Squarespace Vs WordPress for Photographers
Ayup! For photographers, the Squarespace Vs WordPress debate has no right or wrong answer. Both platforms have their own individual strengths. Depending on your levels of perfectionism, both also present a unique set of frustrations.
Having explored each solution, I’m currently typing this on Squarespace. That said, my business site (not photography related) is on WordPress. This is my main area of expertise, with over 14 years experience building personal and commercial websites.
With this in mind, here are a few brutally honest thoughts and insights. Zero affiliate links, zero sales BS.
WordPress is easily the most popular CMS on the planet, accounting for 64.9% of all CMS websites, and 43.1% of all sites on the internet – a staggering 810 million in total.
But it’s not the only CMS, and with a 2.6% market share, Squarespace is the third most popular choice, powering a more modest, but not insignificant 2.96 million websites.
Building a photography portfolio with Squarespace Vs WordPress
As the years whizz by, I’m becoming less and less interested in the technical side of running a website. Instead, I’d rather focus on the fun stuff. For me, that’s photography, writing and running my business.
While I enjoy working with WordPress, the process doesn’t align with my ongoing desire for simplicity. Numerous elements (including a contact form) require an additional plugin. Even the most basic portfolio sites would usually require 5 to 10 plugins.
It’s easier for things to go wrong on WordPress. For example, my sites don’t publish updates any more. This is an issue with the caching plugin my web host provides. I have to log in to the hosting provider to clear the cache every time I want anything to go live. No biggie, but also kind of annoying.
Top three reasons to use Squarespace
All-in-one solution
Beautiful templates
Zero technical skills required
The main appeal of Squarespace is that everything you could ever possibly need is already built in. From displaying your photography portfolio and selling prints, to analytics and email newsletters. It’s all right there in your dashboard. Zero plugins (known as extensions) required.
From a design perspective, you can’t really go wrong with one of the pre-made templates. This site uses Tavla, which I was easily able to edit and customise.
Lastly, literally anyone can build a site with Squarespace. Sure, it takes a little getting used to, but after a day or so, you’ll be whizzing around. There are far fewer customisation options than you’d find with WordPress. This means it’s less complicated for the average user.
If you need to, and want to get slightly more technical, you can easily edit elements with CSS. Most of the code you need can be found on the Squarespace forum, or you can reach out for help there if not.
We live in a busy digital world with much demand on our attention, time and wallet. There are many tools out there promising to make our life easier and our businesses more profitable. This can quickly become confusing and costly. Which is why I appreciate Squarespace’s efforts to become an affordable and easy to manage all-in-one solution in support of our businesses.
Avoid Squarespace if…
You want full control over customisation
You prioritise loading times from PageSpeed Insights
As mentioned, Squarespace provides way less customisation options than WordPress. If you want to be able to tweak every single aspect of your site, this probably isn’t the right solution.
Loading times are a bit of a funny one with Squarespace. In real-world testing, pages load without any lag or issues. Once you pop them into PageSpeed Insights, though, it’s a different story.
I’m still tweaking and experimenting, but mobile scores are currently between 50 and 60 out of 100. This is with only 14 images on the homepage, all in WebP (95% quality, 1500px wide).
Top three reasons to use WordPress
Full customisation
Faster loading times
Choose your own web host
If you want to be able to customise everything on your website, WordPress is always going to beat Squarespace. Additionally, you can edit most of your site from the settings. Minimal CSS required.
Looking for the best of the best when it comes to loading times? I honestly don’t think there’s a better solution than WordPress. For photographers with image heavy portfolios, you can still hit a full set of green circles from PageSpeed Insights. This, however, requires a little technical knowledge and optimisation.
One of the main benefits of WordPress is being able to choose your own web host. If you want full control over the servers your website lives on, you got it. This is especially advantageous if you favour green web hosting.
One might argue why someone would choose WordPress to build a website when there are easier alternatives to creating websites, such as Squarespace and Weebly.
Even though creating a website with a platform like Squarespace is slightly easier than building a self-hosted website with WordPress, such platforms often limit the features of your website.
Avoid WordPress if…
You don’t want to get too technical
You want a simple/all-in-one solution
Ultimately, WordPress can easily become a complex entanglement of tools, plugins, themes and hosting. If you’re not overly comfortable managing all of this, WordPress might not be the way forward.
While the block editor is incredibly powerful these days, anything like SEO settings, analytics and 2FA require additional plugins. When you also have to worry about PHP versions, caching and security, it can become a little overwhelming for some.
You should not have to worry about servers, development environments, deployments, and outdated code anymore if you’re building a basic website.
What about SEO?
Wrapping up this Squarespace Vs WordPress comparison, let’s take a quick look at SEO. As a photographer, it’s obviously super-important that your portfolio, print shop and/or blog is discoverable online.
WordPress requires a plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math to optimise your pages and content. Conversely, Squarespace has all of the basics built in. If you have background experience in SEO, this will be more than enough for most folks. If you prefer a little more guidance (similar to Yoast or Rank Math), take a look at SEO Space.
Squarespace also has an advantage when it comes to your blog. Posts are automatically structured correctly; domainname.com/blog/post-title rather than on WordPress, where it defaults to domainname.com/post-title.
I’m fairly confident in predicting Squarespace will perform as well as WordPress on search engines. An experiment is underway as we speak. I’ll be reporting back in two or three months.
Yes, WordPress has some great plugins that can help with SEO, but Squarespace has all the features you need to rank at the top of any search results.
Squarespace or WordPress?
Two incredible platforms for building a photography portfolio website. Which one you choose will depend on a few key areas:
How much time you want to spend maintaining your site.
How technical you intend to get.
If you favour simplicity over customisation.
How you want your website to look.
Squarespace offers a simple, all-in-one solution with beautifully designed templates. Even with zero design skills, your site will look the part in no time.
WordPress, on the other hand, offers full customisation but often requires a more technical skill set.
Again, no right or wrong here. Your decision will be fully tailored to your unique requirements. My photography portfolio started out on WordPress, moved to Squarespace, then back to WordPress, and now it’s finally returned to Squarespace.
I’m sacrificing loading time scores, full customisation and green hosting (although my website carbon score is still a C). Why? I’m hopeful that Squarespace will eventually switch to green hosting, but primarily, simplicity. Less time and attention on website maintenance, more focus on photography and writing.
