Comment by kevinob11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevinob11 | Hacker News Reader

I love Squarespace. I find it to be as close to the perfect mix of flexibility, usability and beautiful defaults that I've ever seen in a website builder. I can hand off management of the site to someone with almost zero technical skill (my 70 y/o father with almost no technical knowledge manages a Squarespace site I built him!) and when I look back in 2 years the site will still look pretty good and will still work on mobile. Chances of the site being hacked are much much lower than on Wordpress. Prices are reasonable. The layout engine is exactly what I want, it looks nice on all devices and can handle most layouts, which is a totally worthwhile tradeoff for the few times that something just doesn't quite look the way I want it to without custom css.

I know people say this stuff:

"You can't transfer your site away" - I know, but I can build a reasonable site in ~2 days, so the tradeoff is worth it and the sunk cost is lower

"But I want a fully custom design" - Yeah, fair enough, there is a cap on the high end of design with it but I think that cap is pretty high, especially in 7.1

"But it is making the whole internet look the same!" - Not really, between colors, photos and sections in 7.1 I just don't think this is true. If you use unsplash for all of your photos then maybe, but if you are doing that you are probably too small to care, worry about that when you hit 2MM in revenue

"But Wordpress is user friendly too" - No it isn't

As I write these I think that maybe it is just the perfect thing for my subset of clients (SMB), so read this from that perspective. I know this isn't really the discussion on this thread, I just wanted to see what experiences of others have been.

I run a VC firm. I'm a full stack engineer who's built core infrastructure that runs on billions of devices and handles trillions of server side requests a year. And yet I choose to use squaris Squarespace for our website. It's just way easier and more reliable than building it myself despite being more than capable. I don't want to deal with maintenance, mobile, upkeep, etc. I have better things to do than to maintain our website.

Likewise. I did our wedding site in it with a wufoo form back in 2015. Spent an evening at it, sent out email. Done! Literally never touched it again. Simply done and well executed.

Yes! This is a value I kind of missed in my description. We have a static html site right now, its lightning fast and easy enough for me to maintain, but we'll be moving to Squarespace internally on the next site update. Right now our contact form is annoying to maintain, non-developers can't easily make changes and images aren't automatically optimized. It just solves too many problems at too low of a cost, in dollars and other things.

I was trying to learn more about your fund but I think the site is down: https://oyster.vc/. Unless this is the one? https://www.oyster-ventures.com/

His is https://oyster.vc/ and it works for me from residential Comcast in the U.S.

I chose Squarespace for my company's marketing site, and I'd mostly agree with some caveats:

* The developer mode is poorly supported. For example: you can't copy your site if it is in developer mode (which means you can't setup a staging environment and everything you push to your site will be live instantly). The local development server is also very buggy and inconsistent with the production behavior. It feels like something that they developed early on in their road map and haven't spent much time on since then. If I could go back and do this over again, I'd pick an existing theme and just customize it instead of building out a whole theme in developer mode.

* The site is S-L-O-W with tons of bundled assets that it injects into your theme. I have no idea what any of it is doing, but it definitely increases page load.

That said, if you find yourself wanting a solid CMS that has the full breadth of WordPress like features but don't want to deal with the hosting, SquareSpace is a solid choice.

How slow is it? Genuinely asking because I wonder if it is much larger / more complicated than sites I've built so far.

Most sites I've created are _usable_ in about ~500ms, though they take quite a bit longer to fully load. There do appear to be tons of scripts and tracking crap loaded after initial load, but through (what appears to be) above-the-fold handling and a pretty quick (200ms) time to first byte they appear fast-ish.

Do you add a lot of custom scripts?

Zero custom scripts other than some vanilla JS I wrote that loads on a few pages. Your numbers are pretty similar to mine. It's not that much different than the WordPress site that replaced it, but it still seems higher than it should be.

Good to know, thanks!

Have you tried using a static site generator instead? I have used one for my personal site on S3 and it works pretty well. In my opinion figuring out Squarespace was harder for me .

I'd love to use a static site generator, but no simple WYSIWYG for the people that create content on the site make that a non-starter.

