Squarespace review 2026: real costs, features and leaving later

What it is and who it’s for

Squarespace is a hosted website builder. You pick a designer-made template, edit it in your browser, and Squarespace runs the web hosting, security and updates for you. Your site has to run on Squarespace; you can’t move it to another host.

One bill covers the site, and you can add a store, scheduling, memberships and email marketing from the same dashboard. That all-in-one setup is the core of its appeal: there are no plugins to update and no separate hosting bill.

It is one of the bigger names in this market. W3Techs counts Squarespace on 2.4% of all websites, behind WordPress, Shopify and Wix.

Squarespace fits best when:

• You run a creative, portfolio or service business and care a lot about how the site looks.
• You sell a modest number of products or memberships and are willing to pay for Core or higher to avoid transaction fees.
• You want hosting, domain, email marketing and payments on one bill instead of five logins.

It is a weaker fit if you think you might move the whole site somewhere else later. That is the trade-off this review spends the most time on.

Plans and what they really cost

Squarespace has no free plan. Every site starts on a 14-day free trial, and you need a paid plan to publish. Here are the four plans, according to Squarespace’s pricing page.

Paying yearly saves roughly 24-29% compared with paying month to month. Sales tax is not included in the listed prices.

The store fee is a transaction fee: a cut Squarespace takes on top of card processing. It is 2% of online store sales on Basic and 0% on every plan above it. Selling digital content and memberships has its own fee: 7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus and 0% on Advanced.

Card processing through Squarespace Payments applies on every plan:

• Standard cards: 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic and Core, 2.7% + $0.30 on Plus, 2.5% + $0.30 on Advanced.
• Premium cards: 3.2% + $0.30 on all plans.
• ACH bank payments: 1.5% on Basic, 1.0% on Core and up.

The pricing page also lists a “0.05% max tax fee” on Advanced. It does not state separate renewal prices for the plans, so the math below assumes today’s prices hold.

A 3-year cost example

Say you run a small business that sells about $5,000 a year through your online store, as 100 orders of $50. You want one professional email inbox. Here is what three years on Core looks like, billed yearly.

*The pricing page does not publish Squarespace’s domain renewal price or what Google Workspace costs after the free year. As stand-ins we used Namecheap’s published .com renewal of $18.48 a year and Google’s own list price for Workspace Business Starter, $7.00 per user a month on an annual plan. Your real numbers may differ.

Now the same business on Basic. The plan itself is cheaper, at $684 for three years. But Basic adds the 2% store fee ($100 a year on $5,000 of sales), and it doesn’t include the free Workspace year, so email costs $252. The 3-year total comes to $1,797.96, which is $24 more than Core.

Two costs are left out of the example because Squarespace doesn’t publish them on its pricing page: paid extensions from the Squarespace Extensions marketplace, and premium-card surcharges if many of your buyers use them.

What you can build

Design and templates

Design is the main draw. Every site starts from a designer-made template, and the September 2025 Refresh update added new “Finish Layer” design tools. Squarespace doesn’t list a template count on the pages we checked.

Custom code depends on the plan. Basic gets a basic code block and a CSS editor for small style tweaks. Core and higher add an advanced code block and JavaScript, which you need for many third-party widgets. Basic also caps you at 2 contributors, while Core and up allow unlimited contributors.

Blog and content

Squarespace includes built-in blog pages, and one site can hold several blogs. Posts support comments. That flexibility has a cost later: the official export only takes one blog, so a site with three blogs leaves two behind.

Video hosting is capped by plan: 30 minutes on Basic, 5 hours on Core, 50 hours on Plus and unlimited on Advanced.

Online store and memberships

Every plan can sell, but only Core and up skip the 2% store fee. Plus adds a reserved cart with a timer and advanced merchandising. Memberships and paid digital content run through Squarespace’s Digital Content & Memberships feature, with the fees listed above.

The 2025 Refresh also added money tools: Squarespace Balance, Capital, Instant Payouts and Pay Links. If selling is your whole business, compare it with a store-first platform in Squarespace vs Shopify.

SEO

Squarespace has built-in search engine optimization (SEO) controls. In September 2025 it added an AI SEO Scanner that suggests page titles, descriptions and image alt text. It also added an AIO Scanner that tracks mentions of your brand on AI platforms like ChatGPT.

