If you don’t want to use Squarespace, there are other platforms you could use for a website for your business. There are pros and cons to every platform, so you need to weigh the pros and cons of each. There are also certain platforms that I would recommend for different scenarios or different people – there’s nuance to all of this! I’m not here to preach that one website platform is the end-all, be-all solution.
Let’s dive in.
Squarespace alternatives at a glance
| Platform | Best for | Content export | Backups | Learning curve |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | Full customization, memberships, directories | Full ownership, exports cleanly | Yes, via host or plugin | Moderate, theme-dependent |
| Showit | Designers who want a blank canvas | Connects to WordPress export | Yes | Low to moderate |
| Shopify | Product sales with in-person POS | Limited outside Shopify’s ecosystem | Yes | Moderate |
| Webflow | Custom design without code | HTML only, no CMS import elsewhere | Yes | Moderate to high |
How do I decide which website platform to use?
Look at five things before you pick a platform: how easily you can export your content, whether backups are built in, how usable the platform is for you specifically, how well it handles mobile responsiveness, and how it performs for SEO. Price matters too, but it shouldn’t be the first filter. I’ve watched business owners choose the cheapest option and then pay a designer twice as much a year later to migrate off a platform that boxed them in.
Content export sits at the top of my list for a reason. It’s your content, and you need to be able to take it with you if you ever switch platforms, rebrand, or bring on a new designer. Not every platform makes that easy, and you won’t find out until you try.
What should my website be able to do?
Start with function, not aesthetics. If you’re not selling products, you don’t need Shopify. If you’re a solo practitioner without a team managing content daily, you don’t need a platform built for enterprise marketing departments. Ask other people in your field what they use and why, then talk to a couple of web designers before you commit. Users pick platforms for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with what’s actually best for their business, the same way a diet trend spreads because it’s popular, not because a nutritionist recommended it.
Is WordPress better than Squarespace?
WordPress gives you more customization, more plugin functionality, and more long-term flexibility than Squarespace, but the theme you choose determines how usable it feels day to day.
Most of the WordPress complaints I hear trace back to a bad theme, not the platform itself. I build almost exclusively on Divi for my clients, and I like it because it gives non-technical business owners real control over their own pages without needing a developer for every small change. Elementor is a solid alternative if you want to compare page builders (aff. link).
Your host matters as much as your theme. Siteground and Flywheel are the two I recommend most, because site speed and security depend on the hosting environment underneath the platform, not just the platform itself.
WordPress runs a huge share of the internet, which means memberships, podcasts, shops, and directories all have mature plugin solutions already built for them. It also means that when something breaks, you’re rarely the first person to have hit that problem, and a fix is usually a search away.
Ruby Oak Nutrition is a good example of what this stack can do. I rebuilt their site on WordPress and optimized it for search, and their organic traffic grew from around 3,000 to 15,000 monthly visits within the year. That kind of growth is possible because WordPress doesn’t cap what you can build on top of it once the SEO foundation is right.
When does Showit make more sense than WordPress?
Showit makes sense when you want full creative control over your design and you’re willing to connect it to WordPress on the backend for blogging and functionality. It’s built primarily for photographers, but plenty of other visual-first businesses use it well.
Squarespace locks you into template-defined style parameters. Showit doesn’t. It’s closer to a blank canvas, with separate control over how your site looks on mobile versus desktop. If you don’t consider yourself a designer and want something closer to plug-and-play, Squarespace will feel easier. If you want to build something that looks nothing like a template, Showit gives you that room.
I’d steer most business owners away from Wix and Weebly. They operate similarly to each other, and neither holds up well for the kind of long-term SEO and content flexibility a growing practice needs.
Should I use Shopify instead of Squarespace?
Shopify makes sense specifically when you need a point-of-sale system that syncs your in-person sales with your online inventory in real time. Both Squarespace and WordPress can run a store, but neither one connects a physical register to your website’s stock the way Shopify does natively.
That convenience comes with a tradeoff. Shopify takes real customization work to make it look like anything other than a Shopify store, and some design elements are locked down no matter how much development time you put in. If you have a specific vision for what your storefront should look like, budget for a designer or developer rather than expecting to get there on your own.
What about Webflow?
Webflow is Showit’s closest cousin: a blank-canvas builder that lets you design without writing code, with a free plan you can build on until you’re ready to connect a domain and launch. It includes ecommerce functionality too.
The tradeoff is in what you can do with your content once it’s built. Webflow exports HTML, and that’s it. You can’t take a Webflow site and import it into Squarespace or WordPress the way you can move content between some other platforms. Backups are handled well within Webflow itself, but portability outside the platform is limited.
The bottom line
There’s no single “best” platform, only the one that matches how you want to run your business and how much you want to touch your own website once it’s live. If you’re just getting started, my resource guide for building a website walks through the decision in more detail.
