WooCommerce vs Squarespace are two solutions that you may have come across frequently, given that they both place highly on any list of top eCommerce platforms. However, it is not easy to choose from 200+ rising eCommerce platforms.
If you are struggling to find the most suitable platform between these two or wondering whether you should move from one platform to the other, look no further! In this article, we will walk you through:
- Overview of WooCommerce and Squarespace;
- A thorough comparison between Squarespace vs WooCommerce;
- Pros and cons of each platform;
- Is WooCommerce or Squarespace more suitable for your needs?
No more ado, let’s get started!
WooCommerce vs Squarespace: An Overview
WooCommerce Overview
WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce platform built on WordPress that provides the most customization ability. Basically, WooCommerce is a commerce plug-in for WordPress. It transforms each and every WordPress site into a full eCommerce store.
With a powerful content management system (CMS) and the flexibility to customize every aspect of the online store, WooCommerce has established a solid reputation among WordPress users as well as online retailers.
According to BuiltWith, 6,1 million live websites using WooCommerce in January 2024, making up about 20% of the eCommerce market share.
Squarespace Overview
Officially launched in January 2004, Squarespace is a hosted CMS solution that allows online retailers to create and manage a portfolio, blog, or eCommerce store without deep technical knowledge. Every type of business in the world can drag and drop to build a professional and eye-catching website from scratch.
Squarespace allows you to showcase your top-notch visual and handles all aspects of your store, from products to orders, without using any additional plugins. Reaching about 3 million users by Jan 2024, Squarespace gradually confirms its popularity and applicability.
Both platforms are well created to serve the needs of online merchants, but with different levels in terms of technical requirements and eCommerce functionalities. If you’re planning to move to the platform that fits your business better, our LitExtension experts can help you switch to either WooCommerce or Squarespace without data loss or disruption.
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WooCommerce and Squarespace: Pros & Cons
To make the comparison easier to follow, let’s first look at the main advantages and drawbacks of WooCommerce vs Squarespace individually.
PROS | CONS | |
 | ✧ Complete free and open-source with full control and customization ability over your site and plugins
| ✧ No dedicated online support (live chat or email)
✧ Security issues on your risks |
 | ✧ Getting started is super easy. No hosting, no domain, or no coding knowledge is required
| ✧ The website builder is more section-based
|
WooCommerce vs Squarespace: Quick Comparison
If you don’t have enough time to run through the walls of text, or you want to compare WooCommerce vs Squarespace in a more intuitive way, take a look at the table below!
FEATURES | WOOCOMMERCE | SQUARESPACE |
Pricing | Free to install No subscription plan | 14-day free trial From $16/month |
Ease of Use | Domain & hosting required Coding skills may be required | No domain & hosting required No coding skills required |
Designs & Template | 10.000+ themes at WordPress theme store and WooCommerce Storefront | 110 aesthetic and mobile-optimized templates 10/110 are free |
Extensions and Plugins | 6000+ plugins and extension Plus 60.000+ plugins on WordPress Plugin Directory | 31 plugins and extensions |
Product management | Easy to add & edit products Allow both physical & digital, products | Easy to add & manage product inventory Allow both physical & digital, products |
Payment options | Paypal, Stripe, Square & special payment methods if based in the US plus various plugins to add | Paypal, Stripe, Square |
Shipping options | Flat rate shipping, free shipping, local pickup plus various shipping plugins | Flat shipping, depend-on-weight, carrier calculated |
Blog & content | Easy to create and manage Allow retrieving old version On-page editing available | Easy to create blog posts and excerpts & share on social media channels No on-page editing |
Point of Sales (POS) | Square Point of Sales for WooCommerce | Square |
SEO Features | Various SEO plugins (YoastSEO, All-in-One SEO...) | Lack of some SEO functions (301, 302 redirect, rich snippet, alt tag…) |
Marketing Features | Edit tags, permalinks, onpage Discounts, coupons available Email marketing Various plugins to assist | Email marketing Social integration Ads |
Support | No live chat or email support WooCommerce Docs & FAQ Community | 24/7 Email support Livechat Knowledgebase Developers Center Forum, Guides, Webinars Video |
Security | Security risks on own responsibility | Taken care of by Squarespace |
Pricing
When it comes to choosing a suitable eCommerce platform for your online business, pricing is undoubtedly one of the most crucial factors. Understanding the pricing details and managing the store within the budget is indeed the key to the success of a business.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a plugin that anyone can install on a WordPress site without paying a dime. However, as it requires more than just a site to start an eCommerce business, the price might add up when you go further into building your online store.
