Wix vs Squarespace: 6 Crucial Differences To Know

Squarespace and Wix are the two biggest names and website building and they couldn’t be more different Squarespace is curated and designing while Wix is a little chaotic it gives a lot of freedom to customize it’s almost like Mac versus Windows hello I’m a Mac and I’m a PC I’m gonna walk you through six major differences and by the end of this video you’ll have a good idea of which website builder is right for you the most obvious difference
between weeks and Squarespace is how these editors actually work Squarespace lets you drag elements called content blocks up and down the page and into columns but there’s a limit you can’t just drag elements anywhere on the page there’s an inherent and sensible structure that you stay with it Rick’s on the other hand is a blank canvas you can drag any element anywhere on your page being able to drag elements anywhere on a page sounds freeing
right but it can actually cause problems let me explain it to an example when I add more text to this element the elements below it move further down this is clever and other blank canvas website builders the elements would just overlap the problem is once I remove the text the elements below don’t come back up again fixing that can be tedious if your page is long this isn’t a problem you would find a Squarespace is structured editor when you
think of Squarespace think thoughtful Squarespace offers a wide selection of content blocks and each one is thoughtful and fully featured nothing is half-baked one of the most thoughtful Squarespace content blocks is the restaurant menu you might not think it but restaurant menus are a challenge for websites because they have unusual formatting so Squarespace created an inventive markup language that automatically converts into a stylish
restaurant menu it’s a simple and elegant solution to a tricky problem another example of Squarespace is thoughtfulness is image cropping in order to display images in a perfect grid they need to be cropped into squares most website builders will crop around the center of the photo and leave it at that not Squarespace Squarespace goes a step further they let you set a focal point to crop around it’s handy when you think of Wix think freedom Wix
has a huge selection of elements everything you could need is here plus a bit more on one hand some users will love the freedom on the other hand the amount of options could overwhelm some elements feel half-baked and Wix for example in contrast to Squarespace Wix is restaurant menu editor feels unintuitive has two interfaces found in two different places and that makes it difficult to handle on but the great thing with Wix is that it’s so
flexible there’s such a broad selection of elements navigation options shapes arrows lines icons lots of buttons you could even design your own theme from scratch which is something you definitely can’t do with Squarespace website builders often advertise a low monthly rate that’s actually the annual rate divided by 12 months it’s confusing I know Squarespace is pretty transparent about this it’s right there on the pricing page Wix isn’t quite as
transparent they don’t make it clear that the prices you’re seeing is the annual rate divided by 12 months and not the monthly rate so to make this a little clearer I created a spreadsheet of the real prices that you can expect to pay so as you can see annual plans are cheaper than monthly plans and they often include a free domain names so if you plan to have a website for the long term there are strong incentives to choose an annual plan Wix is
first – plans are the cheapest but they have limitations the Connect domain actually still displays Wix ads on your website here’s an example ad so that’s a deal-breaker the next cheapest plan is the combo plan which I’m hesitant to recommend because it has a two gigabyte bandwidth limit per month how limiting is the 2 gigabyte per month limit while calculating bandwidth usage is tricky but an average Wix webpage is 1.4 megabytes so I’d estimate
you wouldn’t want more than 25 visitors per day on this plan the comparison between Squarespace and which plans really begins with Wix is unlimited plan and Squarespace is personal plan these are the first two plans to offer unlimited bandwidth they have the same annual cost with Squarespace actually offers a cheaper monthly plan when it comes to e-commerce Squarespace is more expensive which is ecommerce plan is two hundred forty annually and
Squarespace is basic plan is three twelve annually but as you’ll see in the e-commerce section Squarespace actually has better ecommerce themes are a good example of the difference between Squarespace and Wix Squarespace provides a curated set of around 70 themes with a definite look and feel Wix offers 288 themes with more variety and quality plus they give you an enormous degree of flexibility I’ve always really liked squarespace’s themes it’s
subjective but I think they have the best themes of any website builder themes are clean modern and they really showcase photography well not going to find any corny small business themed on Squarespace it’s too curated for that Squarespace has an excellent style customization tool it’s a clever click to reveal option system that manages to be both flexible and easy to use with Wix you can’t change your template without losing all your content
which is unusual most website builders let you do this so when you choose your Wix theme make sure it’s the one you want the great thing about Wix is that you can really customize themes to the point where you could even design your own theme from scratch setting a consistent style to Wix websites can be a pain it usually involves tediously changing individual elements to establish a consistent look and feel technically you can set global styles
is just practically speaking it’s never that simple it wicks Squarespace has the best blogging of any website builder if you’re looking to build a blog just use Squarespace it’s not that Wix has bad blogging features it’s just that Squarespace has excellent blogging there’s a long list of features post timing categories drafts comments moderation customizable URLs and much more plus it has excellent support for teams of bloggers you can add
contributors with different roles and you can even have multiple authors on a single post this is a minor feature I know but it’s handy for a team Squarespace has the best e-commerce of any website builder there’s a long list of features digital products customizable email receipts which is something most website builders neglect check out customization taxes customer accounts gift cards and and like just a bunch more but it’s not just about
features because like most things Squarespace does it’s also intuitive for example I find the style editor for the checkout is excellent and easy to use Wix also has good ecommerce but it’s just not as fully featured as Squarespace for example I wasn’t able to edit the email receipts customers received these are the kind of limitations that keep me from recommending it over Squarespace so OneNote if the primary purpose of your website is
ecommerce you may actually want to try Shopify Shopify is the best e-commerce software available it’s just not meant for creating general-purpose websites like Wix and square space center but for e-commerce websites it’s easy to use and highly scalable I recommend Squarespace / Wix but you won’t be unhappy with either website brother I’ve reviewed over 35 website builders at site builder report comm and I can safely tell you there are worse
options ultimately the difference could be about preference Wix offers a high degree of control to the point where you can even design your own theme from scratch Squarespace is a much more curated experience they offer smart well-designed defaults you can use confidently thanks for watching you can find links to Squarespace and Wix as well as Shopify in the video description I’d love to hear from you so so definitely leave a comment but
otherwise best of luck building your website