SQUARESPACE IS SHITE

I wrote a blog post some time ago about my dissatisfaction with Squarespace, the company who hosts this website. In particular, I noted that my website was stuck in their older 7.0 engine and that in order to enjoy the new 7.1 version, I would have had to start again from scratch and pay $192 a year instead of the $120 I’m paying now. No thanks.

An artist's impression of a person viewing Squarespace's pricing plans (allegedly).

Last week I receievd an email from them telling me that they were going to increase my subscription to $138 a year because it “helps support the significant improvements we continue to make to the Squarespace platform every year.” Yeah, all those improvements that I don’t get because my webiste is locked into the old 7.0 engine, which has seen no new features in a decade.

I started looking a round at alternatives. Sadly, the prices of the main competitor, Wix, aren’t any better, and they seem as shitty as Squarespace from what I’ve read. What to do?

I contacted Squarespace and in the course of our conversation it was revealed that it is actually now possible to port a 7.0 website to the 7.1 engine. So, yes, my costs would go from $120 to $138, but I’d finally be able to get my hands on all those exciting new features!

There was a catch, though. Only two families of templates could be ported to the 7.1 engine. Naturally, mine wasn’t one of them, so first I had to convert my site to a compliant one, which was time-consuming and tricky, but wasn’t actually too bad.

Then came the time to convert it to 7.1. I had been warned that some things wouldn’t transfer over too well, and that turned out to be true - the blog was a complete mess and I’ve had to add a content description and a photo for every single post - quite a bit of work. Then I noticed that the ‘likes’ hadn’t been transferred over. I did some research and found that Squarespace just didn’t bother to include this most basic of functions in their new blog. Two years into the new engine and it still hasn’t been fixed, despite complaints.

"Why the fork is there no 'like' button any more?"

Worse still, all of my music didn’t port over. Squarespace used to have this great ‘album’ template which made it so easy to upload your tracks into a nice little player. For some reason they decided we didn’t need this any more. I had to manually make each page for my releases, and then after finally making a fairly decent looking template of my own, discovered that the mobile view is completely forked up. If you open one of my music pages on your iPhone, the songs get diverted to Apple’s own music player, and then give the listener the option to download my track for free, FFS! Again, I found a fix for this online - some kind soul had written some code to correct this - but guess what - you can only inject your own code if you have one of the premium subscriptions!

In additon, some of the buttons in the mobile view come out incorrectly shaped, and I haven’t yet found any explanation or fix for this.

So there we have it. Squarespace is one of those companies which is concerned with getting as much money as possible out of its customers without even bothering to provide or fix the basic functionality that existed in the earlier 7.0 engine. They probably know that rebuilding a site from scratch is such a daunting task that most people will stick with them even though they keep increasing prices and not fixing things.

If you ever think about having a website, avoid Squarespace at all costs.