First off, if you do not currently own a ready-to-use WordPress site and have to build everything from scratch, the mandatory fee can be quite a lot. It comprises the cost of registering the domain (about $15 annually), hosting (from 10$ monthly), as well as an SSL (Secure Sockets Layers) certificate (up to $65 annually). This fee may get even higher if you are working on a big site.
WOOCOMMERCE MANDATORY COSTS | |
Hosting | ✧ below $10/month for starters, up to $40/month for bigger plans ✧ up to $70/month for Woo Express |
Domain | ✧ $0 included in hosting plans ✧ $9-$20/year for separate purchases |
Themes | ✧ $0 for free themes ✧ $200+ for one-time payments |
Shipping | ✧ $0-$108/year on average |
Transaction Fees | ✧ WooPayments: no monthly fees, 2.9% +$0.3 per transaction ✧ Other & monthly fees from $0-$30 per month on average |
Communication Costs | ✧ $0-$348 per year with customer communication ✧ $0-$79 per year with SEO plugins |
Security | ✧ $0- $300 per year with tools ✧ $0-$65 per year with SSL Certificates |
WOOCOMMERCE OPTIONAL COSTS | |
Customer Experience | ✧ $0-$200/extension per year |
Plugins Costs | ✧ $0-$200/plugin per year |
Developers Hirings | ✧ $10-$100 per hour ✧ Up to thousands of dollars per project |
If you want to get tips on the lowest WooCommerce price, follow the link for more details.
Squarespace Pricing
As Squarespace is a hosted eCommerce platform, the pricing plans seem easier to understand. So how much is Squarespace?
There are four Squarespace pricing plans available with different choices of included services: Personal, Business, Basic Commerce, and Advance Commerce.
PRICING PLANS | Annual Payment | Monthly Payment | Saving |
Personal Plan | $16 | $23 | 30% |
Business Plan | $23 | $33 | 30% |
Basic Commerce Plan | $27 | $36 | 25% |
Advance Commerce Plan | $49 | $65 | 25% |
Consider the annual payment if you plan to build your business over the long term because you can save up to 30% that way! For instance, you only need to pay $276 once per year and then be fully prepared to start your business instead of spending $396 total for the Business plan.
Each of these Squarespace pricing plans provides you with the following amazing features:
- A custom domain name;
- Default SSL security encryption;
- No limit on bandwidth and storage capacity;
- SEO features for site ranking on search engines;
- Mobile-optimized websites and basic website metrics.
Even though Squarespace pricing plans do not come with a free option and eCommerce store owners are only able to sell when they choose from the Business plan up, Squarespace eCommerce is still worthwhile with the breadth of features provided.
Above all, Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial to test out the features. In case you find this platform is not right for you, you can easily get your money back with a simple cancellation process.
The verdict
Between WooCommerce vs Squarespace, WooCommerce is a better option if you are trying to limit costs. It is basically a free WordPress plugin and allows store owners to start selling right away if they already have a live WordPress site. The cost for WooCommerce, like the plugin itself, can be customized easily.
Squarespace can be a bit pricey in this case, but the cost is more predictable in comparison to WooCommerce.
WooCommerce vs Squarespace: Ease of Use
The ease of managing an eCommerce site is just as important as its pricing because it is the day-to-day work you will face when running an online store. Let’s scroll down to see the work needed when running an eCommerce store on WooCommerce vs Squarespace.
