Choosing your fate
Updated January 2021 • 3,700 words • 15 min read
There are many ways to make a site out there and there are many tables comparing their features out there, too. I’m not going to do that. I’m only going to talk about two platforms: Squarespace and WordPress. And they both kinda suck for less technical people because y’all want webpages to work like presentation slides. They just don’t. Code is fussy and it’s hard. But Squarespace and WordPress do the best job of making it easier and you should choose one of them.
Option 1: Squarespace
Acknowledging the elephant in the room: this site was built with Squarespace. I would have published this on Medium except it got long, and Medium doesn’t allow anchor links (that’s linking to a specific section on a long page), and I wanted this to be easy to hop around.
I have to admit, I tried WordPress first. Squarespace was easier! But I also don’t need this site to do very much. I am my own case study, and you can see a lot of my recommendations in action around this site.
Foolproof (and restrictive)
These descriptions come hand-in-hand, just like flexibility comes with fragility (more about that in WordPress).
Squarespace comes with a bunch of layouts out of the box and you get to edit them right on the page, instead of editing inside an inscrutable WYSIWYG edit box. Even the mobile page editor is about as painless as Google Docs. They look good. They’re hard to break. They’re easy to replicate. It Just Works.
The other side of that coin is that if you want anything too specific, Squarespace might just not let you do it, or make you enter a wild world of premium customizations that would be free and laughably simple with WordPress.
For example, no Squarespace template has a sidebar. This Squarespace developer sells a plugin that gets you a sidebar (that has to be on every page, and the same on every page) for $49, and they have a number of other plugins that will help you achieve your special vision for your site, and not just Squarespace’s.
But even plain ole Squarespace…
Flexible enOUGH?
Let me paint a picture: you built a site. You never thought you’d want a photo gallery. Then one night, you can’t sleep. The humming you can never find the source of has started up again. Suddenly, you realize you need a big grid of pictures of your pets on your About page (amazing idea). Don’t worry, Squarespace user. There’s a layout for that. Insert, replace stock with your own photos, done.
Adding a section in Squarespace 7.1.
On WordPress, you’d need to find a plugin, install the plugin, learn how to use the plugin, and assess hundreds of customization options... easy enough, and worth the hassle if you need the power of WordPress for other things, but Squarespace just says, “this is probably what you want,” and if they’re right, you have a gallery of your pets now and you can finally fall asleep.
If you can be satisfied by Squarespace’s vision, you’re on easy street.
Notes
This looks like a sidebar (on desktops), but I HAD TO HACK IT
Generic (but that’s not necessarily a bad thing)
Not only do all Squarespace sites look the same, they look a lot like… most sites on the internet these days. Squarespace makes it really easy to choose free stock photography from Unsplash, and with their latest 7.1 update, they offer pre-selected color palettes and font combinations, too, adding to the potential conformity.
But in my opinion? That’s okay. Especially for authors and other book people, the focus should be on what you have to say. That flat design you see everywhere allows the look and feel to disappear, and for book covers and brilliant words to take the spotlight.
Everything in one place
Squarespace gives you your SSL certificate, backups, domain registration, performance analytics, email marketing, membership areas, appointment scheduling, and ecommerce all in one place, with one login, one charge on your bank statement, one interface to learn, one customer service form when you need help.
They’re gonna charge you for it, though, and you could probably piece together the same services for less money. If you’re happy with Squarespace as a site provider, and simplicity is more important to you than minmaxing your web budget, you can’t beat Squarespace for ease of use.
Secure
Squarespace simply promises that your site is going to be kept secure. What version of PHP are you running? Squarespace users don’t care. You never need to think about it.
But don’t forget about your password
The most essential part of keeping any site secure is making sure all your users’ passwords are secure. I mean really secure. What’s a secure password? I’m gonna let Namecheap tell you about it.
If your sibling helped you with your site once, and you made them their own user (good idea), and they haven’t been involved in months, remove their access for now. You can set it up again later. But you can’t depend on bitches’ safe password practices!
Option 2: WordPress (self-hosted)
First of all, WordPress.org and WordPress.com are two different things. WordPress.org is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) run by a nonprofit, the WordPress Foundation. WordPress.com is a commercial implementation of that CMS, run by a private company, Automattic Inc. (that’s the company that bought Tumblr). Get yo coin, Automattic, but I’m not going to recommend .com to almost anyone.