AI features

Squarespace announced most of its AI tools at Refresh 2025 on September 30, 2025:

• Blueprint AI builds a starter site from designer-made templates. Squarespace expanded it with industry-specific versions and said chat-based site generation was coming soon.
• Beacon AI is an AI business guide that works across the platform.
• AI Product Composer, AI Discount Composer and AI FAQ Composer help with store and FAQ content.
• AI image and video backgrounds, plus a Squarespace GPT in the ChatGPT Store.
• AI Site Scanner for broken links and other issues, announced as coming soon.

AI use is metered in credits. Basic gets 10 credits one time, not per month. Core gets 20 a month, Plus 40 and Advanced 120. If AI drafting matters to you, Basic is the wrong plan.

What happens when you leave

Squarespace scores 5/10 on our exit score, which rates how much of a site you can take with you. Exporting takes minutes. Rebuilding somewhere else is the hard part.

What the export includes

According to Squarespace’s help article on exporting your site, the official export is a WordPress-format .xml file. It includes:

• Layout pages, text blocks, image blocks and gallery pages
• One blog page with all its posts and up to 1,000 comments per post
• Text from embed and Instagram blocks

What stays behind

• Album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio and store pages
• Audio, product and video blocks
• Page-specific headers, footers and sidebars
• Drafts, style settings and custom CSS
• Every blog except the one you pick as your primary blog

Images are the other snag. Squarespace says images may not come across into self-hosted WordPress (only links to them do), and it suggests importing into WordPress.com instead, which copies the images. There is no bulk image export: you download images one at a time from the Asset library. Uploaded videos cannot be exported at all.

Store data is better covered. Products export to an editable .csv file, orders can be exported, and the Contacts panel exports customers, mailing list subscribers, members and donors.

Taking your domain with you

You can keep a domain you registered through Squarespace. Turn off the domain lock in the domains dashboard, get the authorization code by email, and give that code to your new domain registrar. Newly registered or recently transferred domains have a 60-day lock, and a transfer can take up to 15 days.

If you use Google Workspace email, update your MX records (the DNS settings that route your mail) at the new provider so email keeps arriving.

We build on WordPress every week, and the Squarespace XML file is a fair head start for text and blog posts. Plan to rebuild the design and any store from scratch. Our guide to leaving your website builder covers the order of steps so you don’t lose traffic.

Gotchas

• The export covers one blog and basic pages. Store, portfolio and index pages, video, audio and product blocks, drafts, styles and custom CSS are left out (Squarespace help center, “Exporting your site”).
• No bulk image or video export. Images download one at a time from the Asset library, and uploaded videos can’t be exported (help center, “Import to and export from your site”).
• Basic charges fees on sales. 2% on online store sales and 7% on Digital Content & Memberships (pricing page).
• JavaScript needs Core or higher. Basic gets only the basic code block and CSS editor (pricing page).
• The free domain is year one only. It comes with annual plans only, and the free offer does not follow the domain if you transfer it out (pricing page; help center, “Transferring a domain away”).
• Email isn’t free on Basic. The free first year of Google Workspace starts on Core (pricing page).
• AI is metered. Basic gets 10 AI credits one time, not each month (pricing page).
• Some costs aren’t published. The pricing page doesn’t list domain renewal prices or what Google Workspace costs after the free year.

Who should pick it, who should not

Pick Squarespace if

• You want a site that looks polished with little design work, such as a portfolio, studio or service business.
• You sell a modest catalog or memberships and will pay for Core or higher.
• You want one bill for hosting, domain, email marketing and payments, and no updates to manage.
• You plan to stay put for years, so the export limits matter less.

Skip it if

• You expect to move the full site, including design, store pages or custom code, to another platform later.
• You run several blogs or a large video library you may need to migrate.
• You’d sell on Basic to save money. The 2% fee often wipes out the savings.
• You want a free plan to test for months. The 14-day trial is the only free option.

Alternatives worth a look

• Squarespace vs Wix: Wix has a free plan and a big app market, but it scores 3/10 for leaving.
• Squarespace vs WordPress: more upkeep, but you own every file and it scores 10/10 for leaving.
• Squarespace vs Shopify: for stores where selling is the whole business.
• Webflow vs Squarespace: more design control, and paid workspaces can export static code (6/10 for leaving).

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