Wordpress vs. Squarespace vs. ShowIt: How to Choose the Right Web Platform for Your Service-Based Business

… and what I ultimately chose

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Picture this: You have a brilliant idea that you want to share with the world, and you want to create a business around it. You don’t have the money upfront to hire a web designer, so you know, at least initially, it will be a DIY project. As you begin researching where to host your website, you come across countless opinions stating that WordPress is the best option. Some people even claim you’re not serious if you’re not using WordPress. 

Then you notice that some people are using Squarespace to create really beautiful sites! And, Squarespace has a lot of bells and whistles. Sure, they add on to the price, but they’re convenient! To complicate matters further, you discover a gorgeous website built on ShowIt. Now you don’t know where to start!

Sound familiar? I’ve spoken with many entrepreneurs, artists, and others who have faced similar challenges when deciding how and where to host their websites. It’s a big decision, and whether you hire someone else to build it or do it yourself, it’s a HUGE investment of time and/or money. So, how do you even begin to figure out what’s right for you?

Why trust me?

I am not a web designer. I am an artist and educator who now runs a coaching business focusing on confidence, communication, and financial literacy. Over the years, I built several portfolio websites for myself on various platforms, starting with iWeb (yep, I know I’m dating myself on that one), then WordPress, and then Squarespace. These websites were built to help me get gigs, get into grad school, and eventually secure university faculty positions. I sweated every single detail of these sites.

As a college professor, I taught a portfolio class with a unit dedicated to building digital portfolios. In this unit, students were assigned different web-building platforms to evaluate, allowing us to collectively discuss which options would work best for their individual needs.

And now, as a coach and solopreneur, I’ve built another website using Squarespace (I’ll explain why later). With my prior experience, I understood what I needed from a website and how I wanted it to function. However, I still took the time to research and explore my options, recognizing that these platforms are constantly evolving.

While I may not be an expert in web design, I am certainly familiar with the decision-making process and have been in the shoes of a newbie solopreneur just trying to make the best decision for their fledgling business. It can be a lot, and it can cause anxiety, but I hope I can help you make an informed decision about which platform to choose.

We’ll examine what you need when starting a website and then discuss various builders, along with their benefits and potential drawbacks. 

**Note:** My assessment of WordPress and Squarespace is based on hands-on experience and extensive research. Although I have not personally used ShowIt, I have thoroughly researched it to provide an informed evaluation.

Understand What You Need

First, take a deep breath. Before choosing which site builder you are going to use, it is important to understand all of the things you will need while building your website:

Domain Name: This is the address people type into their browser to visit your site. You can purchase a domain through registrars like GoDaddy, Network Solutions, Namecheap or Squarespace.

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate:  SSL is the technology that encrypts information exchanged between the website and the user. It distinguishes URLs that start with “http://” from those that begin with “https://”.   An SSL certificate is an important layer of security that you can purchase when you purchase hosting for your site. Some hosting platforms include SSL with purchase, others don’t, so it is up to you to make sure you have it. Having an SSL certificate can potentially boost SEO (search engine optimization).

Hosting: You need a place to store your website content, and this is where hosting comes into play. Some website builders also act as hosting platforms, meaning your content resides on their servers, and you build your site using their tools. For other builders, like self-hosted WordPress sites through WordPress.org (as opposed to the hosted version at WordPress.com), you will need to secure hosting through one of many available providers. The costs for hosting vary based on what you need, so you will want to do some comparison shopping.

Building Tools: You need a way to design and build your site. Platforms like ShowIt and Squarespace provide drag-and-drop builders for this purpose, while WordPress offers themes that you can customize or allows you to purchase themes or additional drag-and-drop builders.

Mobile Optimization: Most people will look at your site on a mobile device, so it is critical to ensure that your site looks good everywhere. Most website editors will show you the desktop view, so you want to make sure that your editor offers you a mobile view that you can edit as well.

There are additional factors to consider if you are selling services, such as payment processing, client resource management (CRM), e-mail marketing, and others that I’m sure I’m missing, but let’s focus on the basics right now.

