At one point, building 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 understand your needs and once the site was ready after a considerable period of time, you would still have to go through a lengthy process to make any changes to the site. 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, allows you to use an easy interface and quick steps to create your own website without having to go through any coding or scripting. Therefore, even a non-technical customer can create their own website. There are several CMS available in the market. Two of these CMS are: ubiquitous WordPress and the simple SquareSpace. This article offers an honest comparison between the two to decide which one fares better in different ways.

Let us start:

Budget

WordPress – While WordPress gives you a free and reliable platform to design your website or blog, you have to pay if you want to publish it. You will need to purchase 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 budget/technical knowledge. It is inexpensive, offers convenient scalability with unlimited resources (bandwidth and disk space), and is largely managed by the service provider. If your needs are more specific, you can go for VPS or dedicated hosting. These plans are more expensive since they offer privacy, greater security and availability of dedicated resources. Also, you would have to manage various aspects on your own. Also, you need to pay for the domain name to buy a memorable domain name for your website. So while it’s free to build your website with WordPress, you’ll need to pay for resources if you want it to be live and accessible.

SquareSpace: SquareSpace offers you a personal plan with all the essential features you need to get connected. In addition to the infrastructure, it also includes the resources needed to keep your site up and running. The plans start at $8 which may not seem like a huge difference compared to the hosting plans you need when building a website using the WordPress CMS. However, there is a catch when it comes to resources. The $8 Plan – Personal Plan – allows you to add only up to 20 pages, 1 blog and 2 contributors which can interfere with the financial goals of the site owner. What is more disappointing is that you will be able to sell only one item in a personal plan. Is there no hope then? – You can ask! Yes, there is a hope, but that hope comes with a price, namely the Premium package priced at $16. You can add up to 20 products in this plan and enjoy unlimited space, bandwidth, and pages. If you need complete freedom, spend $24 and sell unlimited products plus enjoy unlimited resources.

The quality of service, support, and infrastructure differ greatly for different hosting providers. You understandably 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 gives you the freedom to move your content around seamlessly. The easily manageable export tools that WordPress offers are light years ahead of SquareSpace and allow you to export your entire site with ease. 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 entire data solution using WordPress Backup Solutions. Once backed up, you can easily export the content to other content management systems. Thus, you retain the power to change the CMS service at any time you want.

· SquareSpace: In SquareSpace, you can only export some parts of your content in the form of an XML file. Here you can save your gallery blogs and pages. That means if you don’t like SquareSpace’s service or need to switch to another CMS, you’ll have to go through a lengthy process and request SquareSpace support to back up all your data in a format that can be exported. Due to this restricted appeal, SquareSpace clearly falls behind.

electronic commerce

WordPress – Although WordPress started out as bloggers’ first CMS, it has significantly expanded its focus of late to properly support corporate and e-commerce sites. There is a huge directory of ecommerce plugins that WordPress offers you. Also, there are a number of WordPress themes that are specially designed to promote e-commerce. Thus, you can combine the simplicity of WordPress with the advanced functionality and features required by an ecommerce site that is like getting the best of both worlds.

· SquareSpace: SquareSpace again disappoints when it comes to eCommerce. You can integrate very few external services to promote eCommerce operations on your SquareSpace site. In addition, during the integration processes, some of the original qualities and capabilities of these external applications are lost. In addition, you can configure only a single service for payments – Shrill and it is not available worldwide, but is limited to only a few countries. If you don’t like Shrill or Shrill is not available in the country you want to sell to, you have no other hope than to change your platform. In addition to limiting your reach, it can also stop your future globalization journey.

The verdict

If you’re starting from scratch and need a quick infrastructure solution to reclaim your space online, then SquareSpace is the best option for you. While you’ll enjoy the full pampering and guided tour, you must be ready to sacrifice a fair share of freedom. You would need to walk a path that is already carved and have very little opportunity to carve your own path or even take another route to the destination.

While it’s good for websites with non-commercial goals or limited scope, you should be careful when using SquareSpace if you need to build a complex eCommerce site or corporate site with impressive features and specific demands.

Although there is some learning involved while working with WordPress, it gives you much more flexibility and you can decide different aspects of your website. Better design power is the main benefit of WordPress CMS. When it comes to posting and posting commands, WordPress clearly does a lot better than SquareSpace. It allows you a multitude of features and functionality, tools, themes and plugins to manage your site in the most efficient way.