Showit vs Squarespace 2023 : real user test & results!
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squarespace vs showit - in-depth review 2023
Yes, I, the one who has been called the "Squarespace Queen of the Internet" left Squarespace for Showit...
Temporarily.
I'm back now. Let me explain why I moved, where I moved and why I moved back.
To cut a long story short, I wanted to test if the whole "Squarespace sucks for SEO" statement was true in the only way I knew how, moving my whole website, primarily my over 500 blog posts, from Squarespace to Showit (no small feat!)
If you're unfamiliar - Showit uses a WordPress blog, which is thought to be the mustard, when it comes to SEO - in order to see if it made a difference to our SEO and the organic traffic we got from Google.
Wanna know the results? Watch this!
But in today’s post, however I am going to give you an extremelyyy in-depth Squarespace vs Showit comparison as of January 2023.
I've now fully, fully used both platform and friends, I have opinions.
A few years when Showit was new and sexy on the scene I tried Showit, I played around in it for a day, created a mock site and wrote a review of it on my blog and that review was pretty glowing 💖
I loved the complete design freedom, the gorgeous templates, the amazing team and the founder Todd was so lovely he even commented personal thanks on the post.
I also loved about Showit just how much they support their designers, selling their templates on the Showit site and taking their best designers on a trip annually.
Plus they're super engaged in their community hosting what looks like a fantastic conference every year too!
Now however I have actually used Showit in the real world in a proper test drive, having moved all our content onto it and actually using it day in and day out for a few months, and my findings are a bit different than that original review.
I'm going to compare the two platforms on the following categories and then give you my final verdict. We'll compare Squarespace and Showit on:
Features & functionality
Ease of use (eg. buying domain, plugins)
Design capability
Templates
Blogging
SEO
Customer support
Price
Now remember this comparison comes from my own experience. I'm going to point out bits that were relevant to my site but obviously some of this might not be the same for you.
For example I'll speak about integrating Convertkit my email marketing provider and blogging and the price difference of Squarespace and Showit for me.
While the results might be different for you in your unique circumstance, I think that what I'll explain is a very accurate comparison of the platforms for a typical website.
So let’s do this!
Squarespace vs Showit on features and functionality.
Squarespace is known to be an all-in-one platform.
Inside Squarespace you can blog, have your Instagram feed pulled onto the site, have Pinterest pins on the site, have an appointment booking scheduler on your site, buy a domain name, have popups on your site, sell products through an online shop, create customer profile accounts, do your email marketing, have forms, access free or paid stock images, have a built-in anti-spam software, see your analytics, and edit your SEO settings, just to name a few.
A common problem people will complain about with any all-in-one software platforms is that you're often stuck using whatever the built-in option is and sometimes that feature isn't quite up to snuff. I do have to admit, I don't love the Squarespace email marketing system but otherwise I genuinely LOVE 🥰 every built in feature.
Every other feature I would say is 100% up to snuff with competitors which just do that 1 thing.
Showit functionality is much more limited and this is made up for by the use of plugins.
From that list of built-in features you can have in Squarespace automatically, let me show you how many can be natively done inside Showit without adding an additional plugin or software.
Blog
Instagram feed
Pinterest pins
Appointment booking scheduler
Buy a domain name
Sell products through an online shop
Create customer profile accounts
Email marketing
Forms
Free or paid stock images
Anti-spam software
Analytics
Edit SEO settings
😬 …
Now let me clarify, all of these things CAN be done on a Showit site, it's just not built into the platform.
It took one of my team members 3 whole months to move us from Squarespace to Showit, and let me clarify, she's a fantastic, efficient, fast worker, so it wasn't because she was slow or slacking.
The reason it took us so long to move was that for every one of these bits of functionality that was missing, she had to go find a plugin, connect said plugin and troubleshoot the inevitable problems that arose when doing so.
Every time we thought we were ready to launch the site, something else appeared 🤯.
So the winner on the features & functionality front, Squarespace wins by genuinely miles. As you can see here, it honestly isn't even a competition. Squarespace wins this one hands down.
Best for features & functionality: Squarespace
Showit vs Squarespace for ease of use
Both Showit and Squarespace have a drag and drop builder, meaning you add bits to the site like images and text blocks pop them into place. The builder in this regard is honestly pretty on par between the two.
One difference between the builders however is the views.
On Squarespace you can toggle between desktop and mobile view easily. On Showit, you're automatically building on tablet view with the mobile view there too.