Why do I recommend self-hosted? It’s more involved to set up, but it does WordPress better in every way. If you want the simplicity of WordPress.com, get Squarespace. WordPress.com’s pricing is confusing, and they have a tantalizing $4/month option — but I promise, for comparable features, it costs the same as Squarespace. If you want the flexibility I talk about below, you’re going to want WordPress.org.
Cheaper (depending on your host)
With WordPress.org, all you absolutely need to pay for is hosting for the server where your site lives. Dreamhost is a solid host and you can get a site hosted for less than $30 a year.
WordPress can also quickly get more expensive as you add on premium plugins. If you buy a plugin, sign up for the shortest amount of time available to begin with, add it to your list of expenses, and once your site is launched, make sure the total cost feels justified to you. If it doesn’t, restructure your site without it.
Premium plugins aren’t a bad thing. Some have unethical pricing schemes, some are poorly built, and some simply weren’t built to do what you wanted them for, and those are all bad plugins to use at all, never mind pay for.
All good plugins are the result of developers working hard to help you with your website and charging to license that work is one way developers are able to pay rent. You’re usually subsidizing a free version that they maintain for anyone to use. Support good developers!
Every website owner just needs to balance the worthy goal of paying developers with other realities like:
keeping money for themselves,
keeping their site secure, and
making sure their plugins serve their site as effective and meaningful problem-solvers.
Notes
Many premium plugins charge for the first download and “one year of updates.” Do you really need to pay for another year just for updates? You don’t need all the latest and greatest features, right? Maybe not, but you do need access to their security updates to keep your site safe. Every plugin cost should be considered ongoing unless you specifically opt into a “lifetime” plan.
Secure (but it’s up to you to keep it that way)
Do you think security doesn’t really matter for you because your site is too small to be worth hacking into? Let me change your mind! First of all, most bad actors aren’t actively focused on their neon green text, trying to hack into a specific network. They’ve written scripts that automatically find places to mess up and then automatically try to mess them up. Your site might get found.
Even if it’s not, keeping your site secure is part of being a good neighbor on the internet. If I ran your site’s HOA, I’d encourage you to paint your mailbox pink and run a raccoon rescue in the front yard, but I’d insist you keep your doors and windows locked. If a neighborhood — i.e. sites that run WordPress — is known for being easy to break into, every house is more in danger. Invest in your community, my friends.
A WordPress site is complex and every part of it has security implications. (So is every site, but Squarespace makes the complexity invisible.)
Server
Your server handles some things that impact the security of your site, like what version of PHP is installed. I won’t go into all the details, but if you’re site is built with PHP (like WordPress sites), at the end of 2018, to keep your site secure, you had to make sure your site was was running PHP 7, which was a pretty big leap from the widely used PHP 5. Any decent host should have warned its users that they had to update to 7, and make it easy to do so, but you had to pay attention to those warnings and, if the big leap broke your site, you had to notice that, and figure out how to fix it. That kind of update could happen again. It could be annoying.
WordPress core
WordPress core has regular updates, and some of them have security implications. (Security updates have “security” in the name.) Security updates’ changelog necessarily describe exactly what the vulnerability was, and makes it easy for a bad actor to exploit that vulnerability in sites that haven’t run that update. In other words, if you don’t update in a timely way, you’re handing the bank vault blueprints to the heist team. Run your updates! Most servers are set up to allow automatic updates, but you should make a habit to check that updates didn’t break anything important on your site.
Plugins
Plugins (should) also have regular updates, and they need to be paying attention to core updates. If a plugin hasn’t been updated in 2+ years, you shouldn’t be using it. Plugins use tools provided by WordPress core. If WordPress changes something a plugin uses, and the plugin doesn’t update itself to account for that, your site will break. If two plugins use the thing WordPress changed, and only one updates, the functionality of both may be broken until they both release updates (and you run the updates). Most annoyingly, it’s up to you to notice something is wrong, and figure out where the problem is. The world of WordPress plugins is robust enough now that if you stick with popular, well-supported plugins and keep everything updated, you should be fine.
