Squarespace

Squarespace is an all-in-one website builder and hosting platform. It lets you create a professional site — portfolio, blog, business site or online store — from designer-made templates, then handles the hosting, a custom domain, e-commerce, scheduling and email marketing in a single subscription. No coding is required, and the results look polished by default.

Squarespace plans start at US$16/mo for the entry Basic tier and rise through the mainstream Core plan (around US$23/mo) to higher Plus and Advanced tiers, billed annually; monthly billing costs more. Annual plans include a free custom domain for the first year. Most personal and small-business sites are fine on the Basic or Core plan.

Yes. Squarespace integrates with Stripe (and PayPal) to process payments for products, services and subscriptions. You connect your Stripe account in the settings, and Stripe's standard processing fees apply on top of your Squarespace plan.

It's less flexible than Wix for free-form layouts — you work within each template's structure — and it has fewer third-party extensions. Its cheapest plan also costs more than some rivals' entry tiers, and there's no permanently free plan. In return you get reliably polished, professional-looking results with very little effort.

Both are excellent. Wix is more flexible, with more templates and true drag-and-drop; Squarespace produces more consistently elegant, designer-quality sites and is a favorite for portfolios and visual brands. Pick Wix for flexibility, Squarespace for refined design.

No — there's a 14-day free trial but no permanent free plan. Paid plans start at US$16/mo on the Personal tier with annual billing. Squarespace's whole pitch is that design quality is worth paying for from day one; if a real free tier matters more, Wix and Weebly both offer one.

No — different centres of gravity. Squarespace is a website builder with commerce added: ideal for a beautiful site that also sells a handful of products, from US$16/mo. Shopify is a commerce engine with a website attached, built for serious selling — inventory, shipping and tax at scale. A dozen products on a brand-led site: Squarespace. A real store you expect to grow: Shopify. Many sellers start on Squarespace and migrate once the shop, not the site, has become the point.

Go to squarespace.com and click Log In (top right), or open the Squarespace app, then sign in with your email and password — or with Google or Apple if that's how you signed up. The account dashboard is where you manage your sites, domains (including any moved over from Google Domains) and billing. If your password's gone missing, the login page has a reset link to get you back in.

Yes — Squarespace acquired Google Domains' registrations in 2023, and the migration finished in 2024. Tens of millions of domains moved across, and former Google Domains customers now manage them through a Squarespace account. Existing pricing was honored at first, but renewals now follow Squarespace's own rates — so if your domain came over from Google, it's worth checking the renewal price rather than assuming the old one still applies.

It's an all-in-one website builder with the best-designed templates in the business — design, hosting, domain and commerce bundled into a single subscription. It's the go-to for portfolios, studios, restaurants, small shops and any brand where visual presentation does the selling. Since absorbing Google Domains it has also become one of the world's largest domain registrars, so you can buy and manage your domain in the same place you build the site.

A few trade-offs. It gives you less freedom than Wix — the design system keeps sites polished but constrains how far you can stray from a template. The app and extension ecosystem is smaller, there's no free plan (only a 14-day trial), and its advanced ecommerce still trails Shopify on features and scale. Deeply custom layouts can also fight the built-in guardrails. The flip side is that those same constraints are exactly why Squarespace sites look so consistently good with very little effort — you're trading flexibility for near-guaranteed quality.