WooCommerce Ease of Use
Serving as a free plugin that turns every WordPress site into an online store without charge, Woocommerce starts out a bit stronger than its competitors. If you already have a live WordPress site, all you need to do is install it on your site by following the wizard setup, then you’re ready to get off the ground.
Payment Gateways
Payment processing, one of the first steps of capital turnover, is vital to every business. Therefore, it’s important to keep the payment process simple and seamless.
WooCommerce Payment Gateways
WooCommerce covers all needs of payment gateways. First off, they release an exclusively customized payment method named WooCommerce Payments that allows your customer to pay by both credit and debit card. And the good thing is that you can freely and easily download it. Especially, your customers don't need to leave your eCommerce site to process payments.
There are also other leading payment processors, such as Paypal, Stripe, and Square… which please most WooCommerce store owners. If you are based in the US, you can even opt for bank transfers, debit & credit cards, Apple Pay, COD, or cheques. In case you need regional and less popular payment methods, you can choose from 100+ options on the WooCommerce Extension store.
Squarespace Payment Gateways
On the contrary, Squarespace just offers a few payment options including Paypal, Stripe, and Square. Among these, Paypal and Stripe allow customers to pay via popular international debit and credit cards such as Visa, MasterCard, and American Express… Besides that, among Squarespace eCommerce plugins, there's a Squarespace POS to accept cash and card payments in person.
Shipping Options
WooCommerce Shipping Options
By default, WooCommerce provides three types of shipping methods: flat-rate shipping, free shipping, and local pickup.
- With flat shipping, store owners can ship items to their buyers at a flat or standard rate per item, order, or shipping class;
- With free shipping, store owners will cover the shipping fee for the clients as a special promotion;
- As for local pick-up, your customers can pick up their orders in person.
In case you require additional shipping methods, there are tons of shipping plugins available.
Squarespace shipping options
Squarespace simply cannot compete with WooCommerce in terms of the shipping options provided. There are only two built-in options: flat shipping and depend-on-weight, while carrier calculated is available only to Commerce Advance Plan users. Squarespace users are able to choose third-party shipping extensions, but they need to configure shipping rates in Squarespace.
Blog & Content
Blog and content are a great way to drive more traffic to your website, as well as convert your to-be customers to orders and payments. Fortunately, both WooCommerce and Squarespace offer different yet good tools to create content for your eCommerce site.
WooCommerce Blogging Tool
Built on WordPress, there's no doubt that WooCommerce offers a great method to create and manage content. You can easily add a post to showcase your products, update your customers with promotions for upcoming holidays, or increase your search engine rankings.
Just like WordPress blogs, you have the ability to retrieve the older version of your posts. The content you create will be securely stored on the system, allowing you to roll back to any of them at any point.
Squarespace Blogging Tool
You can create blog posts and excerpts, tag and categorize posts, enable comments, share your posts on social media, and more with Squarespace's built-in blog page. Additionally, Squarespace offers free blogger templates that are modern and beautifully designed.
However, Squarespace does not provide the on-page editing that WooCommerce inherits from WordPress.
Point of Sales (POS)
If you own a brick-and-mortar store, it’s necessary to have a POS solution that helps to manage product inventory effectively. Let’s see if WooCommerce and Squarespace are able to meet this rare requirement!
WooCommerce POS Solution
If you are using both WordPress and WooCommerce, you’re already halfway through the process! It’s easy to access various integrations for offline transactions, including Square. To access both online and offline selling, make sure to add the right integrations to your CMS when getting started with WooCommerce.
Moreover, the Point of Sales for WooCommerce (at $199 if you pay annually) is at your service. It can work natively with WooCommerce, with no need for third-party interfaces. All you need to do is simply download the extension, install it, register for an account, and happy selling!
Squarespace POS Solution
Fortunately, Squarespace store owners are not left out in terms of POS. The platform offers an integration with Square services for payments, which means you are able to connect your backend to the Square system to manage inventory and POS selling.
If you need to sell in your offline store, opt for one in the wide variety of hardware options of Square and the software will automatically sync the data with the eCommerce site.
