Why Squarespace is the leading All-In-One Platform for Solopreneurs
Please note: This post contains affiliate links to Squarespace. Photo credit: Bayley Courtland
Last week I chatted with a friend about Squarespace and she was surprised just how much I do via my website. It made me think about how Squarespace has evolved over the years and how it is more of an all-in-one business hub these days than just a website host. As someone who has forever used technology to simplify and streamline processes (my employers always appreciated that about me) I love that Squarespace makes running my business so much easier and nicer.
So what are all the things I can do with Squarespace?
Everything I list here comes out-of-the-box. You can of course do even more through Squarespace if you use 3rd party apps via the Squarespace API (Application Programming Interface) but that’s not what I am talking about here.
You don’t have to be a tech wizard to take advantage of all the features listed below - they are all built-in and easy to use.
1. Website Hosting
This is the obvious one. After spending a few years on Wordpress I switched to Squarespace in 2008 and never looked back. I have always loved their intuitive design and gorgeous templates, plus you can’t beat the 24/7 support via email and chat. You can’t talk to Wordpress like that! Occasionally I have to push past the first-line defense to get an answer, but overall they are very helpful and always friendly & respectful.
I think that Squarespace’s hosting fees are very reasonable for business owners. I am on the highest plans and feel that I get a lot for that, like zero transaction fees for my course sales, or the abandoned cart feature, which recovers thousands of dollars for me every year. That alone more than pays for my website fee.
→ Click here to sign up for a Squarespace trial, and when you are ready to upgrade to a paid plan, use the code KERSTIN to save 20%.
2. Domain & Email
Generally I don’t think it’s a bad idea to keep your domains independent of your website platform. That certainly makes a lot of sense for someone like me who buys domains every time I have a great business idea!
However, there is merit to managing your domain through Squarespace. This way you don’t have to worry about DNS and privacy settings, you don’t need to remember separate logins and you can pay for everything in one place. Squarespace make dealing with your domain name easy and convenient.
Once you have your domain name you should also get a business email, e.g. name@mybiz.com. Squarespace have teamed up with Google Workspace for this and you can easily set up and manage your email account from your Squarespace dashboard while enjoying all the benefits of a Workspace account such as Google Docs, Drive, plenty of cloud storage etc.
All of my small business customers who only have the one website love that they can manage their domain easily through their website.
3. Online Shop
I’ve sold services and physical products on Squarespace since 2016 and love it! Squarespace is perfect for smaller retail shops and anyone who offers digital or service products.
With Commerce you can enjoy features such as abandoned cart recovery, express check-out, customer accounts, Point of Sale, detailed analytics, connect your shop to Instagram, inventory management, limited availability and more. There is a learning curve but Squarespace is pretty intuitive and also has great help guides and of course their customer care team to help you out if you get stuck on anything.
I love how seamlessly the shop works with the rest of my website, for instance it is very easy to plug products into my pages or an email campaign.
4. Online Courses
It is no secret that I love hosting my eCourses on Squarespace! For years I used a hack to make it work with a blog and page password, but these days Squarespace has an awesome courses feature where members create their own accounts and passwords. So now it’s easier than ever to create a beautiful classroom right on your own website.
What do I most love about hosting my courses on Squarespace?
100% brand consistency
Because you are using your own website fonts, colors and design it’s very easy to stay on-brand.It’s easy for your students
Your course participants have their own accounts and logins, they only need to know one place for your content: your website.It’s good for your SEO
No need to send people away, keeping them on your site for all your content makes it easy for them and will boost your SEO.Sidebar navigation + lesson tracking
Your students can easily nagivate and track their progress using the beautiful, intuitive sidebar navigation.A beautiful, mobile friendly classroom
Create a gorgeous, well organized course. Saved sections, the global asset library, Fluid Engine + mobile styling make it easy!Manage it all calmly in one place
Easily manage your website, email marketing, courses and members without ever leaving your website.
I’ve been hosting my courses on my own Squarespace website since 2016 and I absolutely love it! Courses makes it easy for my students and I love managing everything on my own website.
5. Email Marketing
I used Mailchimp for many years and liked it but it was always way more than I needed. When Squarespace launched Campaigns I decided to give it a try and I’ve been using it for a few years now and couldn’t be happier! Here are some of the features I love most about Campaigns:
I can send stylish and easy to design newsletters.
It is super easy to add blog posts and products, no need to create thumbnails and text boxes, you literally just plug them in.
I can easily send emails to all my course members.
I can send the same newsletter or email campaign to multiple lists or digital products at the same time.
With Campaignsautomations I can create sales funnels, nurture sequences, drip email campaigns or automated product welcome or upsell emails.
Campaigns offers a choice of beautiful email templates or I can easily design my own and use that as a template.
There is no free tier, prices start at $8 a month which I am happy to pay for all the features and the convenience of having everything under one roof.
Campaigns has changed how I feel about email marketing, the ease of use and the styling have reawakened my joy of writing my newsletter and communicating with my members.
6. Scheduling & Appointments
In 2019 Squarespace acquired Acuity Scheduling (the best scheduling app out there) and thanks to this Squarespace now has a built-in Scheduling feature and it is awesome for managing appointments and online scheduling. Whether you offer client consultations or have a yoga studio or massage or therapy practice – you can manage all your scheduling and payment needs right from within your website, including accepting payments via Stripe, PayPal and Square.
Can’t beat the ease and convenience of having it all in one place! Prices for Scheduling start at $16 a month.
7. Awesome Analytics
Squarespace Analytics are well organized, powerful and easy to understand. I use Analytics all the time to check and evaluate my:
Sales numbers.
Sales conversions from pages and email campaigns.
Traffic sources to see where people came from.
Top performing products.
Abandoned cart statistics.
Sign-up and click-through conversions from forms and buttons.
Popular Google keywords to help me decide on blog post topics.
You can also still use Google Analytics and easily plug your GA code into Squarespace. I definitely recommend to do this, just in case you ever want to go into even deeper analysis of your data, or if you ever switch platforms then you won’t lose your analytical data.
Knowing my data helps me make strategic business decisions and Analytics is a great partner in this regard.
Conclusion
We live in a busy digital world with much demand on our attention, time and wallet. There are many tools out there promising to make our life easier and our businesses more profitable. This can quickly become confusing and costly. Which is why I appreciate Squarespace’s efforts to become an affordable and easy to manage all-in-one solution in support of our businesses.
