DIY website builders, easy and the perfect fit for your business

Before we start I need to add a little disclosure that the below are my own personal subjective views and thoughts around the platform SquareSpace and other DIY platforms. All of the content contained within the below is based on my personal experiences over the 20 years in the industry. You should seek independence advice from multiple places if you’re considering moving to the platforms.

Being upfront and transparent from the start is important to us at Get Leads. I’ve built several SquareSpace, Wix DIY sites but far more Drupal and WordPress in the years I’ve been in the industry. I do believe there’s a perfect customer for SquareSpace and that customer looks a little bit like this and I’d tick all boxes below before i consider it an option:

• It’s a mum/dad business startup operating on a budget
• A school kid playing with technology to understand some basics maybe do a school project
• They want to do minor updates every now and then themselves
• They don’t want to spend money on a trained professional to do updates it’s all DIY
• They have lots of spare time they think about building and tweaking their website
• They have this friend or family member who said do it in SquareSpace it’s easy
• They don’t mind if their site looks similar to everybody else’s as longs got their logo and colours. Also make that logo really big. :)
• Don’t want the hassle of having to maintain their own website security.
• Don’t really care if they rank on Google or have a chance in the SEO game for keywords. Their focus keywords are their business name so reallyuniquekeywordsindomain.com.au will rank no. 1 regardless.
• Happy to spend money out of town building up the DIY website builder empire even in the USA. Lodge that ticket and wait days for a response.
• Don’t see value in content strategy or take into consideration that it’s a valuable skill. Templates are good and you just need to edit it like Word doc.
• Don’t actually see much value in a web designer at all, other than picking colours and doing a logo

Ok, if you’re a brand or marketing based “web designer” reading this then you’re probably upset I burst your bubble and yes, you may have some design skills or you’re able to craft a strategy and put together compelling content. Well done you.

Is this what your customer wants you to do? Is there enough money in the budget to do it properly?

DIY platforms attracts budget customers for a reason.

Do you think in the one night it takes you to build a site in SquareSpace you should charge your customer just as much as the 60+ hours it takes a professional team puts together something that’s going to outrank and outlast your DIY site. As long as you stick to the hours you promised and actually spend then I have no problems everyone needs to make a living.

It’s annoying when professionals in the industry see backyard web designers picking up tools like this and leading customers to drink their no-code coo-lade.

I don’t do SquareSpace websites. I’ll never do them, even if it turns out to be the best builder in the world. Their business model sucks and sucks the life out of people trying to create sustainable marketing businesses and small time mums and dads paying good money for their business startup website.

As a designer If this is your route to a business that gives you freedom you are absolutely kidding yourself. Your a salve to the DIY builders and the enterprises behind them. You will continue to support your clients “FOR NOTHING” while sending money to the big companies so that they too can have a support team that nobody actually wants to use.

At this point the DIY designer is thinking they’re just providing the best product possible despite the tech. I agree it’s important to provide the best possible product despite the tech. Clearly our opinions on what the best product is differs.

I don’t deny, customers don’t care less what the tech is, all customers care about are real results.

Sorry they also don’t care about the fact it’s easy to use but it’s a great way to sell a DIY platform when it looks easy to use. It’s a marketing false expectation that a customer actually has time to update their website. One that these businesses have sold to their unsuspecting customers.

I have worked with over 200 clients many of them used SquareSpace. More times than not a customer will hand over the edits to a designer or develoepr who will do the edits for them. Why did they choose SquareSpace again? To be fair the same can be said with WordPress and other self hosted solutions but I just find it funny that the main selling point for SquareSpace is something most customers of web designers don’t actually end up using.

I don’t deny SquareSpace has come a long way and it has it’s advantages. Experience has lead me to an understanding about the easy to use platform that is often lost on the DIY designer.

The ease of use only goes so far and when you hit the wall you’ll hit it so fricken hard you’ll wonder what you were thinking. For those of you who have used SquareSpace you’ll find choosing a theme, layout, adding text, colours, text a breeze. It has predefined layouts and pattern libraries that make putting something together rather quick and easy. I’ve been 70% of the way there plenty of times with SquareSpace and then gone the 30% of the rest of the way is a lot of hand coded css work in a clumsy textbox with classnames that make absolutely no sense and no way I’m understanding if I was to come back months later. The end result — it takes me 3 times longer than if I was to do it with WordPress Bricks, Etch, Breakdance or Oxygen. Therefore it’s going to cost the client more in the long run.

One thing I do like about SquareSpace is it’s fade in effects. I of course can get the same thing ticking a box with a WordPress Oxygen or Bricks site but hey it’s nice out of the box.

Vendor Locked

What does that mean? Well imagine you wake up one day and say you don’t want to pay the ongoings to your SaaS platform. The migration isn’t all that easy, in fact it’s going to take way longer and more costly to rebuild than moving your WordPress site from agency to agency.

This isn’t limited to SquareSpace or Wix, Duda is also well known used by companies like Local Search and Thrive for vendor locking their customers content into a site that is stuck on the one system. All these platforms defend their position and don’t want to see their customers transferred out so AI scrapers are usually blocked giving a 403 permissions error if they are attempted to be scrapped for rebuild. Clever also in the name of “protecting content”.

Be aware there are ways around this that feed into automated rebuilds onto a WordPress site and while I wouldn’t recommend it usually sometimes a customer may ask how do I get off the platform without losing the ability to edit or pay for a redesign. If this is you reach out and we’ll have a chat.

Search Engine Optimisation

When SquareSpace first came out I was a little nervous it was going to be my Uber to my taxi. Then a little agency started in our local town of Wagga Wagga. She built SquareSpace sites “yay” and people joined up in droves. She was cheaper than us and could be because it wasn’t a comparable product. Needless to say that little agency thrived for a while. But today it doesn’t exist anymore the empire she built websites, namely SqaureSpace continues to thrive though. Designers are lining up to serve their new master.