Check out https://forestry.io or something on https://jamstack.org/headless-cms

The appeal of using a static site generator is that its output is, well, static. Deployment is something simple like copying some files to an s3 bucket. If I need to host an app for the CMS portion, I'm not any better off than using wordpress or another full suite CMS. It's also not clear to me from the docs what responsibilities the content creator have in the workflow (in my experience, teaching github or markdown makes things a non-starter most of the time)

Dedicated hosts like Kinsta are a great alternative to self hosting WordPress, though you still need to maintain plugin security updates yourself.

Sounds like you know what your customers want and deliver on that. That's better than most devs who want to shove their favorite language/framework down the throat of their poor customers.

>That's better than most devs who want to shove their favorite language/framework down the throat of their poor customers.

This is exactly that.

Okay, but in this case, the favourite framework has a GUI. Sure, you can't use WYSIWYG HTML editors with it, but it has its own sort-of WYSIWYG editor.

Handing your customers something solid that they can easily use and update is hardly "[shoving it] . . . down the throat of their poor customers."

Same with your insert favourite framework my friend.

Squarespace is the perfect solution for non-tech-savvy brick-and-mortar business who probably won't update their site more than once every 5 years. I'd say it has way better defaults than Wix.

Beyond the mom-and-pop flower shop down the street or the friend that needs a portfolio site...not so much. Squarespace is good for the aforementioned users because the platform makes it hard for them to create bad designs and do stupid things. Putting either of those types of users on a Wordpress site would just be a total nightmare.

HOWEVER, if you're even mildly tech-savvy, Squarespace (or site builders like Wix) become frustrating and limiting almost immediately.

This is why I believe Webflow is ultimately the answer. It addresses all the downsides of Wordpress with none of the limitations.

I think 5 years from now, Squarespace/Wix will completely own the mom-and-pop and portfolio space.

I think Webflow will ultimately own the space inhabited today by Wordpress (as well as static site generators), and be powering the marketing & content sites for most businesses. Which is where the real money is.

If Webflow added native i18n support, I wouldn't be surprised if they ate up considerable marketshare from most headless CMS providers.

>> I think Webflow will ultimately own the space inhabited today by Wordpress (as well as static site generators)

Not sure about static site generators though. They already have a pretty big head start. Netlify, Stackbit and others are constantly adding services for both tech savvy and non technical folks.

The area where Squarespace sets itself apart is really their available themes. Most are way better than Wordpress themes, and easier to change to suit your needs without much work. Static site generators like Gatsby just don't have the depth of themes like WP and Squarespace do. Its kind of the app store comparison. One is Apple and Android with millions of really good apps (WP, Squarespace) and the other is the MS app store which has a limited, sort of the run of the mill stuff (Gatsby, Netlify, Stackbit).

If WebFlow can offer better designs out of the box, then I agree, they will most likely own the space. Design will always be the X factor to me.

I don't know if I agree. I recently tried Webflow and was not so impressed. It's basically a UI on top of CSS. Which is OK for developers, but there is still too much complexity and too many footguns for non-technical users.

For example, take position: sticky. This CSS property is basically one-to-one mapped to a dropdown in Webflow. So I thought it would just work. But alas, just like the CSS pendant, it only works if the parent element has the correct properties. Also it only works in browsers that support it, and isn't polyfilled automatically.

Maybe what I'm asking for is technically not feasible, but then the UI should disable the option in such cases and not hide this in a support page imho.

I think a truly powerful website builder would have to leave the CSS paradigms behind and invent something new.

Tilda Publishing is the perfect balance

I agree 100%. It can’t just be a UI on too of CSS. At that point just write the HTML and CSS...

To me that's the best part, they haven't abstracted away HTML/CSS, so you have control over everything like you would if you built a site from scratch.

Creating HTML/CSS through a realtime updated UI is just so much faster and the better experience IMO. Its a great example of "Inventing on Principle," re: this great Bret Victor talk https://vimeo.com/36579366

That said, coding from scratch, while slower than using Webflow, isn't the real pain point for me. But I can see how someone less technical might see that as the real value.

The real hassle in building static sites from scratch is the nightmare of NPM, git, bad static site generator defaults, complicated headless CMSs configurations and fragile dependencies.

> "But it is making the whole internet look the same!"