The verdict
Between Squarespace vs WooCommerce, It’s obvious that WooCommerce surpasses its competitor in terms of eCommerce features. While Squacequare remains at a just-enough level, the enormous extension repository of WooCommerce meets all kinds of requirements from store owners.
WooCommerce vs Squarespace: SEO & Marketing Features
SEO Features
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website's ranking in search engine results. It is becoming increasingly important because it determines whether your customers see your products before seeing others'.
WooCommerce SEO features
Built on WordPress, a powerful blogging platform, it’s doubtless that SEO is WooCommerce’s advantage. The WordPress editor allows you to edit content, permalinks, meta description, alt tags as well as on-page elements.
On top of that, WooCommerce also offers various SEO features & plugins to optimize your eCommerce website, such as Yoast SEO, All-in-One SEO, etc.
Taken together, WooCommerce’s SEO features offer strong flexibility and control. To turn that potential into real results, our SEO checklist helps you apply these features the right way.
Squarespace SEO features
Squarespace falls a little behind in terms of SEO features. There are no automatic 301 & 302 redirects, no Squarespace SEO plugin for checking, no rich snippet function, and it is rather difficult to add an alt tag.
Nonetheless, Squarespace still covers about 90% of your SEO requirements, including built-in sitemap and mobile optimization, a clean HTML markup… and allows you to track your SEO issue with Google Analytics and Google Console.
Marketing Features
WooCommerce Marketing Features
It’s easy to boost your sales volume if you make the most out of WooCommerce marketing features.
First off, WooCommerce allows you to discount your whole store by percentage, or apply specific discounts to fixed carts or products. There are also numerous extensions that help you to encourage sales such as the WooCommerce Coupon Campaign or WooCommerce Points and Rewards.
Besides, WooCommerce offers an amazing email marketing experience. The platform allows you to collect email addresses from customers and send out specific WooCommerce email campaigns based on their purchasing history. It’s also simple to craft your emails in plain text or HTML format.
Above that, WooCommerce also features the NewsLetter plugins and Abandoned Cart Recovery. They provide you with great outreach to customers by sending emails regularly or reminding them about the items left in their shopping cart.
Squarespace Marketing Features
Squarespace users can take advantage of built-in marketing features such as email marketing, social media integration, and ads to increase their sales volume. There are various email templates for store owners to choose from, as well as email campaign analytics so that store owners can keep track of email seeding and make adjustments if necessary.
Squarespace provides integration to over 20 social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram… with millions of users. With a Share button enabled, you can share your content all over places and reach more potential customers.
If you intend to use ads to promote your store, Square can make the most out of your budget with the integration of Instagram, Facebook Pixel, or Facebook Dynamics ads.
The verdict
Once again, when comparing WooCommerce vs Squarespace in terms of SEO and marketing features, it’s a close win for WooCommerce thanks to the numerous plugins provided. However, for those who want features to come in handy, Squarespace wins the race as an all-inclusive platform.
WooCommerce vs Squarespace: Support
WooCommerce Customer Support
WooCommerce, as an open-source platform, may not be as helpful as its competitors. Because there is no live chat or support, store owners have to find answers to their questions in the WooCommerce Docs or FAQ section. Posting concerns on the community forum is another way to get help, though you won't get a response right away, and the answers are not official either.
Its humongous plugin store is not a plus point in this case. You might not find any official support regarding plugins and services supplied by third parties.
Squarespace Customer Support
Meanwhile, Squarespace offers one of the best customer support among top eCommerce platforms. Users can rest assured knowing that they can get immediate help via email or live chat support. Besides the Knowledgebase and Developers Center, there are also webinars, forums, guides, and videos that visualize the steps for store owners.
The verdict
Squarespace deserves a strong win in this race, as the platform gives out support whenever you need it. That’s the determinant factor to find which is the better platform between WooCommerce and Squarespace in terms of support.
WooCommerce vs Squarespace: Security
Security is an important factor when deciding whether to build your eCommerce store on WooCommerce or Squarespace. Improve your eCommerce site security on a regular basis to protect your data and keep the transaction above board.
