Why Squarespace is the perfect web platform for authors
On some of my trawls of the internet researching author websites, I’ve found a few articles suggesting that Squarespace isn’t a good platform for author websites.
(I’ll save you my horror and indignation here!)
I also constantly hear how Wordpress is the best platform for author websites. Don’t get me wrong - Wordpress is great. I used it myself for many, many years.
But it has some serious drawbacks and significant flaws, which is why I switched my website and blog over to Squarespace in 2018, and haven’t looked back since.
Anyway, the main arguments I found against using Squarespace for your author website seemed to be that the templates only look good if you have stunning photography (when obviously most author websites are pretty light on images), and also that it was expensive.
While I’ll agree that Squarespace’s template demos do use amazing photography, I would argue that it’s perfectly possible to create a beautiful author website with hardly any images at all, using fabulous typography and clever layout.
Take a look at my portfolio if you don’t believe me ;)
And as for Squarespace being expensive - let me just say that nothing is as ‘free’ as it seems. With Wordpress you still have to pay for your hosting and domain, and most of the time you’ll want to buy a template too (yes, you can download free ones but they are rarely great quality).
And then there are the ongoing support and maintenance costs. If something breaks with your Wordpress site, how are you going to fix it? What will you do if your site is hacked?
More often than not you’ll find yourself paying expensive developer fees or using premium plugins such as Sucuri to keep your site safe. It all adds up.
So, to redress the balance, allow me to present five reasons why Squarespace is the perfect platform for your author website…
1) Squarespace is super secure
Let me tell you a story - before I got my book deal, I decided to set up a children’s interiors blog (this sounds random, but I worked as an interiors journalist, had just had a baby and was really interested in kids’ interiors at the time!). I spent a lot of time writing content for the site, bought an off-the-shelf Wordpress template, and then spent ages tweaking it so that it looked beautiful.
But then I went on holiday and stupidly forgot to update to the latest version of Wordpress. When I came back, the site had been hacked by someone in eastern Europe, who had covered it in pictures of men with guns and headscarfs. They’d also uploaded some jazzy music that played when the site loaded.
I was pretty distraught. I spoke to my domain host and they told me they could restore it to an earlier version that they had saved in their archive, but I still lost about a month’s work of work. They suggested I install a firewall and a website security company. None of this was cheap.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, with Squarespace, NONE of this is an issue. Squarespace do not allow you to self-host, but this is a good thing. Your site is 100% secure, looked after by them, and if anything does go wrong, included in the price of your monthly fee is world-class 24/7 support. You will never have to worry about your site being hacked by internet devils. You will never have to install security plugins, or pay external companies to monitor your site. Squarespace does it all.
“the built-in security of Squarespace - and the peace of mind this provides - is a godsend”
Most of the authors I know do not want to have to worry about the security of their website. The built-in security of Squarespace - and the peace of mind this provides - is a godsend.
There’s also the added benefit that Squarespace offers free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates with all its sites. This really helps with your SEO (more on that below), as Google loves secure websites. Many Wordpress sites still do not have SSL.
2) Squarespace is easy to update
Squarespace’s CMS (content management system) is incredibly intuitive and easy to use. Once you know your way around it, it’s very easy to make changes to your site, whether that’s adding a new event, updating your images or publishing a new blog post.
“you don’t need to waste the time you’d rather be spending working in your next book trying to navigate your way around a complicated system”
Building pages is a matter of dragging and dropping blocks in the page editor, and everything is clearly labelled in the back end. You don’t need to waste the time you’d rather be spending working in your next book trying to navigate your way around a complicated system just to add your latest book to your site!
I’ve used many different systems to update websites over the years, and I can categorically say that Squarespace is the easiest to use by far.
3) All Squarespace sites are fully responsive
Have you ever visited a website on your phone and realised you can barely read the text it’s so small? Or found that the awkward layout means images are covering up text, or the whole thing just looks ‘wrong’?
This is never an issue with Squarespace sites.
In case you’re not sure, ‘responsive’ websites are websites that resize automatically depending on what device they are being viewed on - whether mobile, iPad or desktop.
If you want to find out more about it, I’ve written a blog post on responsive web design here.
Mobile traffic now counts for more than half of all website traffic (which is pretty staggering really). Every Squarespace template includes a unique mobile experience that reflects the overall style of the website, which means your content will look great on every device.
4) Squarespace offers fantastic - and free - support
Squarespace is super easy to use but, if you do get stuck on something, the customer care team at Squarespace is available seven days a week, 24 hours a day. It’s also completely free! There’s a comprehensive help centre based in Ireland and Squarespace has won several awards for its outstanding customer support.
Compare this to Wordpress, where self-hosted really does mean you have to do everything yourself. If something breaks - you’re stuck paying a developer or trying to find a friend who has enough website nous to help you. All of which adds up to time + stress.
5) Squarespace comes with built-in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Making sure your website is optimised for search - which means that people looking online for it will be able to find it easily - is crucial to ensuring you get as much web traffic as possible. Again, SEO is probably not something you want to spend much time thinking about.
Even I will admit it is one of the driest aspects of my job!
“Squarespace, unlike Wordpress, builds SEO into its foundations”
With Wordpress, you need to install a plugin like Yoast to ensure you’re making the most of your SEO opportunities. Squarespace, on the other hand, builds SEO into its foundations. Site descriptions, page titles, custom URLs, search-friendly formatting, and other key elements are all easily managed.
Each site also generates a sitemap automatically that helps Google crawl, understand, and rank a website.
6) Squarespace has lots of amazing extra tools to help you in your author career
Squarespace constantly innovates! The company keeps adding to its offering with really powerful and useful extra features.
My most favourite of all is Squarespace Campaigns, which is Squarespace’s own newsletter functionality, allowing you to control and send your author newsletters all from within the same platform as your website, saving you time and money.
Squarespace also offers the ability to set up a shop on your website very easily, so that you can sell signed copies of your books directly to readers.
A few years ago, they also introduced Memberships - allowing you to ‘gate’ content behind a password, and they have also recently announced the addition of a Courses feature, meaning you can run your own writing workshops and courses directly through your author website. With the digital courses market expected to grow by 14% over the coming years, this is a great opportunity to add an extra income stream to your writing career.
You can find out more about these additional features here.
I truly believe that Squarespace is the most low-hassle, trouble-free and best value option for author websites. It also scales beautifully, meaning you can add pages to your site with ease as you publish more books.
