Why I left Squarespace for WordPress

After a couple of years of using Squarespace, I decided about a month ago to migrate my portfolio to WordPress. I needed some extra functionality while maintaining a fairly minimal approach to the website’s design.

Disclaimer

Don’t get me wrong, Squarespace is an excellent service, enabling its users to create responsive websites and benefits from an active online community. It is advertised as an easy-to-use, all-in-one platform. “No coding knowledge required” is its big selling point, as it presents an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. While that is mostly true, some basic grasp of HTML and CSS wouldn’t hurt if you want to customize your website.

The Challenge

Building a website in WordPress is admittedly more challenging than using other heavily advertised website builders, but it isn’t the arduous task it was many years ago, thanks to the continued development of themes, plugins, and updates to the platform. Choosing a host, buying or transferring a domain, and selecting a theme to customize are similar steps to the onboarding process on Squarespace. Managing on-page content is easy enough thanks to the improved Gutenberg editor. If you need alternatives for layouts, you can use other page builders, like Elementor or Divi, but Gutenberg is good enough for me for the time being.

The good news is, the number of online resources regarding the management of a WordPress website has heavily increased, making access to maintaining such a web presence easier than ever. The terminology of WordPress takes some time to get used to and requires some patience, but it’s well worth it.

Features and tools

While Squarespace offers a beginner-friendly environment to showcase your work, it lacks some tools and features that, to me, are indispensable.

For example, I wanted to create a bilingual website, which on Squarespace you can only do by duplicating content or using its Weglot integration. Briefly, Weglot is a service that allows you to manage your translations off-site, which is not an ideal situation if you want your pages to load faster or have quick access to your text because that means you are dependent on their server status. The translation plugins offered by WordPress allow me to easily manage and edit my translations on the same page without relying on external services.

Thanks to access to image optimization plugins, I fully control the way my images are presented on both desktop and mobile devices, without having to worry about arbitrary compression algorithms. The choice of a block-based responsive theme gave me the opportunity to revise some design decisions and ensured the uniform display of my content. Lastly, creating random-based galleries and media queries allows me to maintain an interesting approach to the display of some images and other related content.

Before I started moving my portfolio to WordPress, a friend mentioned that flexibility comes with responsibility, and I agree. Even though managing a WordPress portfolio requires more effort, at the end of the day, for me, having access to a ton of customization options is more important, and that’s why I chose it over Squarespace.

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