WordPress

For our purposes, we are discussing self-hosted WordPress sites that can be accessed through WordPress.org. This assessment does not apply to WordPress.com.

I have built and rebuilt a few portfolio sites for myself in WordPress. At the time, there weren’t builders as robust as Squarespace or ShowIt, so WordPress made the most sense. 

Since a self-hosted WordPress site isn’t hosted by WordPress, I had to purchase my domain name, hosting and SSL certificate from another provider. Not too terrible, and I could buy all of that from the same provider, allowing me to manage everything in one place.

Once my site was up and running, I spent a lot of time looking through the free themes available on WordPress.org, but I realized that they didn’t really meet my needs. I discovered I could purchase a premium theme, so I spent days finding one that I could customize and make my own. Since then, various drag-and-drop themes have been designed for WordPress, opening up many possibilities. But themes are going to cost you extra. And not every theme is going to work on mobile, so you have to make sure those themes are mobile-optimized.

Next, I had to consider the functionalities I wanted for my site, which meant I would need to purchase plugins. While some plugins are free, many come with a price tag. Do you want a tag cloud? You’ll need a plugin. Looking for better SEO insights? Another plugin. Want a contact form? Yep, that’s a plugin, too.

Plugins are great because they allow you to add things to your site without having to code. The drawback, however, is that you must stay on top of them and keep them updated. If your plugins are out of date, parts of your site can break, and if you are not paying regular attention to your site, it might get wonky.

I found this with my portfolio sites. I only updated them when I added a new piece to my portfolio, usually once a month at most. I didn’t like coming to my site and seeing surprises.

What I did like was being able to see the backend of my site via FTP. It allowed me to do a lot of customization that I wouldn’t have been able to handle otherwise. Having worked in publishing, I was familiar with managing the backend of a website, so this access was invaluable. For tech-savvy people, this might be a reason to choose WordPress. You can view the file structure, rename files, move them around, and more. While I’m a bit out of practice in this area now, and it holds less significance for me, it remains a fantastic feature for technically inclined users.

In the end, WordPress is robust, and you can do so much with it. But there are a lot of costs associated with it beyond hosting and domains. The costs of premium themes and plugins add up quickly. You must also ensure that you consistently update them to maintain the latest versions of both themes and plugins and the WordPress software itself. As a solopreneur responsible for all aspects of my business, that’s more plates than I want to have to spin at once. Despite its impressive features and value, I decided to explore other options.

Squarespace

Squarespace is an all-in-one platform that allows you to host and design your website and blog. Squarespace can provide your domain name for an additional, reasonable cost. If you’re just starting a business, the Core plan offers many features, and you can always upgrade to a higher-tier plan as your needs grow. Everything they offer is mobile-optimized, and when designing your site, you can easily switch between mobile and desktop views to ensure it looks great on any device.

If you don’t want to start from scratch, Squarespace offers a variety of templates. They also have an AI site builder, which I haven’t tried. If you don’t like Squarespace’s templates, there are options. If you have the budget, you can hire a designer, or for a fraction of the cost, you can purchase a template. I bought my template from Big Cat Creative, which made the process easier. Their designs and layouts are far more aesthetically pleasing than Squarespace’s. Plus, I was able to purchase social media templates for my theme, as well.

Some find Squarespace a bit limiting because you can’t fully control everything on the site. However, the Core plan and above allow you to inject custom code onto your site, enabling you to customize your site. And, there are many sites out there devoted to custom code for Squarespace sites, so even if the thought of coding sends chills up your spine, you can likely find the exact code you need, complete with a tutorial for how to get it up on your site.

You can sell products and services from your site directly with Squarespace, and their processing fees are competitive. This allows you to keep much of your workflow on one platform, which is a plus for many.

Squarespace offers extras like e-mail campaigns and marketing. While these come at an additional cost, having a one-stop shop for your business needs is beneficial, especially when starting out and managing multiple tasks.

One area where Squarespace shines is that it imposes no traffic limits on your site. This means you’ll pay the same rate whether your site receives 1 or 15,000 visits. Other hosts charge more as your number of visitors increases. With Squarespace, you can predict your expenses without any surprises.