Because WordPress ecosystem is a bunch of different developers are working together, no one is going to take responsibility for your site working the way Squarespace does. You can’t break Squarespace. (Or, at least, Squarespace customer service should be able to point at the specific third-party code or custom CSS that’s at fault.) You can break WordPress in so many different ways. But with that fragility comes —
Flexibility (with some elbow grease)
Are there things WordPress can do that Squarespace can’t? So many things! It’s ahead of Squarespace on a few quality of life details, too, like edit revisions, and adding links to copy. In WordPress, if you highlight text and paste a URL, boom — the text is linked! In Squarespace, that takes like four clicks.
Squarespace offers solutions to a lot of more common needs, like ecommerce and scheduling and limiting some site content to members, but WordPress can do all that and basically anything else you can dream up. You can build a library collection and circulation system, or install an LMS (Learning Management System) to host courses like Udemy, or add a falling snowflakes animation at Christmastime.
However, in most cases, you need to be more technical, or prepared to pay someone more technical, to achieve those dreams. If you don’t know where the technical expertise is coming from, the unlimited, unreachable possibilities of WordPress might end up being more frustrating than fun.
But also restrictive (sometimes): a note on themes
There are basically as many ways to build a WordPress site as there are developers. If you try three different themes, you will have three different experiences, and you could have three radically different experiences, some much more pleasant than others.
You want to find a theme that has a bunch of pre-built components you can use on any page. Hey, that sounds just like Squarespace, doesn’t it? The difference is you can also do everything else.
Since 2018, WordPress comes with a page builder out of the box, with a tool you might hear called “Gutenberg,” “the WordPress Editor,” “blocks,” or some combination of the three. This is a notoriously hated update, and now two years later, the plugin that brings back the old page editor is still one of the most popular out there. Successfully using blocks comes down to your theme, and a lot of themes don’t take advantage of them.
I categorize themes like this:
Themes made by the official WordPress developers (WordPress.org-authored themes / Automattic-authored themes) — these are all built very similarly to each other and with WordPress best practices because the WordPress did it themselves. That means they’re free, the recent ones use blocks, they’ll be kept secure, and they’ll be easy and well-documented to develop on.
Free themes by other developers. These run the gamut on how secure they’ll be kept and how nice they’ll be to use — but they’re free, so you could spend your whole life trying them out if you wanted to!
Paid themes by other developers. These run exactly the same gamut as free themes, but you have to pay for them to figure out if they’re nice. I don’t recommend any paid theme as a rule, unless you’re getting a direct recommendation from someone you know — the benefit of having someone to talk to about your site outweighs most drawbacks.
Elementor. This is actually a plugin, but it provides a page builder interface like Squarespace. It isn’t as foolproof as Squarespace, but it comes with a lot of the same benefits, way more customization options, and you can still take advantage of all the other things WordPress can do. It costs money, but this is one of the only paid layout helpers I’d recommend. It comes with really robust documentation of its own, plus tons of third-party tutorials. One of the greatest potential pain points of other paid themes is that you might end up one of a half dozen buyers getting ignored in a support forum, and there’s no chance of that with Elementor. You are not alone.
…Other stuff. For a while it felt like all the themes I looked at had to do with something called Genesis. I still don’t know what that is.
Your theme changes how the site looks, but it also has a huge impact on your WordPress admin experience. Try out a few themes just to see how things change. It will open up your mind to the possibilities.
And back to security for a second: backup your site
Shit happens, especially if you’re playing around on your server, and you could lose everything. Your server might keep backups automatically (Dreamhost does), but it probably doesn’t guarantee them, and it will be involved to actually restore your site with. UpdraftPlus is a great free option for easy restoration.
What about Wix or Weebly or another option?
Nah. I mean, go for it, but in my experience, you’ll be happier with Squarespace or WordPress, depending on your needs. That said, I only have longterm, regular experience working with WordPress and Squarespace (and Drupal, which is a terrific CMS, but I don’t recommend it to most types of bookish website havers), so I’m not in a good position to talk about them — and I’m suspect of the many lists that compare them all. It’s hard to believe they come from a place of genuine user experience. I care about features, but I care more about vibes.
