarespace mentions online are because of either direct sponsorship or those with an interest in promoting Squarespace. As they only sponsor videos on larger channels, they're the ones that come up in your feed.
b. Squarespace support pages are incredibly well optimised. What that means is that if you search for a topic, the first two pages on Google are just various iterations and versions of their support pages about a vaguely related topic.
I'm not saying it's impossible to find information. It's just not as straightforward.
Post Scheduling
Post scheduling is done with a calendar and time slider. Funnily enough, there are times when I want a post to launch at exactly 3pm to coincide with a video. The slider jumps from 2.59 and 3.02. What a load of poo.
Post Scheduling in Squarespace
Social Media Integration
You can add your Instagram feed to your pages if you want but don't count on it ever updating. Everytime I've added it, it's needed a manual refresh to bring in new posts. I contacted support about this who recommended removing the rights on both the IG side and SS. That did nothing. Twitter integration works but is limited and ugly.
Instagram integration in Squarespace
When I used a WordPress site, I used a plugin from SmashBalloon to do this job. It was truly amazing. Beautiful to look at, configure and it worked 100% of the time. I miss my SmashBalloon plugins.
Copying Objects…or not!
This is probably one of my biggest gripes with the platform. You cannot copy an object. You can duplicate certain blocks and entire pages but if you want two buttons on your page that are basically identical except for maybe and incrementing number, there is no way to copy or duplicate the first one. You just have to go through the laborious process of creating the second exactly the same as the first.
It is absolutely insane that this has not been fixed.
Styles & Colour Palettes
Colours are very fixed and structured things in Squarespace. That's no bad thing. It's right for a website to only used a limited triumvirate of colours to ensure that you are forced into consistency.
The problem is that, short of moving into the use of CSS styling which many won't be comfortable with, there's no way to make one item a different colour from others.
For example, let's say you want to put a link to your Patreon page on a post. You might choose to make that link Patreon's primary colour rather than your own to help it stand out. There's no simple way to do that.
Colour Palettes in Squarespace
Hosting Files
Hosting a file is virtually impossible. Even if you're paying for the premium package, hosting any kind of downloadable content is very clumsy to do and even if you choose to, files have to be 20MB or smaller. Yes, you heard me correctly. 20MB!!!
I fully understand that they do not want their platform used as a file repository and the kind of bandwidth usage of such sites would be unpredictable and hard for them to manage but, for all intents and purposes, if you want to hosts anything of any kind, you're going to have to find your own method.
Digital products for e-commerce can be up to an enormous 300MB. Wow, just think what you could do with 300MB. It's like having an entire Google datacentre at your fingertips. Such a gratious and generous amount that's nigh on useless for everybody wanting to sell any kind of media or software content.
Google Adsense is Awkward
Google require you to place a file in the root of your website to allow you to correctly configure Adsense. As I mentioned in the previous point, hosting files is horrible and the links to the files themselves is actually a symbolic link that redirects. It's simply not seen by Google and despite many web articles claiming to have solutions for this, they do not work.
I had to host the file myself on a different domain with a 301 redirect to that location. That solved the problem. Effectively, removing Squarespace from the equation altogether.
Audio Player
The music player is a mess. We've already discussed file hosting so there's no way that Squarespace are going to let you upload wav or flac files so you're stuck with mp3 or m4a to start with unless you host your own.
Then there's the players themselves. What a load of crap. You have a choice between compact and classic. These should be named ultra-basic and 90's garbage. There's such potential here to enhance this and capture bands and music lovers but again, as with everything on Squarespace, you'll really just need to embed code from an external service like SoundCloud to do anything interesting here...yet more money.
Third-Party Addons
Addons or enhancements are really a bit uninspiring and overpriced. Coming from a world of WordPress and manually administering my own site and server, the options and world to go beyond what you get in the box seems rather limited.
There are certainly ways to inject code to your pages and add scripts that wouldn't otherwise run but I've had limited success. The last one I tried was a Livechat solution and, while the Livechat worked great, I found fairly soon that it was breaking something else on my site. That's much less straightforward to fix on something like Squarespace...at least it is for me.
If you go and search for a commercial add-on there is little choice and they're way too expensive for what they are. The developers of these bad boys clearly know they've got you by the balls if you've landed on their page. "Ah, another sucker who can't do what they want with the limited Squarespace functionality. Let's bleed them dry."
Conclusion
Compared to my previous solution, Squarespace saves me both money and time. Doing precisely what I want with it is much much more difficult or impossible but, with workarounds and a few sacrifices, it does easily as much as I need.
I have no plans to move and I would recommend it to you. I have no discount code to offer you and have no affiliation with Squarespace whatsoever. These are just a few of my thoughts on the service after 18 months of use.
Do let me know if you have any questions, comments or if I've made any errors.