Showit vs Squarespace: How to choose your website platform

Which website platform is right for your small business? I review Showit vs Squarespace so that you can make the best decision for your website.

If you’re a creative service provider and small business owner, you’ve likely heard of Showit and unless you’ve lived under a rock for the last 7 or so years, you’ve probably heard of Squarespace (queue Squarespace and Dolly Parton’s 5-9 ad from 2021). For those who haven’t heard of Showit, I like to think of it as what would happen if Wix and WordPress had a baby. When it comes down to it, Squarespace and Showit are both powerful and useful website platforms. I have worked with both for websites for wedding vendors and photographers!

1. Showit vs Squarespace for design flexibility:

Both Showit and Squarespace are designed with DIY web designers in mind. That means that you as a small business owner have the power to update your photography, copywriting, and just about anything else within your website design yourself.

Ultimately, Showit offers more flexibility for design than Squarespace, which gives you the ability to create custom layouts and designs minus the custom code.

2. Templates: who does it better?

Because of Showit’s design flexibility without needing custom code, most Showit templates are more intuitive than Squarespace templates. As a website designer, I’ve worked with both Showit and Squarespace templates, and found that basic sections like Instagram grids in Squarespace had to be customized with at lease some knowledge of code. I worked on a Squarespace template during one of our VIP Days for a client, and quickly found that it would have been very difficult for the client to update her Squarespace site herself.

If you’re just starting out in business and deciding between Showit vs Squarespace, it may be best to start with a Showit template.

3. Powerful mobile design

Having a beautiful, functional mobile website is essential. There is no excuse for why your mobile site shouldn’t be optimized. When it comes down to mobile capabilities, Showit wins the contest. You can definitely customize your mobile site on Squarespace, but it sometimes requires custom code. Squarespace’s Fluid engine update has helped with the mobile design to a certain extent, but a lot of website designers agree that Showit’s mobile design is more flexible than Squarespace’s.

4. Pricing for Showit vs Squarespace

When it comes down to price, Squarespace and Showit are pretty comparable. As of January 2023, Squarespace’s month-to-month business plan is $33/month and Showit’s mid-tier plan that comes with a blog is $29/month. You can get a discount with each platform when you opt to pay annually.

One pro of Squarespace over Showit is that you can host your domain within Squarespace. If you build your website on Showit, you will need to host your domain with a host like GoDaddy, Google Domains, or Bluehost.

5. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Capabilities

Here’s a really, really important concept for everyone to understand: if you are a small business owner and you work with an SEO expert or web designer who tells you that you need to be on a specific platform in order to get your website on the first page of Google, they’re likely wrong. You do not need to be on a specific platform like WordPress or Showit or Squarespace in order to see success with ranking on Google.

Even though I’m a big fan of Showit, I really can’t be biased with this one. Showit and Squarespace both allow for yourself or your website designer to easily customize your Page Titles, metadescriptions, alt text on images, and more. They also both have great blogging capabilities, however Showit has the WordPress blog, which allows you to install Yoast SEO, and that’s one perk that leads me to…

6. The WordPress blog on Showit

Showit is unique in the fact that you get to design your website on showit.co and write your blog posts on WordPress. So, you get the easy design capabilities of Showit and the fantastic blogging capabilities of WordPress. When you work with us at Emily Foster Creative, we’ll set up your blog for you, transfer your old blog posts, and install Yoast SEO on your WordPress blog. Yoast SEO helps you to write blog posts that are optimized to rank higher on Google.

In fact, I’m using Yoast SEO to optimize this blog post as I write it!

7. Showit vs Squarespace: e-commerce capabilities.

When it comes down to selling products online, Squarespace wins… sort of. You can sell products directly through Squarespace websites, which is super convenient for product-based businesses.

However, Showit has a number of integrations that make it possible to sell products on a Showit site. You can integrate the buy button from Shopify Lite or integrate with a shopping cart platform like Thrivecart.

We used Shopify Lite’s buy button to set up an internal rental system for one of our clients, The Heartland Lodge. This was a great way to allow her wedding couples to choose their free rental items but make it easy on the back-end for her to see which items she needed to pull from her inventory prior to the wedding.

At the end of the day, if your main goal with your website is to sell products, you should look into building your site on an e-commerce platform like Shopify.

8. Customer service with Showit vs Squarespace

When I chat with web designer friends, customer service experiences seem to vary. I personally have had better customer support with Wix, Shopify, and Showit vs Squarespace. However, I have web designer friends who are Squarespace Circle members, so they get access to a higher quality level of customer support that I don’t.

Showit offers excellent customer support with access to dedicated support staff, live chat, and knowledge-based resources. Similarly to Squarespace, there are also plenty of resources on YouTube and Google for how to make updates to your Showit website. When you work with us at Emily Foster Creative, we’ll leave you with tutorials on how to update your Squarespace or Showit website, so that you’re never lost on how to make tiny tweaks.

Still confused about which website platform is best for your business? Book a free consultation call with us, and we’ll help you determine what the next best step is for your creative business.