Is the Squarespace Business Plan the Best Choice for Your Wellness Business?
An overview of the Plans & My recommendations
Something made you click on this article, so that likely means that you have chosen to build your website on Squarespace, or you're very close to making a decision and need a little more information.
One thing that might be holding you up is knowing which plan is the best choice for you and your business.
I'm here to help!
If you’d prefer to watch or listen, hop on over to my companion YouTube video for my detailed review of the available plans.
Otherwise, keep on reading to get the highlights!
Overview of the Squarespace Plans
To view the plans Squarespace offers for building and hosting your website and their respective pricing, head over to squarespace.com/pricing.
Here’s a screenshot of that page:
What to Pay Attention To
One quick thing I do want to call out to you at the top right of this page is the the24/7 customer support regardless of what plan you have. Squarespace customer support is outstanding in my experience, and the fact that it comes with all plans (not always the case with other providers) is a big plus!
Ok, let’s look at the plans.
Annual or Monthly Plan?
I always recommend paying annually when you can because you do tend to save quite a bit of money that way. Generally speaking, unless you're really not sure your business is going to be around a year from now, this is probably the best and value investment for your money.
Four Basic Plans to Choose From
There are four basic plans you can choose from.
Personal plan
Business
Basic Commerce
Advanced Commerce
If you're in business and you’re planning a website for your business, do not go with a personal plan. It isn't suitable for a business, and I don't recommend it.
You will have limited features and capabilities, likely get frustrated, and end up upgrading to a business plan anyway. Save yourself the trouble.
Pricing: Business and Commerce plan comparison
Please note, the prices quoted in this article are accurate as of the date published. Please refer to the actual pricing page in Squarespace for up-to-date information.
Let's start by looking at the business plan. It’s the most popular and on an annual basis, it will cost you $276/year or the equivalent of $23/month.
If you were to choose the monthly plan it’s going to be $33/month. That’s a $10/mo difference, so you can see you’ll get quite significant savings by choosing an annual plan.
By comparison, here’s how the Commerce plans compare:
Basic Commerce annual plan is $27/mo or $324 annually
Advanced Commerce annual is $49/mo or $588 annually.
Squarespace Plan Features
Squarespace plans include a ton of features. I’m not going to go into all of them in detail in this post, but you can refer to my YouTube video if you want a deeper dive.
Free Domain for a Year
If you have not yet purchased your domain name for your website and you purchase it through Squarespace, when you sign up for an annual website plan, you will get the first year of your domain for free! Domains typically cost around $20/yr when purchased through Squarespace.
How it works, is that when you go to pay for your annual plan, they will credit the $20 for your first year. Simple!
If you already have a domain through another provider, you may be able to take advantage of this offer by transferring your domain to Squarespace. Transferring a domain is a multi-step process that requires a bit of time so it’s best to do a little homework before making the leap.
Here’s an FAQ article from Squarespace all about Domain transfers!
Security Certificates
Squarespace will automatically set up your site with industry standard SSL certificates. What does that mean? Visitors to your site will see a little padlock image before your web address indicating it’s a secure site. You’ll also notice if your web address begins with ‘https:’ vs. ‘http:’, for example. Another perk to having your site set up with this is that Google likes them better and looks upon that favorably when it comes to your ranking!
Unlimited Bandwidth
This is straightforward, and it means they do not cap your bandwidth or your photo storage!
But what about video? Ah, that’s a bit different…
Video Storage
Video storage is relatively new for Squarespace, and they continue to improve and expand upon this, so I’m excited for the potential here in the future.
As of this writing, you can have up to 30 minutes of video within your website, and it doesn’t have to be linked to either Vimeo or YouTube (which is how it used to be). You can actually natively upload right from your computer.
So if you recorded something at QuickTime or your phone or whatever your preferred tool, you can load that video into a video block right on your website. Just like you do with an image!
That being said, it is only 30 minutes as of this writing, so this is good for short videos. Think of using it in places where you wanna introduce yourself or talk about or highlight a product or a service that you offer.
If you are hosting classes or courses or things like that where you're going to need more than 30 minutes of video on your website, that's where something like a Squarespace membership area might be something to consider adding on because they have more expansive allowances for video storage.
