Updated Oct 5, 2026
Website Builders
Squarespace
Template-based website builder with selling tools on every plan
Squarespace at a glance
from our research
Hosted website builder for small businesses and creatives, with templates and selling tools in one plan
Fluid Engine places blocks on a grid with separate desktop and mobile layouts; 7.1 sites can't switch templates
Sitemap, robots.txt and structured data can't be edited, and translation relies on Weglot, a separate service
Core: $39 a month, or $29 a month billed yearly, with no Squarespace fee on online store sales
Overview
What is Squarespace?
Squarespace is a hosted website builder from Squarespace, Inc., which says it was founded in 2003 at the University of Maryland and lists an office in New York City. A subscription covers one site and includes hosting, templates and 24/7 support. Acuity Scheduling, Email Campaigns, domains and Google Workspace are billed separately.
Every site starts as a 14-day trial, built from a template in the template store or from a starting design made by the Blueprint AI Builder, and it stays private until a paid plan is bought. Pages are made of sections and blocks in Fluid Engine, which places blocks on a grid, lets them overlap and keeps a separate mobile layout. Sites on version 7.1 can't switch templates later, so restyling happens through font and color themes. Collection pages run blogs, portfolios, event calendars, online courses, videos and stores, and Member Sites put pages behind free or paid plans. Every plan can sell products and services, send invoices, take donations and sell gift cards and subscriptions.
The editor runs in Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari on a Mac. Squarespace's iOS and Android apps edit blog posts, orders and invoices, and they can change page blocks but not add or rearrange them. Payments go through Squarespace Payments, Stripe, PayPal or Square, and Core and higher plans add Mailchimp, Zapier, code injection and the Commerce APIs. Content can be imported from WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, and products from Shopify, Etsy and Big Cartel. Plans are priced per site and billed monthly or yearly in advance.
Our verdict on Squarespace
Squarespace suits small businesses, creatives and service providers who want a finished-looking site and its selling tools under one subscription, with no plugins to manage. Fluid Engine keeps blocks on a grid, so layouts are hard to knock out of line, and selling, invoicing, member areas and courses are part of the product rather than add-ons. The 14-day trial lets a whole site be built privately before any payment.
Control is where it stops. The sitemap, robots.txt and structured data are generated automatically and can't be edited, there's no native translation, and Fluid Engine has desktop and mobile layouts but no tablet layout. A 7.1 site can't move to another template. Leaving is partial too: the export file holds pages, one blog and text and image blocks in WordPress format, plus products and contacts as CSV, while store pages, style settings and custom CSS stay behind and images can't be downloaded in bulk.
Basic costs $25 a month, or $19 a month billed yearly, but it limits a site to 2 contributors, leaves out code injection, Mailchimp and Zapier, and adds a 2% Squarespace fee to online store sales. Core, at $39 a month or $29 a month billed yearly, is the plan most businesses need. It drops that fee to 0%, so a store pays card processing through Squarespace Payments, 2.9% + $0.30 per payment, plus 0.15% per transaction, capped at $0.99, if it uses automated tax calculation. On yearly billing Core costs $10 a month more than Basic, the same as Basic's 2% fee on $500 of monthly sales. Digital content and memberships carry a separate fee: 5% on Core, 1% on Plus and none on Advanced, which cost $65 and $139 a month, or $49 and $99 billed yearly. Annual plans can be refunded within 14 days; monthly plans can't.
Choose Squarespace for a portfolio, a service business or a small shop that wants design and selling in one bill, and budget for Core. Look elsewhere if the site has to run in several languages or needs control over its SEO files. Wix Multilingual adds hreflang tags, and Wix lets you edit robots.txt. Webflow, whose Premium site plan costs $25 a month billed yearly, offers canonical tags, wildcard 301 redirects and a CMS with typed fields.
Written by Lokesh Kapoor
Pros & cons
Squarespace pros and cons
What it does well
- Every plan can sell products, send invoices and put pages behind paid memberships
- Core and higher plans charge no Squarespace fee on online store sales
- Imports WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr content, and Shopify, Etsy and Big Cartel products
- Unlimited bandwidth on every plan, and unlimited contributors from Core up
Where it falls short
- Basic adds a 2% fee to online store sales and allows 2 contributors
- Export leaves out store pages, style settings and custom CSS, and images can't be bulk-exported
- No native translation or tablet layout, and SEO files such as the sitemap can't be edited
Editor's assessment from vendor documentation and published pricing
Pricing
Squarespace pricing
Squarespace's paid plans start at $19/month, above the $17 median across the 5 tools in our Website Builders ranking. You can test it on a 14-day free trial.
Basic
per site, per month
or $25/mo billed monthly
- Up to 2 contributors
- Unlimited products and services
- Free custom domain for 1 year (annual)
- 30 minutes of video storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
Usage: Priced per site. Annual billing includes a free custom domain for the first year, which then renews at the standard rate. Selling adds a 2% Squarespace fee on online store sales and 7% on digital content and memberships, plus card processing from 2.9% + $0.30 with Squarespace Payments.
Core
per site, per month
or $39/mo billed monthly
- Unlimited contributors
- Custom code and code injection
- Mailchimp and Zapier integrations
- 5 hours of video storage
- Free Google Workspace email, first year
Usage: No Squarespace fee on online store sales; digital content and memberships carry 5%. Card processing with Squarespace Payments is 2.9% + $0.30, and automated tax calculation costs 0.15% per transaction (maximum $0.99). The free domain and one Google Workspace inbox last the first year, then renew at standard rates.
