If you’ve listened to any podcast ever, you already know the spiel: Squarespace is an all-in-one website builder that makes it easy to create a beautiful online presence. Numbers-wise, it’s one of the most popular web building and hosting services out there, supporting millions of websites across the web.
Why should you consider Squarespace?
One of the primary reasons why Squarespace has seen this success is that it’s inherently all-inclusive. For about £10 to £30 per month, Squarespace plans offer access to hosting, around the clock customer support, website metrics, mobile optimisation, SSL security, unlimited storage and bandwidth, an intuitive drag-and-drop page builder, and dozens of original, modern templates.
Most of those features are self-explanatory, although the templates could probably benefit from a bit more elaboration: A Squarespace template determines how your site looks and works. Users have more than 90 different options to choose from, each of which has been designed and coded exclusively for Squarespace (which means you won’t find them on WordPress, Wix, or other site-building platforms).
Every Squarespace template belongs to a so-called template family, or a group of similarly coded templates that are alike in their basic structure, functionality, and customisation options. Squarespace categorises its templates this way, per its support page, “to showcase their versatility and to help you find the layout and pre-set style options that work best as a starting point for your site.” Poking around within a family can be helpful if you want to see how Squarespace’s tools can be used to make websites look different, it adds, pointing to Brine and Thorne (below) as good examples of two templates that are in the same family of template, but styled differently:
Credit: squarespace
What’s particularly great about Squarespace is that it caters to users of all web design skill levels, with each template falling somewhere on a customisation spectrum. Some templates give you the tools to go all-out with fonts, colours, image effects, border sizes, landing pages, and more, letting you fine-tune every detail, whereas others offer only a few style options to eliminate any potential hassles. It’s up to you to decide how much time and effort you’ll dedicate to designing your site.
At this point, you’re probably wondering: How do these features set Squarespace apart from, say, WordPress, another popular platform? The short of it is this: You get what you pay for. With WordPress, you’ve got virtually unlimited customisation options if you cough up some dough for hosting services, quality themes, and reputable plugins.
Squarespace offers far less flexibility in comparison, but all of its templates are ultra-reliable and mobile-ready. And while they’re not as prolific as WordPress plugins, Squarespace supports the official integrations of certain services, including Acuity Scheduling (to let visitors schedule an appointment), Apple News (to cross-publish your content), and Paypal (to let your site accept PayPal payments from customers), among a few dozen others. Plus, most of the technical drudgery for your site is handled by Squarespace’s team of experts so you can direct your focus elsewhere.
What is the best Squarespace template for you?
If Squarespace sounds like the right solution for you, know this: You really can’t go wrong with any of its templates. Like, it’s almost impossible to make an ugly Squarespace site, but just in case you need a little help to get the ball rolling on the site of your dreams, save yourself a Google search and just keep reading.
These are the best Squarespace templates in 2021.