A common SEO story

The cookie crumbles, ok, so you spend 3k-4K on a SquareSpace website, I’m being generous. 3 months goes by and you don’t see it even appear on Google. 6 months goes by and you ask for some extra SEO services from your SquareSpace designer. 12 months goes by and again your asking for more advanced SEO work and yet you may not even be on the front page for your domain name.

You sack your designer and you take it to the WordPress guys down the road that do advanced SEO. The WordPress guys have a go but eventually say “You’re going to need to spend money on a new site”

First mistake was doing the site in SquareSpace, second mistake was thinking that someone who relies on a DIY web builder aimed at amateurs and business start-ups could do some advanced SEO work for you.

More Website Performance Problems

I know SquareSpace is getting better at SEO and they certainly try to market themselves this way more and more to burst the techie’s bubble. Sorry this part is a little technical so those of you who hate the tech skip forward.

At this time in March 2024, Even now though I’ll do a test using GT Metrix with a bunch of new SquareSpace sites they came out with a test grade of “D” and 36% score. That’s the start, as you unpack the problems more and more you find things that will be outside of your control to do anything about.

Update 2026, the game has changed significantly and what we’ve seen over the last two years is a focus on improving the “D” grade rating and while this has improved to a “C” or “B” but wait the numbers are actually being fudged. Let me explain, the SquareSpace crew have optimised things with a DIY user in mind so instead of having them have to tick boxes not ticked by default in the past this now gives them optimised scores and results. Alt tags, schema and META tags might be there but either automated or filled out.

Go check out the “common.min.en-US.js” file that’s about 10 times in size what it needs to be. It’s a highly efficient builder with it’s eyes on optimisation and performance clearly.

Then theirs the initial response or TTFB, my sites load generally in less than 40ms with Litespeed server. Some of the ones I’ve seen on SquareSpace are 218ms.

Testing again on a couple today in May of 2026 are still close to 200ms and that’s testing on a really, really fast connection.

New site below built 2026

I know, who cares about the numbers it’s all about the content and good content is king says the brave designer who loves their DIY platforms.

What about your limited layout and customisation options? Are you really a designer or an 18 year old out of school trying to start a web design business with a DIY platform.

To the designer customise that element with intuitive name of .fe-block-d3a879404a204869fa8e and remember what that was for next time you edit the page.

In the past SquareSpace didn’t have Alt tags for images helping to describe what the image is to Google. It’s new builder finally caught up after 25 years, well done SquareSpace. I think this was something introduced to me at uni in 1997.

Where else does it fall down when it comes to SEO and ranking then. If the page eventually loads surely it will be structured in such a way as Google reads it effectively and brings me customers.

In the past and even now I find it often embarrassing that there’s no heading 1 defined. It’s not all sites I’ve seen, but quite a lot are built without H1 tags or duplicate H1s. I have absolutely no idea why. It’s just the themes they had or the theme builders fault. Amateurs don’t care of hierarchy or tag structure they just care it looks so they can get paid. Don’t worry about the future.

What about my support?

Best of luck with that, you pay them a monthly fee and I’m sure there’s someone somewhere or maybe it’s a bot ready to answer your questions or let you do the self serve thing to get the answers your after. I can feel the customer tapping out even as I’m writing. You don’t expect your ex-web designer to help you with that technical problem do you?

What about the good stuff.

Everything till now seems super negative and “I just don’t like it” as one of our very special Australian politicians would say. There’s some good when it comes to letting Squarespace look after the hosting and maybe it starts out cheaper.

UPDATE 7 AUG 24 – My event just got cancelled for next year

It’s pretty obvious from my blog, videos and monthly emails I’m not a huge fan of SquareSpace. I have a few that have rebuilt and others that I’ve inherited these from a website designer and asked to maintain. All was good while they were just built and I generally like the customer who runs these two sites who have referred to me. He also understands the problems with this builder.

Now for the burn, lots of customers may not be able to pay via their own credit card for lots of different reasons. Get Leads in this case chose to pay up front to SquareSpace in order to get the discount a years hosting and making it more affordable for the customer. A month after we sent the invoice to the customer only to find the customer may not want these run this year. Totally fine, it’s my fault for taking the full year up front but can I get a refund.

Check the refund policy with SquareSpace and here it says you only have 14 days after a renewal to request a refund. 14 days is insane and a clear grab for cash. Looks like I’m left with two crappy hosting plans in SquareSpace I won’t be able to offload. Maybe I’ll turn them into video walkthroughs of how crappy the SquareSpace code generation is and continue my mission to convert one SquareSpace client at a time to WordPress.

UPDATE 11 May 26 – AI is that DIY website builder game changer

Ok, AI is amazing and in 2026 it’s come a long way to rebuild and build sites. Every builder from WordPress to SaaS platforms have adopted AI into their systems. For SquareSpace this looks like an optimised AI onboarding. It’s basically a theme and design workflow chooser but adding AI to the name makes it feel like it’s keeping up with the game.

Don’t be fooled other AI website builders are also hype and will generate “AI garbage” without well defined strategy and thought. You’ll get that “oh, ah” response initially but in the long term it’s all bad. I’ve got other blogs that talk about these in detail. AI builders

Some final DIY Square Thoughts

I’m not saying every website builder is perfect, most have their strengths and weaknesses but this one in particular is bad because it sucks young designers dry of work simply because it’s what’s called a SaaS solution. While I’ve put together a list of bad things I’m sure the list of good things would also be impressive.

Don’t take my word for it Google “Disadvantages of SquareSpace” and checkout the results.