You know, that's alright with me in many cases. The internet is a utility, and consistency can allow for providing people with a normalized, accessible, fast, fine-tuned experience. A lot of the internet would benefit immensely from that. If it comes at the expense of your website not looking super cool or unique, that's probably fine - a lot of internet users aren't all that concerned with that.

I'm not saying squarespace offers that. Just – a lot of the internet being uniform isn't in and of itself a bad thing.

> "But Wordpress is user friendly too" - No it isn't

Only millions disagree. No big deal.

Popular and user friendly are different things.

Sure, but in order for this first world perspective to hold, you have to pretend that properly developed WordPress themes don’t exist.

Fair enough, Wordpress is certainly more user friendly than everything I used before it. All I know is how often my clients who use Squarespace make meaningful changes to their site and how often my clients who use Wordpress do it, as well as their technical levels needed to do so. In my case, they seem to do it a lot more if they have Squarespace.

> You can't transfer your site away

From an investment perspective, that's a pretty big positive. High switching costs locks existing customers in.

Sure it's your site?

IDK the lack of ability to export _your_ data and leave when _you_ feel like it is pretty much crap.

Frankly, from a product perspective it's short-sighted. Let people leave. Find out why. Fix the problem(s). But if you hold them hostage you're holding your own product back _and_ you're creating ill-will towards your brand. Lose, lose.

That's not forgivable.

I don't see anyone's data being held hostage. I do see a specialized hosting service that will require you to rebuild/redesign your site if you migrate away.

Yes, there are higher migration costs if you use Squarespace. For a lot of people those are reasonable in exchange for lower up-front and maintenance costs. People should absolutely consider the lock-in factor but there's not a universal correct answer.

My website HTML+JS content is my data.

Then use a more generic hosting site. I don't see anyone preventing you.

There's always a tradeoff.

Because it's too much trouble for an outfit like SP to write an export feature?? And why not read the whole comment? You buried the lede.

So they should have an export function to export all the supporting Squarespace code? Yes, that seems like an unreasonable expectation.

If being able to easily lift and shift is important to you, no one is keeping you from hand-coding your site and/or using some sort of static site generator and hosting it on a generic platform.

If you write an application using AWS-specific services, you're not going to be able to trivially migrate that either. It's a tradeoff.

If that’s how you feel, then curl away…

Every page on Squarespace has a JSON format if you want the lot:

https://www.squarespace.com/?format=json

I get where you are coming from as an idea, and generally I agree you should own your data. That being said you can export your data from Squarespace, you just can't "transfer" your site to alternative hosting because the platform is proprietary. So it isn't that they won't let you leave, it is that you are trading (pros) not having to think about hosting and security for (cons) slightly higher migration costs, and I think in this case pros outweigh the cons for sites below a certain level of scope.

They have an export feature right in the settings page for your site.

It's ridiculously expensive though. Almost $150/yr for what probably costs $5/yr to host.

Ridiculously cheap if you factor in the costs of time/effort spent learning to do it yourself when your primary focus is launching your jewelry making business.

Jewelry making businesses go to where the buyers are, which is Etsy. They could do Squarespace Ecommerce and work on SEO and PPC ads to drive traffic, but as you said, they might prefer to focus on making jewelry.

For me, it's not clear how Squarespace will be able to grow if their market is mom-and-pop shops. There are better economies of scale in targeting 1 enterprise accounts over 10 consumer accounts.

But they're not just hosting. A website shop will probably charge you a few thousand to build a site and then charge you again whenever you want changes. $150/yr just for that alone is a bargain to someone who cannot do it themselves.

I hear you, but I feel like that ignores a lot of externalities to hosting a site for a client, including:

1. Support (fielding calls, answering emails, etc)

2. Updates (copy, design, patching)

3. Admin (billing, contracts)

And that's just off the top of my head. Having a client is rarely about just handling the hosting. You effectively become a technical resource and field all the duties that entails.

What expenses are you considering in that $5 though? Even so, keeping things running might be cheap, but its expensive to get to that stage. By the same token, it costs the same ~$50 to fill gas in a camry or a lambo.

Good luck finding decent hosting for $5/year, and hosting it yourself would cost more like $5/month (entry-level linode or something).

