The learning curve and ease of use

WordPress offers you a multitude of possibilities and is a simple and powerful platform. This makes it ideal for both advanced and beginners. You can use it to start a blog or create an advanced and professional website. Although WordPress is easy to use and fairly intuitive, sometimes it can be quite complicated. To get started, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with WordPress concepts and understand the differences between concepts such as tags versus categories, pages versus messages as well as plug-ins and themes. Despite these concepts, most users can adapt relatively quickly.

Squarespace, on the other hand, does not offer many options. But the lack of choice makes the platform very easy to use. Even amateur and novice users can quickly develop and publish their content.

Adding videos, images and audio files is much easier compared to WordPress. The developer has an effective function for editing and dragging content. This makes it very easy to create new posts and pages, even for people who have not worked with websites in the past. Squarespace also has an in-depth and extensive library with many user manuals (text and video). That is why working with Squarespace is not very difficult.

Flexibility

With WordPress you can customize the website to your liking as it is an open source development platform. However, you need a powerful and suitable encoder. The free developers of plug-ins can help you with problems . If you buy premium plug-ins, you are entitled to ongoing support. However, they cannot guarantee that all your problems will be solved as the conflicts can be caused by other plug-ins.

Squarespace, on the other hand, is not an open source platform. Therefore, only the internal development team is responsible for creating tools. This means that all website development tools are created by a dedicated team. This ensures that the different tools are of the highest quality and work well together. These tools have been carefully tested and reviewed to ensure optimum performance.

Functions and design

The great thing about WordPress is its expandability. You can choose from thousands of paid and free plug-ins that allow you to add more features to the website. You can choose from advanced plug-ins for membership sites to simple social sharing plug-ins. Any kind of website can be developed with WordPress. In addition, WordPress offers numerous paid and free themes that can be installed on the website.

Squarespace is far behind in this area. You can choose from a very limited number of design templates. In addition, the site customization function allows you to edit only a few features. The same applies to plug-ins. It is difficult to extend the functionality of the website by installing external plug-ins.

Ongoing maintenance

WordPress constantly updates its platform to improve security and fix bugs. In the event of a new update, you will be notified by the WordPress Dashboard and you can update the WordPress version by clicking the “Update” button. When you update the version of WordPress, you also need to update the plug-ins and themes, which can sometimes be tricky. This requires a dedicated team or technician to manage the site, this will save you a lot of time.

Since Squarespace is not an open source system, all security and performance updates are managed. That way, you do not have to worry or click the Update button. The Squarespace team tests all updates and automatically implements them on your site. This can help to free up valuable time for more important things.

User support

In terms of user support, WordPress has a huge online community with an endless number of tutorials and resources to help you. However, finding relevant and good help is difficult because there is so much information. People ask many questions, many are answered and some are not. Also, many questions are answered, but not always effective. In some cases, the problem is not solved at all. In addition, it may take several days until answers are received.

On the other hand, Squarespace offers special support services throughout the day to answer all your questions. Squarespace offers 24-hour email support (within an hour), live chat (Monday through Friday from 3:00 pm to 8:00 pm), user guides (text and video), and online forum support. Because all tools are developed by the company itself, they take full responsibility for all issues and quickly resolve them, rather than shifting the responsibility or blame to other developers.

Conclusion

WordPress offers more flexibility and is very adaptable (if you are professional in programming). However, it requires more maintenance and is much more complicated. You also need to hire a programmer for your website management.

Squarespace is much easier to use because you do not need to be familiar with coding. It requires less maintenance and ongoing commitments in the long run. Plus, you get dedicated 24×7 user support, which leads to a timely resolution of issues.