Squarespace

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace is a hosted website builder for people who care more about how a site looks than how many apps it can run, so it suits photographers, consultants, restaurants and small shops that sell a modest number of products.

What Squarespace actually does

Hosting, templates, a domain option, forms and a checkout all come on one bill. You edit inside Squarespace itself and you cannot move a finished design to another host, which is the main lock-in to understand before you build.

Is the trial enough to decide?

Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, and on the pricing page we opened no card was requested to begin. That is long enough to rebuild a five-page site and test the checkout. Do it before you pay, because a full redesign later is a rebuild, not a theme swap.

Pricing and the annual-billing catch

The pricing page we opened showed euro prices for our region: Basic, Core and Advanced, each cheaper per month on annual billing. In the US the older Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced ladder has been quoted at $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month on annual billing, but check your own region, as the plan names and amounts differ. Annual billing is the lower rate and it is also the one you cannot easily walk away from, so use the trial first and commit second.

Black Friday adds little beyond that. In 2025 coverage reported up to 36% off annual plans for new accounts, applied at checkout without a code. We could not find a reliable figure for 2023 or 2024, so we do not list one.

Who should skip it

Stores with a big catalogue, complex shipping rules or a need for a deep app marketplace will outgrow it; Shopify is the better base for that. Developers who want to host their own code will find Squarespace restrictive. Blogs run by writers who want to export everything to another system later should look at WordPress.

Decision rule

If you want a good-looking site live this week and will be happy to stay on one platform, start the trial, pick the annual rate on the plan you tested, and ignore code hunting. If you already know you will sell hundreds of products, skip it.

Key features

• Template-based design editor
• 14-day free trial on every plan
• Built-in hosting and SSL on paid plans
• Online store and checkout on higher plans
• Blog, forms and basic email campaigns
• Annual billing lowers the monthly rate
• Plans scale from Basic to Advanced
• Single bill for site, hosting and commerce

Use cases

• Portfolio for a photographer or designer
• Restaurant or studio brochure site
• Small shop with a limited catalogue
• Consultant or coach booking site

Squarespace pricing

As of October 2026 the Squarespace pricing page, viewed from a European location, listed three plans in euros per month. Which figure applies to annual versus monthly billing was not labelled in the text we could extract, so treat the split as our reading and confirm at checkout.