Granted, only a fraction of website traffic is on a tablet, so it seems like an odd choice to have that as the main bit you see when building. When you want to see your site on desktop, you need to always be previewing to see how the design you created on tablet looks on desktop and tweak. This is just not very efficient IMHO.
Now the real difference with the ease of use comes back to the plugins thing. With a Showit site, you are absolutely going to need to use plugins. There are a LOT of common website features which 100% of you are going to want that Showit doesn't have.
For example blogging, selling products or services, appointment scheduling, etc. And this is where the problems begin…
Plugins are a real ease-of-use challenge because having a number of plugins just inherently creates problems.
When we were building and moving our site, constantly something was going wrong. In order to see what was causing the issue, one by one we'd need to disable the 8 plugins and refresh to see if that plugin being disabled solved the problem.
And if not, we'd need to disable and test the next one and the next one.
We learned the hard way that not all plugins are compatible with each other, but you won’t know which ones are compatible ahead of time, meaning a lot of time spent testing 🤯!
Granted, if you're a web designer 🖥️ reading this, obviously you'll compile your go-to list of plugins that all play nicely together and this won't be such a problem for you.
If you're building a site for your own business on Showit however, you'll likely run into this same struggle like we did.
Now the second ease-of-use plugins problem is when you're trying to solve these issues you need to contact each plugin support team separately because each plugin is created by a different company.
Which obviously, is a bit of a hassle. I don't want to blame Showit for this, this isn't Showits fault per se, but it is just a fact of using the platform.
Clearly, on the ease of use front, Squarespace takes the lead again, so Squarespace wins this one.
Again, I do want to clarify, Showit itself isn't so much the issue, it's the lack of functionality that you need to fill in with plugins which causes the real ease of use challenges, but that's kinda unavoidable working with the platform.
Best for ease of use: Squarespace
Pst… before I go any further, whichever platform you build on - you’re gonna wanna grab this FREE training on the 4 Simple Steps to Double your Site Sales (make sure to bookmark it for later!!)
Squarespace vs Showit design capability & visuals
Now this is where Showit has always stood out, and it still does 🤩.
Showit gives you COMPLETE design freedom. Showit has always by far and away been the leader in this and it still is, but slightly less so than before thanks to a Squarespace update.
Let me explain it like this, Showit looks like Adobe, you can drag and drop anything anywhere. The freedom is genuinely unlimited.
You can customize the thing down to the last pixel, from header to footer to everything in between. You can get so specific with what you want where and the design which is genuinely incredible. If you want this line to intersect this word at exactlyyyy this spot, you can do it… swoon 🫶
On Squarespace, you can't get quiteee as specific … I'll admit there were some design capabilities in Showit that I as a Squarespace designer lusted after for years.
Squarespace recently caught up, BUT in all honestly still isn't QUITE at Showits level of design capability and visuals.
Lemme explain…
Squarespace recently released their newest editor, Fluid Engine which changed the game for design capability in Squarespace.
Before this, Squarespace operated on a grid of 12, meaning your blocks had to drop in line with that grid. Now the grid has been changed, allowing you to customize the spacing of the grid and making it into a grid of 24.
The numbers however are honestly not important, you don't think about this at all when you're designing it just means you can get an item within half a centimeter of where you want it, but NOT down to the millimetre like you can with Showit. Granted, the difference between this tiny difference in the level of flexibility probably only matters to like 1% of people.
Now I do want to mention, my team member Vicky who was tasked with making the site move for us did say that as much as Showit allows for freedom of style, she didn't love that you don’t have any clear rulers to easily drag and drop blocks to a specific grid, you just put them wherever you want and then use align buttons to make some sort of an aligned design. (There are rulers on the left side of builder but you can’t drag them so she didn’t find them helpful).
This makes it time-consuming to create designs that are structured.
Showit is the winner on this one.
Best for design capability: Showit
Showit vs Squarespace for Templates
On the visuals front, I do have to say, I personally am more a fan of Showits template options, probably the platform caters to women like me with a certain asethetic ✨, and so from the templates perspective, Showits built-in templates are more my vibe.
Granted, as a web designer, I'm not actually using templates, I'm building sites from scratch so template style isn't as important to me but I realize for the average business owner who wants to build a site quickly, and isn't that interested in building a fully custom site, this would be more important to them.
If you don't like the Showit vibe, this would be a negative and not a positive for you, as all their templates definitely appeal to a certain style, whereas Squarespace has a bit more variety in their template styles.