WooCommerce Security
Using WooCommerce means that you will take charge of most security risks and issues. Although WooCommerce still protects your account by two-factor authentication, you will be responsible for PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance, SSL certificates… and so on. Furthermore, if you have third-party apps installed on your site, you have to confront security issues and focus on improving site security.
Squarespace Security
As a hosted solution, Squarespace tackles all security issues on your behalf like with other concerns. SSL certificates are available on every Squarespace pricing plan, and all payment gateways are PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry – Data Security Standard) compliant.
The two-factor authentication improves the security of your account, and Squarespace takes good care of PCI compliance. Furthermore, you will need to verify account ownership every time you reach out to Customer Support. This really aids in protecting your privacy and content.
The verdict
When running an eCommerce store on Squarespace, all security tasks will be wiped off your places. Hence, between WooCommerce and Squarespace, it is obvious that many store owners choose the latter.
WooCommerce or Squarespace: Which Should You Choose?
With a lot of information provided in this thorough comparison between WooCommerce vs Squarespace, we do hope that you have found a suitable eCommerce platform by now.
WooCommerce vs Squarespace: Which Should You Choose? Actually, there is no one-fit-all answer. The needs and wants of an eCommerce store may vary depending on many factors: business size, budget, product types, or technical knowledge.
- WooCommerce is the go-to platform for all-size businesses since it’s completely free at the start and chock-full of attributes. Built on WordPress, WooCommerce comes with an enormous plugin repository that meets all eCommerce needs.
- If your business size is small to medium, and your technical knowledge & skills are somewhere between non-techy and intermediate, then Squarespace is for you! It is a solid option if you want to showcase your DIY items or photography portfolio.
📢 You might also want to read:
- WooCommerce vs Shopify: Find Out The Best Platform!
- WooCommerce vs PrestaShop | Which Is Better?
- WooCommerce vs Squarespace: Which Should You Go For?
- WooCommerce vs Magento | Which Is Better?
WooCommerce vs Squarespace: FAQs
Can I use WooCommerce with Squarespace?
You can use both WooCommerce and Squarespace to expand your business and increase sales by attracting as many potential customers as possible. There might be tons of work needed when building your online presence on these platforms, not mentioning the time spent to run these businesses. Hence, it’s better to resort to multi-channel selling platforms to make use of your effort.
LitCommerce, an up-and-coming multichannel selling solution, provides online merchants with an easy and affordable platform cross-selling experience. Thanks to years of experience in dealing with eCommerce data and platform structure, LitCommerce helps you to list and sell products on the largest online marketplaces (such as Etsy, eBay, Amazon…) and eCommerce platforms (such as WooCommerce, Shopify…).
Is Squarespace or WooCommerce better?
Squarespace and WooCommerce are two of the top eCommerce platforms and each of them has its own pros and cons. For example, Squarespace is better than WooCommerce in terms of security and support; while WooCommerce beats its competitor when it comes to the flexibility and ability to control your site.
Can I switch between WooCommerce and Squarespace?
Of course, you can switch between WooCommerce vs Squarespace! As there are many differences between these two platforms in terms of category, security, and so on… LitExtension is here to save your day! LitExtension is supporting cart migration services between 200+ platforms including WooCommerce migration, Squarespace migration, and of course, WooCommerce to Squarespace or Squarespace to WooCommerce.
WooCommerce vs Squarespace: Final Words
All in all, both WooCommerce and Squarespace are amazing eCommerce platforms that currently provide services to millions of store owners out there. WooCommerce impresses its users with a wide variety of plugins and extensions provided. Meanwhile, Squarespace gives out excellent customer support and the peace of mind of taking care of all security tasks for novice users.
We do hope that the detailed comparison between WooCommerce vs Squarespace above aids you in finding your suitable eCommerce platform. Should you need further assistance regarding WooCommerce and Squarespace, do not hesitate to reach out to the LitExtension support team or join our community for more eCommerce tips!
