Squarespace: What to Know Before You Sign Up

Love it or hate it the John Malkovich Super Bowl ad where he yells at a phone and sends angry emails to the owner of JohnMalkovich.com, this is a very effective ad. The service is Squarespace and while you may not want to send angry emails to get your domain, it is a popular choice for setting up a small business website.

There are plenty of services out there that will help you make a small business website including other companies advertising during Super Bowl 51 like Wix and GoDaddy.

As you investigate your options, you need to look farther than John Malkovich yelling into a phone while talking with headphones on to see what you really need to know about Squarespace.

Squarespace Price & Plans

You can try Squarespace free of charge for 14 days if you just want to see what you could make a website look like. If you want to register your domain so that John Malkovich doesn’t steal it from you, then you’ll need to pay.

Before you get started, check out the Squarespace Templates to see what you could make your website look like. There are themes and styles for all kinds of businesses and services.

Squarespace starts at $12 a month when you pay for a year upfront. There are four Squarespace plans to consider. You can upgrade as needed.

• Personal Plan  – $12 a month when billed annually
• Business Plan  – $18 a month when billed annually
• Basic Online Store Plan  – $26 a month when billed annually
• Advanced Online Store Plan  – $40 a month when billed annually

You can compare the limits and options on this page. The biggest difference between the website plans and the online store plans is that Squarespace charges a 2-3% transaction fee on the website plans. There are some other limits, but you do get some basic things with each plan.

What You Get with Squarespace

With most of the Squarespace plans you get unlimited pages, galleries, blogs, bandwidth, and contributors. The only limitation is on the $12 a month plan, which limits you to 20 pages, galleries and blogs and just two contributors. Unlimited bandwidth and storage mean you can upload as many photos and files as you need and you won’t have to pay more if 10,000 people come to your website compared to 1,000 people.

• With every Squarespace plan you get the following benefits;
• Unlimited Bandwidth and Storage
• Mobile Optimized Website
• Your Choice of a Professional Looking Template
• Website Analytics
• Custom Domain (Free when you buy an annual plan)
• SSL
• 24/7 Customer Support
• Integrated Ecommerce
• Unlimited Products and Donations

As you upgrade to different plans you get Google Email, AdWords credit, and other items. These services are similar to what you can get with many other services or with setting up your own hosting with a service like WP-Engine and using WordPress, but Squarespace simplifies what you need to do.

Do I need to Know Code to Use Squarespace?

This is John. John Malkovich knows how to act, how to yell into a phone and how to make clothes. He doesn’t need to know how to code or how to make a website to use Squarespace.

The Squarespace templates allow you to drag and drop to make your website. You don’t need to know how to make a website to use Squarespace. That is one of the reasons you will pay a little more than if you started from scratch and built your own website.

Squarespace Reviews

Overall the Squarespace reviews are positive. There are some areas where you may run into limitations, like with payment processor choices or if you want to customize outside of the templates, but for many businesses and users, Squarespace is an excellent drag and drop website builder.

One thing that we like is the ability to start using a template to see if the service will deliver what you need before you even enter a credit card. If you are in a specific industry search for Squarespace restaurant reviews or whatever your business is to see how it works for your