The editor: polished and section-based
Squarespace builds pages out of sections — a hero, a gallery, a testimonial strip, a contact form — and lets you arrange elements on a grid inside each one. Two generations of editor exist, and the platform has spent several years moving everyone onto the newer one.
Fluid Engine
Fluid Engine is the current editor. It sits deliberately between the rigid templates of old Squarespace and the drag-anywhere canvas of Wix: you get real freedom inside a section, but the grid keeps your alignment honest. The payoff is mobile. You lay out the phone view on its own grid rather than hoping a desktop design reflows sensibly, which is why Squarespace sites so rarely look broken on a small screen.
The cost is a learning curve that is steeper than it first appears. Snapping and stretching behave differently from a free canvas, and most people spend their first hour fighting the grid before they start using it. Once it clicks, it is faster than the alternative.
Blueprint and Squarespace AI
Blueprint is the guided setup: you describe the business, choose a style, and Squarespace assembles a starter site with relevant sections, placeholder copy and imagery. The built-in AI assistant will also draft or rewrite page copy on request, which is useful for an About page or product descriptions you have been avoiding writing.
As with any generated copy, treat it as a first draft. It is coherent and on-topic, and it reads like everyone else’s AI copy until you edit it.
Templates and design
This is where Squarespace is genuinely best-in-class. The library is smaller than Wix’s — roughly 180 templates — but every one is designed in-house and looks current, and you can filter by industry and by visual style. There is no long tail of dated designs padding the count.
The structural advantage is that all current templates share one underlying system, so you can change template later without rebuilding the site. Your content stays; the design changes. That is a real difference from Wix, where the template you pick on day one is the template you keep, and it removes the biggest source of regret in choosing a builder quickly.
Pricing: how much does Squarespace cost in the UK?
Squarespace replaced its old Personal / Business / Commerce lineup in 2025. New customers now choose from Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced; the legacy plan names still appear on older accounts and in a lot of out-of-date articles. There is no free plan — only a 14-day trial that needs no card.
| Plan | Price | Best for | Key features |
|---|
| Basic | £12/mo£16 billed monthly | Portfolios and personal sites | Free domain year 1, SSL, unlimited bandwidth, full template library, 2% store fee |
| Core | £17/mo£24 billed monthly | Small businesses and shops | No store transaction fee, inventory, customer accounts, gift cards, advanced analytics |
| Plus | £29/mo£36 billed monthly | Growing stores | Abandoned cart recovery, advanced shipping, lower fees on digital products and memberships |
| Advanced | £79/mo£89 billed monthly | Established online businesses | 0% fees across every product type, subscriptions, the full commerce toolkit |
Squarespace runs promotional discounts on first payments — check the current UK offer and plan prices.
Ease of use
Squarespace is approachable rather than effortless. The interface is calm and well-organised, the common jobs — add a section, swap an image, edit text — are obvious, and you rarely feel lost in menus. Compared with builders that expose every setting at once, it is a relief.
Friction shows up at the edges: configuring commerce properly, changing anything about the checkout, or pushing a layout past what the template anticipated will send you to the help centre. That help centre is excellent, which softens the blow, but it is a step beyond „no learning required“.
Fourteen days, no card, and you keep what you build if you subscribe — enough to judge the editor properly.
Start a free trialKey features
SEO and marketing
The SEO basics are all present and properly implemented: editable page titles and meta descriptions, automatic sitemaps, clean URLs, structured data, SSL everywhere, Google Search Console integration and a built-in checklist that walks you through each page. It is competent rather than remarkable — you will not out-configure WordPress here, but nothing is missing that a small business needs.
One correction worth making, because it is repeated in a lot of older reviews: Squarespace no longer supports AMP. Its own help centre lists Accelerated Mobile Pages as discontinued in February 2025, so if you chose Squarespace for AMP blog posts, that reason has gone. In practice this matters far less than it would have done five years ago, since Google stopped requiring AMP for news carousels.
On the marketing side you get social posting, pop-ups and basic automations in the dashboard. Email Campaigns is a separate paid add-on — it integrates cleanly with your customer list and catalogue, but budget for it rather than assuming it is included.
eCommerce
Squarespace’s commerce tools are among the strongest of any general website builder: unlimited products, inventory management, customer accounts, gift cards, digital downloads, subscriptions, abandoned cart recovery on the higher tiers, and point-of-sale for selling in person. Payments run through Squarespace’s own processing alongside Stripe, PayPal and Apple Pay.
It is not Shopify, and the honest line is that it does not try to be. For a six-figure store with complex fulfilment, multi-warehouse stock and a stack of integrations, Shopify pulls clearly ahead. For an independent merchant, a creator selling digital products, or a boutique brand where the site’s look is part of the product, Squarespace is hard to beat — and the store lives inside a site that already looks good.
Blogging
The blogging tools are mature and pleasant: scheduled posts, categories and tags, multiple authors, podcasting via RSS, and a clean writing view. Less extensible than WordPress, considerably more polished out of the box, and entirely sufficient for a business blog.