Plus
per site, per month
or $65/mo billed monthly
- Unlimited contributors
- 50 hours of video storage
- Cart reservations and countdown timer
- Custom code and code injection
Usage: No Squarespace fee on online store sales; digital content and memberships carry 1%. Card processing with Squarespace Payments is 2.7% + $0.30, and automated tax calculation costs 0.10% per transaction (maximum $0.99).
Advanced
per site, per month
or $139/mo billed monthly
- Unlimited contributors
- Unlimited video storage
- Cart reservations and countdown timer
- 0% digital content and memberships fee
Usage: No Squarespace fee on store sales or on digital content and memberships. Card processing with Squarespace Payments is 2.5% + $0.30, ACH is 1% capped at $10, and automated tax calculation costs 0.05% per transaction (maximum $0.99).
Checked against Squarespace, Inc.'s pricing page on October 5, 2026 · see the full breakdown
Capabilities
Squarespace features
Checked against the same feature list as every other tool in its category.
Platform
- Included:Code or content exportTake your site elsewhere without rebuilding it from scratch.Content only; no design or store pages
- Not included:White-label & client handoverRebrand the editor and hand a restricted version to clients.
Design Control
- Included:Custom code injectionAdd your own HTML, CSS or JavaScript at page or site level.JavaScript and code injection need Core
- Not included:Freeform drag-and-dropPlace elements anywhere on the canvas rather than inside a fixed grid.Grid-based; blocks can overlap
- Included:Per-breakpoint controlStyle each screen size independently rather than relying on automatic reflow.Desktop and mobile layouts only
- Included:Professional templatesA curated library of designed starting points rather than a blank canvas.
Content & Commerce
- Included:Built-in bloggingNative blog with categories, authors and scheduling.
- Included:Ecommerce & paymentsSell products or services with checkout, tax and shipping handling.
- Included:Memberships & gated contentRestrict pages to logged-in or paying members.
- Not included:Multilingual sitesServe translated versions of the same site with correct language tags.
- Not included:Structured CMSCustom content types with fields, so collections render from data rather than duplicated pages.Fixed collection types only, no custom fields
Search & Performance
- Included:Clean semantic markupGenerated HTML is semantic and lightweight rather than deeply nested wrappers.
- Not included:Full SEO controlsTitles, meta, canonicals, redirects, structured data and sitemap control.Titles, meta, redirects only; rest automatic
- Included:Redirect managementCreate and manage 301 redirects without touching a server.
Ecosystem
Squarespace integrations
Alternatives
Top Squarespace alternatives
Tools that do the same job, from the same category.
Webflow
Best for designers and developers building content-heavy marketing sites with CSS control
WordPress.com
Best for bloggers and small businesses that want WordPress plugins without managing hosting
Fit check
Will Squarespace fit your team?
Support
- Email support
- Live chat
- Knowledge base
Training
- Webinars
- Documentation
- Video tutorials
Deployment
- Web
- iOS
- Android
Typical users
- Freelancers
- Small businesses
- Mid-size companies
FAQs
Squarespace FAQs
Written by our editorial team.
How much does Squarespace cost?
Squarespace has four plans, each priced per site: Basic at $25 a month or $19 a month billed yearly, Core at $39 or $29, Plus at $65 or $49, and Advanced at $139 or $99. Yearly plans include a free custom domain for the first year, which then renews at the standard rate. There's no free plan, but every site starts with a 14-day free trial, and annual plans can be refunded within 14 days of purchase. See Squarespace pricing.
Does Squarespace charge transaction fees?
On store sales, only the Basic plan does: it adds a 2% Squarespace fee, while Core, Plus and Advanced charge none. Digital content and memberships carry a separate fee of 7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus and 0% on Advanced. Card processing through Squarespace Payments costs 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic and Core, 2.7% + $0.30 on Plus and 2.5% + $0.30 on Advanced, and automated tax calculation adds 0.15%, 0.10% or 0.05% per transaction on Core, Plus and Advanced, capped at $0.99.
Is there a free trial of Squarespace?
Yes. Every Squarespace site starts as a 14-day free trial, and the trial site stays private until you buy a plan. One 7-day extension is available. Trial sites can't accept payments, and there's no free plan, so publishing a site means choosing a paid one. After you subscribe, annual plans can be refunded within 14 days, while monthly plans and renewals aren't refundable. Annual plans also include a free custom domain for the first year.
Can you export your Squarespace site?
Only in part. Squarespace exports content as an XML file in WordPress format, covering layout pages, one blog with up to 1,000 comments per post, and text and image blocks. Store pages, style settings and custom CSS are left out, and images and videos can't be exported in bulk. Products and contacts download separately as CSV files. Moving to another platform therefore means carrying the content over and rebuilding the design.
Can you make a multilingual site with Squarespace?
Not natively. Squarespace has no built-in translation, and its help center points 7.1 sites to Weglot, a separate service with its own plans; translations are edited in Weglot, not in Squarespace. The other route is copying each page by hand for every language. If languages matter from the start, see how Squarespace and Wix compare: Wix Multilingual translates sites by hand or automatically and adds hreflang tags.
Sources & methodology
Product details come from Squarespace, Inc.'s public website and documentation (United States). Every plan and price was checked against the vendor's pricing page on October 5, 2026. We haven't tested this product hands-on; the verdict is a desk assessment. How we research and rank tools
- Founded 2003
- 6 languages supported
- squarespace.com
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