All that said, @recitrachel and @VickyCBooks make their YA release databases (2020 / 2021) with Tumblr, and while that sounds so painful to me, and I’ve never heard of a more WordPressy project in my life, the databases look fantastic and the creators seem happy, so who’s the clown here? I’m the clown. If you’re willing to put in the work, you can make magic happen with anything.
Who wins?
NO WAY SUCKER, IT DEPENDS
Already on Squarespace?
If you’re pretty happy with Squarespace, I can assure you that the grass is a different shade of green on the other side, but not greener.
If Squarespace is feeling expensive, compare costs with getting the same services elsewhere. Make sure there are savings to be had.
If Squarespace is feeling restrictive, I’d still compare costs, and consider the effort required to transition your analytics, mailing list, and all of your content (though Squarespace gives you an export, a simple import might lose a lot of details — you’ll either have some manual work on your hands, or some technically sophisticated updates to the import file). If you want more functionality, it’s very well worth a higher cost, but you should know what you’re signing up for.
If you fully hate your current Squarespace site, I actually really recommend you try Squarespace 7.1. It’s even more restrictive than previous versions, but that can be a good thing (see above). It also comes with some great annoyance fixers, like not having to update fonts and colors in a hundred places. “Updating” to 7.1 actually means making a whole new website, but you can import your content to save some time. It’s worth the 2-week trial, and Squarespace will give you a full month trial if you ask them.
If you already have 7.1 and don’t like it, that’s good evidence that WordPress might be a better fit.
Just keep in mind that all websites are annoying in their own special ways. No new platform is going to fix that.
Already on WordPress?
If you’re pretty happy with WordPress, I can assure you that the grass is a different shade of green on the other side, but not greener. (If you take nothing else away from this, please make sure you’re keeping all your stuff up-to-date.)
If it’s feeling painful to use, review all plugins and make sure you really need all of them. If it’s the way your theme works, or a particular plugin, replace them! That kind of change could improve your experience wildly and would be way easier than moving to a whole different platform.
But if you’re excited for little project, and WordPress seriously feels like more house than you need, try out Squarespace.
Already on Wix or Weebly or something else?
Squarespace will probably feel like a better version of the same thing. WordPress will make more complex functionality easier to implement. And like any site provider you might be with, if you’re pretty happy, I can assure you that the grass is a different shade of green on the other side, but not greener. The GoDaddy Website Builder, along with every other GoDaddy offering, is the only one I categorically do not recommend. GoDaddy is the worst.
tldr?
Squarespace. If this was too much reading, you want Squarespace.
Published author?
You gotta read the above and decide what’s going to work best — but my advice to most authors is Squarespace.
Aspiring published author?
You don’t need a website! Honestly, you don’t need a site until you’re ready to announce your first book cover. If you want to write about the writing process or the publishing process, use Medium. If you want a web presence, use Twitter and Instagram. If you really really want a presence off of social media, use Carrd.
Established reviewer?
WordPress can be really cool for people who talk about a lot of different books, and it can save you a lot of time. With the magic of a true CMS, you can input book information once and display it in dozens of different places. You need to be down to learn some code or hire a developer to make that magic happen, but being on WordPress already could be a shortcut when you finally decide to commit the time or money. (There are also plenty of situations where already being on WordPress would make no difference.)
Squarespace should also work well enough for you!
New reviewer?
I’d love for you to try some combination of Goodreads + Medium + Caard. If you want a room of your own, this is a rare moment I’d recommend the free version of WordPress.com because it’s free and that price is right to get you started. Tumblr is also a great option, for all its flaws, and comes with some extra promotion built-in. If you’re willing to pay, start out with Squarespace.
Booktuber?
What’s your website going to do that your channel doesn’t?
If you can’t answer that, don’t make a site. If you really really want a web presence off of YouTube, use Carrd.
If you can answer that question, I bet Squarespace will work.
Small press?
WordPress! You’re gonna want some of that fancy stuff.
Coordinating an anthology or lit journal or mentoring program or writing event?
If you mostly want to help people talk to each other, consider a Slack or Discord server and a really simple (Squarespace) site.
If more of the magic needs to happen on the site itself, you’ll do better with WordPress — or maybe Drupal, but you’ll absolutely need to budget for developer support for a Drupal site.