Bookings and apps
Scheduling is built in, which is genuinely useful for studios, salons, clinics and consultants — appointments, payments and reminders without a third-party tool. On mobile, separate apps cover site management, commerce, analytics and scheduling. They are good for monitoring and quick fixes; real design work still belongs on a desktop.
Performance, security and support
Squarespace hosts every site on its own managed infrastructure, with a global CDN, automatic image optimisation and lazy loading on by default. Sites are quick without tuning, and the usual causes of a slow Squarespace site are heavy custom code or third-party embeds rather than the platform. Security is entirely handled for you: free SSL, backups, DDoS protection and server-level monitoring.
Support is the weak spot. Email is 24/7 and live chat runs during weekday business hours, but there is no phone support on any plan, and slow ticket responses are a recurring theme in independent reviews. The help centre is genuinely one of the best written in the industry, which is how most people end up solving things.
Our scoring breakdown
The bottom line
Squarespace earns its position by doing one thing better than anyone: making people who are not designers produce sites that look designed. The templates are excellent, the editor is thoughtful, mobile is handled properly, and hosting, security and performance are simply not your problem. Add capable commerce, decent blogging and built-in bookings and one subscription can run a whole small business online.
The reservations are all about money and support rather than the product: no free plan, VAT on top, and no phone number when something goes wrong. If design quality is your priority and you are willing to pay from day one, few builders come close. Take the 14 days, build a real page rather than a demo, and you will know quickly.
Squarespace vs the competition
How it compares with the other brands we rate most highly. Scores are each brand’s overall rating from our own review of that platform.
Builder
Score
From
Best for
Score
9.5
From£12/moBasic, annual ex VAT
Best forDesign-led sites and portfolios, with commerce that looks as good as the rest
Score
8.9
From£1/mointro, then from £16/mo
Best forCheapest bundled extras — domain, email and a personal consultant included
Score
9.8
From£9/moLight, annual ex VAT
Best forMaximum layout freedom, a free plan to start on, and the biggest app market
Score
9.3
Best forUK-based hosting for a site you build yourself, with transparent renewals
Who should use Squarespace?
Photographers, designers and creatives
Your portfolio is the pitch, and you want galleries and typography that look considered without hiring anyone.
We’d start on Basic — £12/mo
Small businesses selling a few products
You need a real shop with no transaction fee eating each order, inside a site that reflects the brand.
We’d start on Core — £17/mo
Studios, salons and consultants
Bookings, payments and reminders matter as much as the website, and you would rather not stitch three tools together.
We’d start on Core — £17/mo
Creators selling digital products
Downloads, memberships or subscriptions are the business, and the fees on those product types are what decide your margin.
We’d start on Plus — £29/mo
If you need a free plan to start on, want a genuinely unlimited plugin ecosystem, or are running high-volume commerce with complex logistics, weigh Squarespace against the builders in the comparison table above — each of them beats it on one of those points.
Ready to build your site with Squarespace?
Try the editor and the full template library free for 14 days, with no card required — then keep what you have built if it suits you.
Visit SquarespaceFrequently asked questions
Does Squarespace have a free plan?
No. There is a 14-day free trial that needs no card, and after that you choose a paid plan or the site stays unpublished. UK plans start at £12/month on annual billing (£16 billed monthly), before VAT. If a free tier is a requirement, Wix is the obvious alternative to look at.
What are Squarespace’s plans called now?
Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced. Squarespace retired the older Personal, Business, Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced names for new customers in 2025 — legacy accounts keep their old plan, which is why a lot of articles still quote the previous lineup and prices.
Can I switch templates after launching?
Yes, and it is one of the better reasons to choose Squarespace. Every current template runs on the same underlying engine, so you can change design without losing content or rebuilding. Expect to spend some time re-tidying sections afterwards, but nothing like starting again.
Does Squarespace still support AMP?
No. Squarespace’s own help centre lists Accelerated Mobile Pages as discontinued in February 2025, so blog posts no longer have AMP versions. Older reviews that list AMP as a Squarespace SEO feature are out of date. It has little practical impact now that Google no longer requires AMP for top-stories placement.
Can I sell products on Squarespace, and what are the fees?
Yes, on every plan. Squarespace publishes its store transaction fee as a 0%–2% range depending on plan — Basic carries a fee, and moving up to Core or above removes it on physical-product sales. Digital content and memberships are charged separately, at up to 7% on the lower tiers. Payment processing is billed by the processor on top. Check the fee shown for your plan and product type before committing, as the tier-by-tier detail changes.
How does Squarespace compare to Wix or Shopify?
Squarespace produces more polished, design-led sites and lets you change template later; Wix offers more layout freedom, a free plan and a much bigger app market. Against Shopify, Squarespace is friendlier and better looking but built for smaller catalogues — Shopify wins on high-volume commerce, multi-channel selling and integrations. For creatives and small businesses where the site’s appearance is part of the offer, Squarespace is the better balance.