On the downside, Squarespace lacks a straightforward way to download your site for backup. In contrast, WordPress allows you to access FTP files for offline backups. While Squarespace does back up sites on their end, users do not have access to those backups. You may face challenges if something goes wrong or you wish to migrate your site. This may be less of an issue for smaller sites, but for those with blogs, podcasts, or other regularly updated content, it could create complications.

However, the benefits of Squarespace outweigh the drawbacks. It can serve as a comprehensive solution for small businesses, simplifying management by keeping everything in one place. Moreover, it enables you to create beautiful websites relatively quickly, allowing you to get up and running as soon as possible. For those who are not particularly tech-savvy, a wealth of help articles and supportive message boards are available to assist you.

Showit

A caveat: I have not used Showit, so my assessment here is based on my research rather than first-person experience.

I’m seeing more and more sites designed with Showit, and they are absolutely beautiful! Showit is a drag-and-drop site builder that people tout as being super easy to use. Like Squarespace and WordPress, there are templates available for site building. If you don’t like the available free templates, there are plenty of businesses that specialize in designing Showit sites from scratch or sell templates so that you can have a well-designed DIY.

Their sites are mobile-optimized, and in their editor, you can see both the mobile site and the desktop site as you build, ensuring your site looks amazing no matter how it is viewed.

If you want to blog on Showit, you’ll have to use WordPress. Yep, Showit doesn’t have a native blog on its platform. It works with WordPress, so it is more of a hybrid model. This is beneficial because you gain the powerful blogging capabilities of WordPress while your blog inherits the design properties of your Showit site. If you decide to change your site’s design, all your blog posts will automatically reflect those changes. If you are already blogging with WordPress but want a better design solution, you can migrate your blog to Showit, and it should work seamlessly.

On the flip side, managing multiple platforms can complicate your workflow. As someone who built audio systems professionally, I believe in minimizing points of failure; the more platforms involved, the higher the potential for issues. If something goes wrong, I prefer not to track problems across different systems.

You don’t get blogging with Showit’s lowest-tier plan, so if you want to blog, you must invest in the mid-tier plan to get that functionality. And, you don’t get FTP functionality until you are on the top-tier plan, which is relatively expensive when just starting out. Additionally, Showit limits the number of site visits you can get per month, so if you exceed that number, expect to pay more.

If I were creating a static site without blog functionality, I would seriously consider Showit both for the visuals of its builder and because the resulting site is gorgeous. Or, if I already had a WordPress blog but was tired of doing everything on WordPress, Showit could be a good option.

Which Web Builder Did I Choose?

I chose Squarespace. I’ve used WordPress before, and this time around, I was really tempted to try out Showit. However, in the end, Squarespace provided the best value for me and allowed me to simplify my process as I began a new business. While WordPress can be robust and provide endless options, I don’t want to spend a bunch of time checking to make sure that my website works every time something on the platform updates. Been there, done that. I cannot hire someone to take care of it for me, and I’m not sure when I will be, so it isn’t an option. Additionally, while Showit is beautifully designed, I didn’t want to navigate two separate platforms for my site, and the monthly traffic limits were a deterrent. Although my traffic will be low initially, I want to avoid unexpected costs as I grow.

Squarespace’s pricing is straightforward and more than reasonable for what you get. And starting out, it can be a one-stop-shop for all your website needs. Sure, as you grow, you’ll likely need to find additional tools like CRM as you grow your client list, but you don’t necessarily need it right away with a Squarespace site, especially with some of their add-ons like Acuity Scheduling.

That said, I wouldn’t discourage anyone from exploring the other options mentioned. Each platform has benefits and drawbacks; what works for me may not work for you. When deciding, consider what is most important to you and be prepared to find new solutions as your business evolves. While you may strive to choose a platform that will last as long as possible, remember to prioritize what suits your current needs. You will likely undergo several redesigns over the years, allowing you to reassess your requirements at those times. Select a solution that is best for you now and in the near future, but don’t be surprised if changes are necessary along the way.

Ready to start a new chapter but need a boost of confidence to get started? Schedule your free consultation to see if confidence coaching will work for you!