Image from FindYourSearch used under a Attribution-ShareAlike License

I admit we’re very partial to WordPress here at RealBasics.com.  It’s easy to setup, easy to use, easy to extend, easy to maintain, and of course from here it’s very easy to find a company that can help you keep everything up to date.

And so we’re pretty sympathetic with this rundown of the advantages vs. disadvantages of owning and operating your own WordPress website from Jenni McKinnon at the WPMU Developer blog.

If you’ve landed on this post because you’re deciding whether to go with WordPress or Squarespace, let me make your decision easier for you: choose WordPress every time.

While both provide a platform for you to build a website, they are vastly different. WordPress is used by more than 27% of all websites on the internet while Squarespace, on the other hand, powers 1.2 million websites. WordPress is available both as hosted and self-hosted options (we’ll dig into that further down), while Squarespace is available only as a hosted version.

Source: WPMU Developers blog

Here are some of the reasons that make most sense to me are

• You can have unlimited pages on your own WordPress site.  Squarespace limits you to 20.
• You can add any plugin, theme, or even custom code to your own site.  Squarespace not so much.
• You can upload licensed stock photos to your own site.  The post says this is a violation of terms of service on Squarespace.
• WordPress is SEO friendly right out of the box, and you can add sophisticated SEO plugins if you want even more control.  Squarespace’s SEO capabilities are pretty weak.

I did put a little “But” in the title though.

If you’ve got a super low budget then SquareSpace might be right for you.  If you’re on a really limited budget that can work too.  And if you’re just in a hurry and you really want to knock something out quickly and then forget about it?  Squarespace is ok for that.

One nice thing about SquareSpace, though, is they know you might upgrade to another solution.  And so they make it (relatively) easy to export (most of) your content in a format that’s compatible with WordPress.

We hope you’ll choose WordPress every time, same as well over 100 million other site owners.  But if you don’t?  Squarespace isn’t the worst alternative.  And… if you ever change your mind?  We like migrating sites into WordPress and when the time comes we’d be happy to help you migrate yours.