Why We Moved From WordPress to Squarespace (and Who Should Stay)

For most of the life of this studio, if you asked me what platform your website should be on, I’d have said WordPress without finishing the question. I built on it, hosted on it, taught clients to use it, and wrote multiple posts defending it that still brings people here. So I owe anyone who read that post an explanation, because I no longer give that answer every single time and the reasons have less to do with the software than with what I watched happen after.

What I kept noticing

A website is finished for about a week. After that it becomes a thing someone has to live with, and the person living with it is almost never a developer. She’s a naturopath, a designer, an aesthetician, a coach. She has a business to run, and the website is supposed to help her run it, that’s all.

With WordPress, what I saw over and over was a slow accumulation of small responsibilities that not everyone wants to manage. I love it and most often bloggers love it as well. But it’s not for everyone and our WordPress Website Build Service, while meant to be seamless and completely hands-off (if you choose it that way), ended up being super customized to each client and frankly, hard to price. The plugin that needed updating. The update that broke something else. The hosting renewal. The security notice. When we build a site on WordPress we offer all of this is our service, because it’s important and I never wanted to build a single site that wasn’t holistic. But all together they produced a particular kind of low hum that not every client wanted.

It then becomes little design and more maintenance, and I had to make a decision. I started to ask what I was actually selling. And the honest answer was: a beautiful site, and then a small permanent dependency on me.

That’s not the business I want to run, and more to the point, it’s not what I want for the people I build for. The whole point of the way I work, the editable mockups, the brand kits, the handover, is that you shouldn’t need me on a Tuesday afternoon. The platform underneath was quietly contradicting that.

What changed when I started building on Squarespace

The first thing I noticed is how much of the maintenance simply disappears. Hosting, security, updates, backups, SSL, the things that generated most of the hum, are handled by the platform and stop being anyone’s job. The second thing is that clients actually edit their sites. Not in theory. In practice, the week after launch, without emailing me first. Swapping a photo, adding a service, changing a price. That sounds small and it is the entire point.

The third thing surprised me. I expected to give up design control and I gave up less than I feared. Squarespace is a constrained system, and I’ll write separately about why I’ve come to think constraint is a gift to a small business. But within it there’s real room: custom type, custom spacing, custom code where it earns its place, layouts that don’t look like anyone else’s. The sites I’ve built this year on it are, to my eye, as considered as anything I built before. What’s different is that the owner can keep them that way.

And the SEO work I care about, the structure and the words and the clean pages that get found, is entirely possible, in some ways easier because there are fewer ways to break it.

Who should stay on WordPress

I want to be fair here, because WordPress hasn’t become bad. It’s still the right answer for many businesses, and if you’re one of them, I’d rather tell you than sell you.

Stay if your site is really a publication. A large blog with years of archives, complex categories, and a content team. WordPress was built for that and still does it best.

Stay if you need something super custom that no platform offers out of the box: a booking system with unusual rules, a membership structure with several tiers, an integration with software that only speaks to WordPress. Plugins exist for a reason, and sometimes the reason is you.

Stay if you have a developer you trust on retainer and you like the arrangement. Nothing is broken. Don’t move for the sake of moving.

And stay, at least for now, if your current site is ranking well and earning you work. A migration can be done without losing that, and I’ll write about how, but it’s a project, not an afternoon, and the right time for it is when you’re ready to rethink the site anyway, not just the platform.

Who should move

Move if you’re a service business with a site of five to fifteen pages whose main jobs are to look like you, explain what you do, and get you booked. That describes most of the people I work with, and for them the trade is almost entirely in one direction.

Move if the words “I need to update my site but I’m scared to touch it” have come out of your mouth. That sentence is the clearest sign I know that the platform is working against you.

Move if you’re paying someone, or wishing you could pay someone, for maintenance that produces nothing visible. That money is better spent on photography, on copy, on the things that actually change how the site performs.

And move if independence matters to you. Not independence from designers, you’ll still want one for the big moments, but independence in the daily life of your business, where you can change a thing because you decided to, in the time it takes to decide.

What this means for the studio

Going forward, new websites at The Good Canvas are still built on the platform that best suits the client. More often then not this will be Squarespace unless there’s a specific reason not to, and we’ll say so when there is. Existing WordPress clients aren’t being abandoned; the hosting and support arrangements that exist continue for as long as they’re wanted. And the post I wrote defending WordPress stays up at this address, because I’d rather show my thinking changing than pretend it never did.

I spent a long time believing the most capable platform was the right one. I’ve come to think the right platform is the one that lets you stop thinking about it. For the businesses I build for, that’s a different answer than it used to be, and it would have been dishonest to keep giving the old one.

If you’re weighing a new site or a move and you’d like a plain opinion on which platform fits your business, tell us a bit about what you do. Sometimes the answer is Squarespace. Sometimes it’s stay where you are. Either way you’ll get the honest version.

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ABOUT THIS POST

This post is written by Donata Delano – A Web Designer, Professional Artist and Architect based in Burlington, Canada. She specializing in visual communication and web design, creating branding solutions and websites that are thoughtful, unique and aesthetically pleasing.

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