Why I love hosting my online courses on Squarespace
☞ Important Update!
In September 2023, Squarespace launched a new product called ‘Courses’ specifically for course creators! It is a game-changer for course creators who want to host their course on their own website. In this article, I talk about Member Areas, which I used for my online courses. You can still use Member Areas, but I am now switching to the new Courses feature. Mind you, all the reasons and general processes around using Squarespace for courses have not changed, so this will still be a helpful article!
The online course industry has exploded over the last few years and with good reason: sharing our skills and knowledge online is a great way to make a living in the 21st century! You can earn a high income by teaching online while enjoying a flexible lifestyle that is aligned with how you work best.
If you want to launch your own online course and have been wondering which platform to go with, then this article is for you!
Spreadsheet
Background
I’ve been hosting my courses on Squarespace since 2016 and I still love it! For the first few years I protected my content with a page password and I was so determined to keep everything on Squarespace that I developed a Javascript hack to deliver that password to my customers after they purchased a course. In 2020 Squarespace finally launched their own membership system called Member Areas, so now my students create their own accounts and passwords!
Having used Member Areas for 18 months I decided to re-evaluate my set-up. Many of the teaching platforms have evolved since those early days and are offering great features. I wanted to make sure that my set-up still serves my students in the best possible way while keeping my workflows and tech optimized for my growing business.
What is your desired outcome?
When trying to decide which platform will deliver our desired outcome cost is definitely an important factor, but it’s not the only one. In fact, there are many other criteria that ultimately inform our choice of platform. What I’ve seen a lot over the years is that new course creators get hung up on all the bells and whistles, stressing over the ‘perfect’ set-up rather than keeping things simple and focusing on their content and growing their audience.
I have always been very clear on what is important to me as an online course provider:
Squarespace meets all of these requirements and with Member Areas hosting my courses on my own website has become even easier.
What’s important to you? Grab a pen and paper and write it down!
Features comparison
Teaching platforms and membership apps have come a long way in recent years and in my video above I look at the most popular ones:
Squarespace Member Areas
MemberSpace
Podia
Teachable
Kajabi
Thinkific (not in the table below but in the video)
I’ve been doing this for years and built a successful six-figure business offering online courses on Squarespace. With that kind of experience comes a lot of clarity regarding the features that are important to me as an online course creator and here is how each provider compared:
Summary
☞ Make sure you watch the video at the top of this post, which takes you through all of this and also gives you a glimpse inside Member Areas.
1. Cost
The lower tiers of Podia and Thinkific are the cheapest, they have attractive monthly fees and 0% transaction fees.
You really have to be careful with transaction fees as they are levied on top of the Stripe/Paypal fees, they quickly add up!
Conclusion:
The Member Areas Pro Plan with the 1% transaction fee is competitive and gives me everything I need. I was really pleased with how well the Pro Plan did once I started crunching my numbers!
2. Styling, Design and Ease Of Use
Of the teaching platforms I liked Kajabi and Podia the best when it comes to the styling and presentation of content. They have a nice sidebar navigation and everything felt clean and well organized.
I kinda hate Teachable with its wide screen setting and very limited styling options. As a teacher I did not find the backend all that user friendly and as a student (and designer) I did not like the learning experience. Even if the content is great, the presentation is just off-putting to me and has me abandon courses quickly.
Conclusion:
Squarespace is the clear winner here because, well, it’s Squarespace! All the usual styling options are available to us in Member Areas, which has many advantages:
We don’t need to learn a new system because we already know Squarespace and our website.
Squarespace is the only platform that has an easy and intuitive drag’n’drop editor and is 100% WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).
Styling options galore: sections, galleries, buttons, image layouts, etc. This is why artists, designers and creatives love Member Areas because they can create visually beautiful courses.
A beautiful classroom and learning experience for our students. Over the years I’ve gotten so much great feedback from my students who love the look and feel of my courses, and how well organized they are thanks to the way I can design and structure pages in Squarespace.
100% brand consistency is guaranteed because we’re using our own colors, fonts and designs. Love that!
3. Teaching Tools
The teaching platforms shine here and offer features like lesson tracking and completion certificates. I especially like the side menu in one of the Kajabi templates, it is clean and functional without being overwhelming.
One thing I didn’t like in Podia was that it automaticallys strikes through lesson titles as soon as you click on them, regardless of whether you’ve actually read or completed the lesson. To be honest, it drove me a little nutty that I had all these crossed out lesson titles but I had only taken a peak and not actually done them yet. Plus, I associate the strike-through with making mistakes so I just didn’t like this feature.
If you like quizzes they are built-into the teaching platforms and for Squarespace you can use a 3rd party plugin, like Interact.
Squarespace does not have lesson tracking tools so I use checklists for all my courses. Which my students love! With the checklist they not only track their progress but they also use them for notes and to-do’s.
Conclusion:
While I see the value of these teaching tools they are not a top priority for my online course business. I am more interested in creating an attractive and visually appealing environment that supports my high quality content, which in turn helps my students actually complete a course and achieve the best possible learning outcome. Here is what one of of my students says, her words echo what I hear from many others:
“I’ve taken lots of online courses and many of them I lose interest in and never complete. Yours, on the other hand, I follow every single step of the way. Yours are by far the best.” — Kristine Anderson Dahms
4. Affiliate Program
The teaching platforms have built-in affiliate programs which is very nice. You may have to be on a higher plan to use them but from what I hear they are easy to set up and use.
With Squarespace you can use a 3rd party affiliate app, like SendOwl or Peach’s. Bit more complex to set up but works well once done. Caveat: You cannot send customer email addresses to Squarespace Campaigns with these so you'd also need a 3rd party email marketing provider.
Conclusion:
I run a lean business and managing an affiliate program is not a priority for me right now. This, for instance, allows me to offer my courses at reasonable price points rather than jack up my rates to accommodate affiliate payouts. I love my all-in-one solution that includes Squarespace Campaigns which I wouldn’t be able to use with a 3rd party affiliate program. Thankfully my students recommend my courses anyway and they can get a discount code from me to offer to their own audience.
Why it’s still Squarespace for me
For me, teaching online is all about providing a great student experience while leveraging technology to make it easy, fun and profitable for my business.
I took a deep dive into all the teaching platforms and I was impressed by what I learned. But ultimately I decided to stick with Squarespace Member Areas for three simple reasons:
Member Areas allows me to offer a beautiful and well organized user experience for my students. It is important to me that my students enjoy being in my courses and that they feel peaceful and supported while learning with me. Thanks to Squarespace’s styling options and the Member Area functionality I can create a gorgeous classroom.
Brand consistency. I stay 100% on-brand because I am using all my own fonts, colors and designs.
Having an all-in-one platform allows me to run a lean yet powerful business. Keeping everything on my website makes it very easy for me to manage and I just love how seamlessly the different business functions integrate with each other.