So this is kind of hard to give a rating on because I think my personal style makes me want to give Showit a better rating, BUTTT for someone with a different style it'd be a negative. So I'll just go ahead and give both platforms a tie.
Best for templates: it’s a tie
Showit vs Squarespace for blogging
Squarespace has a built-in blog platform, Showit doesn't.
Meaning you need to use a WordPress blog and do your actual content creation in WordPress ✍️, and it gets basically pulled into your Showit "theme" when the post is published.
The real pain in Showit we found was when we were trying to pull a preview of say the most recent 6 blog posts on our blog onto the home page.
There are different types of pages in Showit, and only a blog page can pull blog content in, so we needed to create our home page as a blog page in order to pull a few blog posts onto it, which wasn't just not as convenient as Squarespace and it's ability to pull any blog content onto anywhere on the site with a summary block.
The actual blogging experience and functionality is similar enough between the two (once you've added all the plugins), I would however give Squarespace the edge on the ease of writing posts.
Why?
I find the blog editor in Squarespace a lot more enjoyable to use as you can see the post on the site as it would look published as you're creating it.
Basically, as you're writing in WordPress, you see the WordPress default font, and only when you hit preview you can see the headings and paragraphs populate with the fonts that you've set up in Showit… it therefore takes a bit more time and it’s less intuitive as you go back n forth between views
Winner in blogging goes ever so slightly to Squarespace for a better blogging experience and less plugin headache.
Best for BLOGGINg: squarespace
Showit vs Squarespace for SEO
Soooo important!
And people for the longest time always argued, WordPress has superior SEO… but what’s the truth of the matter 🤷♀️?
In both Showit and Squarespace you have access to some tools in the back end to tweak your SEO settings and description. But the main SEO factor we noticed that was different on the two platforms was our Google Page Speed Insights report was much better on Showit than on Squarespace…📈
BUT that made no difference in real terms in the end… The difference in our traffic when on Squarespace and Showit was nothing. We were getting 30,000 pageviews on Squarespace and we continued to get 30,000 pageviews on Showit - see the full breakdown here.
Organic traffic is our main traffic source by a long shot and we noticed absolutely no difference in ranking or traffic from being on one platform or the other. So both platforms are even for me here and tie.
The lesson here is truly, the quality of your content is what matters to your SEO rank, not the platform your site is on.
Best for seo: it’s a tie
Pst… Make sure to grab my free content creation outlines to help your SEO whatever platform you’re on! 👇👇👇
Showit vs Squarespace for customer support
Both companies have well-trained and educated support agents who can genuinely help with your problem 💁🏻.
Granted, we did get a fair bit of copying & pasting from the FAQ section with Showit support which isn't super helpful when you've already read the FAQ… but… Squarespace has also done this to us in the past too (slap on the wrists for both of ya!
However with Squarespace you have the option for live chat instead of just email support which is faster. And when they link you to some article you can quickly say "I already read that and it didn't solve my problem" and then get to the real solution quicker.
I find live chat generally more helpful when you have a complex problem versus just email support which Showit offers.
So thanks to live chat for customer support, Squarespace is the winner.
Best for customer support: squarespace
Showit vs Squarespace for Price
The Squarespace plan we were on, the Business plan, costs $33 paid monthly.
The Showit plan we were on cost us $69 month.
So double the price for Showit 💰💰💰!
Pricing for Showit is dependent on two things though
1. Traffic to your site and
2. The amount of storage you need.
So as your website gets bigger and more traffic, Squarespace becomes increasingly cheaper in comparison (the price on Squarespace regardless of storage, and visitors, remains the same).
So for price, Squarespace is the winner.
Best for price: squarespace
Which brings me to the final results, or as they say in England, my new home - the scores on the doors!
features & functionality: Squarespace
Ease of use: Squarespace
Design capability: Showit
Templates: the platforms tie
Blogging: Squarespace
SEO: the platforms tie
Customer support: Squarespace
Price: Squarespace
So that's 5 wins for Squarespace🏅🏅🏅🏅🏅, 1 for Showit 🏅 and 2 ties 🤝🤝, making Squarespace my undisputed winner of the Showit vs Squarespace debate 2023!
Now if at the end of all of this you've decided that Squarespace will be your platform of choice, there's 1 vital thing you need to learn to do next…
figure out how to use SQUARESPACE!!!
Lucky for you, right here I put together a complete Squarespace tutorial. So if you're new to Squarespace and want someone to lead you through it, be sure to watch the video below!