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If you’re building your own website or you’re looking to move your ecommerce business onto a new platform, you might be thinking about Shopify and Squarespace.
Everyone has their own preference and depending on the nature of your business, one might work better for you than the other. And both Shopify and Squarespace have their advantages and disadvantages too.
There’s loads of articles out there comparing the two platforms - we found this Forbes article particularly helpful - but it can be time consuming to rake through Google to work out which one would work best for you.
So to save you having to trawl through lots of pros and cons lists, we’ve done it for you! Here’s our top takes on the Spotify vs Squarespace debate:
Generally, Squarespace is cheaper than Shopify
While Shopify technically offers the cheapest membership starting at £9 a month for Shopify Lite, this is only if you want to add a buy button to an existing website.
If you’re hoping to build a website for your business, Shopify’s monthly prices include:
- Basic plan for £20
- Shopify plan for £56
- Advanced Shopify plan for £211
Squarespace’s monthly prices include:
- Personal plan for £10
- Business plan for £15
- Basic Commerce for £20
- Advanced Commerce for £30
So if cost is a main focus for you, Squarespace might be your best choice. However, you should look into what you get for each plan if quality is your priority.
Squarespace is best for beginners
Squarespace is easy-to-use and would work well for you if you want everything in one place. It’s an easy beginner website and won’t require you to have any development or coding knowledge.
Shopify can help with business growth
Shopify was designed as an online store solution, with unlimited products and multiple sales channels. It's an easy way to build your ecommerce business and opens you up to growth over time. This might be a good move for you if you already have a well established business and you want a website where you can add additional components later on.
You also won’t need any coding knowledge to use Shopify.
Shopify saves you time with SEO
Both Shopify and Squarespace offer integrated Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) support, but Shopify generates suggested titles and descriptions to meet Google’s Core Web Vitals requirements.
This means you can invest less time and money into optimising your website for Google if you use Shopify.
You can add optimised meta titles, descriptions and custom URLs with Squarespace, but you must do so manually without any suggestions from the platform itself. You cannot install any third party SEO apps so unless you have an SEO expert in your team, you might fare better by using Shopify for fully optimised website content.
What We Think
Whether Shopify or Squarespace works best for your business will completely depend on your needs.
Generally, Squarespace might be the best for beginners and those who are more price-conscious and Shopify could work if you’re looking to grow your business and focus on SEO. Furthermore, both Shopify and Squarespace can be integrated with out shipping dashboard - Smart Send.
We hope you enjoyed this snapshot and for a comparison table of the two platforms and their features, read more here.
