Which platform is best for you?
Blogging was once considered a mere online version of someone’s personal diary, but over the years it has expanded in scope and functionality. This shot of interest for blogging and website creation comes courtesy of blogging platforms that involve less coding and more convenience.
WordPress rules over the current crop of blogging frameworks in the market, but some very promising platforms have stood their ground and even increased their client base. Take the case of Squarespace, an online website creation service that aims to please its clients with a convenient interface. WordPress is also all for convenience in creating websites, but there are several differences between the two website platforms.
We at PixelateWP are all for getting the best of any service, and we thought it best to compare WordPress and Squarespace and check if their differences can help us arrive at a definitive decision as to which is the better website platform. Let the slugfest begin!
Process of website creation
WordPress is a framework that needs to be installed on a web hosting space and connected to a domain name in order to be viewed online. After installation, themes and plugins need to be placed in the site as well. In contrast, an account at Squarespace puts your hands off any installation and customization mumbo-jumbo because its own developers will do the dirty work for you.
The strength of Squarespace lies on the initial stages of the website creation process, because a client who knows absolutely nothing about coding can put up a website fast using Squarespace. However, there lies the caveat: What if you want to change some parts of the site after it has been created by a Squarespace web developer? Post-creation changes are easier handled using WordPress.
Add to this the fact that WordPress is host to practically unlimited themes, compared to only a dozen templates for Squarespace.
Writing content using WYSIWYG
If it’s your first time to encounter the term, WYSIWYG is an acronym of “what you see is what you get”. In a nutshell, both WordPress and Squarespace allow their users to type page content on a WYSIWYG text editor, and it will appear on the live site as how it was encoded. WordPress has an upper hand in this, with more formatting options and a built-in feature to rid your clipboard-copied text of Microsoft Word formatting for better compatibility with Web browsers.
Capability for expansion
Scalability is a very important characteristic for tools and software used by growing companies. Remember that as the company grows, so should the website. This is one of the strongest suits of WordPress; it can adjust to the growing needs of the company. Planning to equip your website with a membership registration system? Upgrading your e-commerce site to accept Paypal payments? Creating login authorization levels to prevent lower-level users from accessing sensitive information? All of these are possible with WordPress, but unfortunately not with Squarespace.
On its own merit, Squarespace is perfect for those who don’t foresee their website to change much over the years. Examples of these include informational or archive sites, one-time event launch pages, resource download repository, or static educational material sources.
User control over design and page elements
As mentioned earlier, changes in the layout and website elements may be difficult in Squarespace, although not entirely impossible. Quick changes may be done in Squarespace such as fonts, page titles and descriptions, header elements, and site colors. However, these can also be accomplished using the Customizer feature of WordPress.
With more theme developers embracing the beauty of drag-and-drop functionality, WordPress themes have also become ultra-user-friendly. Having chosen the right theme, the user can simply move things around the editing panel to make changes on the live site. This is a default feature in Squarespace, but some users may find the interface too limited.
Choosing the best website services
At Squarespace, they will take care of everything that needs to be done on your website, from the web hosting space down to the free domain name. WordPress users have more work in their hands, because they need to find a web host to install WordPress and a domain registrar to handle their domain name needs.
However, this major difference will play a key factor in terms of budget and user preferences. Squarespace users cannot choose which web host or domain registrar to use because these are all part of the package price. Meanwhile, WordPress website owners can choose their preferred service providers.
These five points are just some of the aspects where WordPress and Squarespace differ. Ultimately, the decision depends entirely on you, the owner of the website.
However, we at PixelateWP highly recommend WordPress because its features far outclass any other website framework. Even if you aren’t impressed by the advantages pointed out above, let its numbers speak for itself – WordPress is the number one website platform today, running roughly 60 percent of all existing websites.
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