There are a few different plan levels available, and you can learn more about them here.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is what helps you get found on the internet, and Squarespace has some great built-in easy-to-use features to help you set up your site and your pages to be SEO friendly. Now they aren’t going to do your Keyword research or create your website content for you; that’s still on you, but they do make it easy to optimize your website pages, and they have helpful guides too! The idea that you can’t do well with SEO on Squarespace is a totally out-of-date myth!
Professional email from Google
If sign up for a business plan or commerce plan, and you connect or register your domain with Squarespace you will get one professional Gmail and Google Workspace account for free for the first year. As of this writing that is about $72 a year. A nice little perk and an easy way to have an email with your custom domain. I’ve done this myself multiple times and I’ve been very happy with it.
Premium Integrations and Blocks
This is one of the prime reasons I recommend a business plan at a minimum. When you’re building a business you’re likely going to want to build an email list, offer appointments, hook up to other software you use to run your business. So you’ll want to be able to add a newsletter block or a scheduling block, for example. You cannot do this with a personal plan.
Custom CSS and JavaScript
As a designer, I like to point out the custom CSS and JavaScript feature. If you DIY or use a template, this is something you may never think about and may never need. But if you decide to work with a designer (or decide you want to learn how to code yourself) someday, this allows for customizing your site using code in the background. It can really make your site even more unique and stand out from your competition.
Marketing Features
On the business plan and above you get some marketing capabilities included. Built-in analytics. A Google Ads credit. The ability to have popups and banners on your site.
And one pretty cool new feature is the Video studio app which you get full access to on the business and commerce plans.
With this app, you can create videos to share on social media, etc. They are created using content from your website, so your images and your branding are all consistent. They have templates to use, and you can do voiceovers using your own voice or using one of their built-in AI voices - which sound like real people, not robots! So if that’s something you’re into, it’s a cool new feature at no extra cost.
What about the Commerce Plans?
Up to this point, the features I’ve covered in the Business plan are also included in the Commerce plans. And on the Business plan, you can sell things, but you are limited in how much you can do, and you’ll pay an extra transaction fee on anything you sell above and beyond what credit card fees you may pay.
Squarespace will take an extra 3% on top of that if you're on the business plan. You can still sell unlimited products, take donations, and accept gift cards, but that's pretty much it.
If an e-commerce store is a big part of your business, then you should consider one of the commerce plans, because they offer many more features you’ll likely want or need without extra transaction fees!
There isn’t a huge leap in price from the business plan to the commerce plan. But, unless you’re selling a decent volume of products, you don’t really need a commerce plan. However, if that changes or the transaction fees don’t make financial sense for your business you can upgrade anytime. The Basic Commerce plan is an extra $4 per month, or $48 per year over the Business plan so it’s not a huge leap.
What if you want to sell classes or courses?
If you're selling services, yoga classes, mini-courses, or things like that, you're most likely not going to sell those through an eCommerce store or a shop. So you probably don’t need a commerce plan to do those things.
These are services that you’re more likely to sell using Squarespace Scheduling, or a Membership area. Or if you’re already using a third-party software or app, you can probably link or embed them directly into your Squarespace website.
The Wrap-Up
On their pricing page, Squarespace does a great job laying out everything that's included in each of their plans so that you can make an informed decision. That said, my personal recommendation is that if you're just getting started or you're a smaller business, the basic business plan is really the best starting place for you.
You can upgrade very easily at any time if you need to. If you decide to add a shop or you want to try out the scheduling or add a membership, you can add those on down the line. The upside is that you don’t have to spend money now on functions you don’t need, but adding it on is hassle-free when/if the time is right.
As I mentioned earlier, if you want to host classes of some type or videos, or book appointments, then I recommend that you check out adding the Squarespace Scheduling add-on or the Membership area add-on.
If you're already using a different piece of software or app for that you can compare them to these to see if sticking with what you already have makes sense or whether adding on one of the Squarespace functions is better for you.
So to close this out the main takeaway here is that you can start small, start with the basics, and easily adjust from there without worrying about penalties or fees, or having to wait a year to add something you need. Start with a Business plan, and you can easily grow from there.
I always recommend before you do anything, that you write down your business needs and requirements and compare all of your options first to find the best solution that meets your functionality and budget requirements.