To be fair, building a static website and hosting on something like Azure Blob Storage Static Websites with an Azure Function for your contact form (or Azure Static Web Apps for both in one solution) would cost cents (pennies) a month have about the same maintenance fees, if you know what you're doing.

You're not going to have any support with that though and lacking the CMS part of it, and if you want to use any of the more advanced features like Ecommerce then you're going to have to spend a while building that.

I just spent more than $5/yr reading your comment.

$5/yr for a whole site is simply not worth even talking about. It's not relevant.

I have three dozen client sites (mom and pop businesses) running on Google App Engine that cost between $0.05 and $0.20 per month.

For low traffic sites that end up mostly just being object store and bandwidth, the public clouds are almost certainly the cheapest (from a computing bill perspective) way to do things. My personal website is similar.

The main caveat is that theoretically your costs could spike for some reason given you're paying based on usage. But if you're not doing anything complicated, I consider that pretty low odds.

Are you valuing your own time at all? At $150/year for a business that barely registers as an expense.

When your Wordpress site gets hacked and you pay someone $500 (if you are lucky) to fix it this flips pretty quickly. If your Wordpress site doesn't get hacked its because you manually maintain it, and time at most of my clients is worth more than that.

If you are on something that can't get hacked (static site) it is because you are a developer or at least pretty technical and the ease of use doesn't apply to you.

Again, this is all targeted at US (West Coast to be specific) SMB.

Automated backups exist for Wordpress.

If hacked sites were really that much of an issue, then WP wouldn't be as popular as it is for business sites.

In any case, if you have a mature website, it's going to be complicated to switch from WP to Squarespace and vice versa. But with WP you still have the flexibility to host wherever you want, on whatever you want.

All of this is 100% correct and if its easier / easy enough for you then that works. I wasn't really making the case that it was explicitly better for everyone, but it is awesome for my clients.

For backup, I either end up paying as much as Squarespace (WPEngine) or have to keep an eye on it to make sure its working.

I have no global stats on Wordpress hacks, of the clients I have running it (40???) I think probably 10 have been hacked. Zero have been hacked since moving to WPEngine (which is the first thing we do when we take over management), which is certainly something.

I'm not sure what the exact definition of mature website is, but I'm not sure it is that difficult. Certainly if you have 100s of pages, posts, articles etc. then it could / would take a while to make the move. At that point we're just talking about target market. Most of my clients have stopped posting tons of news / blogs because they were only doing it for SEO and it didn't really work anymore. In my world where sites have 25 pages with semi-limited complexity it just doesn't take long to move anymore.

I do certainly have clients with more complicated needs (member areas, ecommerce, etc.) but most of the time I just recommend they link out to that content and use another service (client portal in their main line of business app, shopify, etc.) rather than building it into their site.

>> If hacked sites were really that much of an issue, then WP wouldn't be as popular as it is for business sites.

Business owners have no idea how often they get hacked. They get hacked because business owners want a DIY approach and start installing plugins willy nilly without sandboxing and testing them, making their sites vulnerable to attack

September 2020:

Millions of WordPress sites are being probed and attacked with recent plugin bug

The sudden spike in attacks happened after hackers discovered and started exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in "File Manager," a popular WordPress plugin installed on more than 700,000 sites.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/millions-of-wordpress-sites-ar...

That's a hell of a vector for a hacker. Target one plugin - hit over 700K machines? Unreal.

~1 year ago there was a zero-click (rce I think?) for easy smtp. At the time it was the most popular plugin for smtp setup on Wordpress, I can't imagine how many sites have that plugin installed without updates.

$12 a month? Not really breaking the bank here man.

It's more of the principle. I don't like giving giving any company money, especially when there are cheaper alternatives.

I'm cheap when it comes to spending money on tech. I'm glad people are questioning the price.

We need more competition. It seems like we are just giving into the bigger companies, and I don't see the innovation I saw a few years ago.

If you refuse to pay for anything, to won't get innovation.

You want more competition, but you don't want to pay anyone? How is that going to work, exactly?

I'm sorry but this is ludicrous. We're talking about a high-quality website designer here. $12 a month is extremely reasonable.

Don’t confused the cost of production with the value to the user.

(Fwiw I tried squarespace and found the UX awful)

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