Unlock the Full Potential of Your Squarespace Plans & Premium Features
Hey there, fellow Squarespace users!
Are you new to Squarespace and wondering which plan to choose? Or are you a current user curious about the premium features available on this platform? Either way, you're in luck. In this post, we'll walk you through everything you need to know about Squarespace plans and premium features, including pricing, features, and limitations.
Choosing the Right Plan for Your Needs
When it comes to choosing a Squarespace plan, it's important to consider your goals, budget, and website needs. Squarespace offers four main plans: Personal, Business, Basic Commerce, and Advanced Commerce. Each plan offers different features and benefits, so it's essential to compare them carefully before making a decision. To help you choose, we've broken down the main differences between each plan below:
Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty, shall we?
Squarespace Personal Plan:
Looking to start your own blog about your financial journey to FIRE or create a virtual homepage for your wedding guests about all the goodies and activities on your special day?
The personal plan on Squarespace may be just what you need. While it may not be suitable for a full-fledged business, it offers basic features that allow you to easily post and edit content, including images, text, buttons, and forms. Plus, with basic Squarespace website analytics, you can track your audience engagement and see how many people are tuning into your content. So go ahead and share those adventures with your followers and get that momentum going!
Get the most of your Squarespace Personal Plan.
24/7 customer support : One thing we absolutely love about Squarespace is their super knowledgeable and helpful support team. There is nothing worse than having to dig through outdated forums and go round and round in circles with useless chatbots to try to get answers to your question. Thankfully, you get access to round-the-clock support the minute you upgrade to any paid plan.
SSL Security : Squarespace is known for being more secure than other website-building platforms, and this handy little feature is what keeps hackers from impersonating you. Google does not want to be responsible for sending visitors somewhere where their information could be compromised, so if you want to rank at all, SSL is a must.
Up to 1000 pages of mobile responsive website content : You want visitors’ first impression of your site to be a good one, no matter which device they are using, so Squarespace automatically optimises all your content for desktop and mobile (and every screen size in between).
Two contributors : Want to bring on another blogger or get help managing your site? With the personal plan, you can give one other person permission to view and edit the back ‘stage’ of your website, without having to give away your personal login.
Basic site analytics: Squarespace Analytics is the platform’s built-in way of helping you learn about your visitor’s behaviour and the overall performance of your site. With the basic plan, you can check out things like who visited certain pages on your site, where they’re coming from both geographically and link-wise, what search terms landed them on your site, and which content seems to be
Squarespace Business Plan:
The business plan is your first step to getting your course & template selling shop as well as your 1:1 coaching courses set up for success! This is where even the smallest of businesses will want to start their search, we were once-upon-a time exactly here. (This is where we started out!)
Get the most of your Squarespace Business Plan.
In addition to what you get on the personal plan, these are the extra features you get when you unlock this tier:
Custom email address: Unfortunately, you’ll need to also invest in this moving forwards with your business. If you want potential customers to take your business seriously, you’re going to need a professional and on-brand-sounding email address. The business plan gives you this, as well as a one-year subscription to G Suite for free.
Unlimited contributors: If you have a team of more than two people, you can give them access to help you manage your site, and more importantly, control what they can and cannot edit.
Squarespace e-commerce: Want to sell your products or services online and maybe start accepting payments there too, this is your plan. Not all commerce features are included in the Business plan. There are a few capabilities reserved for the next plans, which we will discuss later on in this blog.
Basic e-commerce analytics: Now that you’ve set up shop, you’re going to need a way to track those sales and other important site metrics.
Access to Squarespace Premium Features: we will discuss this later on in this blog but Squarespace premium features are basically what take your site into the ultimate team player and tool for your business.
Squarespace Basic Commerce Plan:
By this point you are probably thinking, well if I have e-commerce capabilities on the business plan why would I invest in this plan? If you are here I’m guessing you want the information upfront with no frills, so here it is:
With the business plan, there is a 3% transaction fee for every sale you make on your store. (The Advance Commerce Plan has 0% transaction fee) So it’s a question of how much you are making each month on sales and if you can save or not your hard-earned cash with this plan.
Don’t worry I got my calculator out and did the math, so you don’t have to.
There is a 7€/ month difference between the Business plan & the Basic Commerce plan.
3% of 288€/month** = 8,50€
So, if you know that you’ll make more than 288€/ month in sales with your website shop definitely go for the Basic Commerce plan.
* If you are buying your plans in another currency - there WILL be a minor difference and you need to figure out what that is.
**We are also assuming that you are going for the annual plan since you will always save with those over the monthly payments but we will talk more on that later on this blog.
Get the most of your Squarespace Basic Commerce plan.
In addition to what you get on the personal & business plan, these are the extra features you get when you unlock this tier:
Custom checkout hosted on your own domain: With the business plan when someone checks out, they are directed to a Squarespace checkout page. With the basis commerce plan, you get to keep customers right where they are on your site so the checkout process is that much more on-brand and legit looking in the eyes of the customer.
Individual customer accounts: This plan lets your customers set up their own login details so they can speed through that checkout process without any distractions. - Think Amazon: this allows your customers to have smoother, fewer steps to complete (because all their information is already stored on your website) for each purchase they make on your website).
Products on Instagram: It can be a struggle to get people to cross the threshold from followers on social to actually visiting your site, so the ability to have them shop directly from Instagram could be pretty massive depending on your business.
Advanced E-commerce analytics: A more in-depth, detailed look at your sales statistics and all the metrics you’d ever need to make sure your online store is optimised to convert visitors into loyal, repeat buyers.
Related product suggestions: This keeps your customers shopping longer and can help you to automatically recommend other products or services they might be interested in from your shop. This is especially useful the more listings you have, to make for a more customised, smother shopping experience where customers are not having to comb through hundreds of products to find what they are looking for.
Squarespace Advanced Commerce Plan:
This plan is ideal for businesses that need the sturdiest e-commerce tier.
Get the most of your Squarespace Advanced Commerce plan.
In addition to what you get on the personal, business, commerce plan, these are the extra features you get when you unlock this tier:
Limited stock or availability warnings : Very often in order to generate sales in your business one of the strategies that you might want to implement is to create urgency. If something is always available for sale on your site, people will be less inclined and come up with reasons to put off committing. But if you let them sweat a little by thinking that they might miss their chance, you’re helping those fence-sitters to finally make a decision. So if you run an online shop, limited inventory warnings are your friend.
Abandoned cart recovery : With the two previous plans, if someone adds something to their cart but then for some reason leaves your site, they are having to start from scratch the next time they visit. With the advanced commerce plan, those items will be waiting for them in their cart when they return!
Shipping and fulfilment automation: Here shipping fees can be calculated based on where the customer is located, and if you want to get super techy, you can set up your site to work with third parties to automate order fulfilment, shipping, and inventory checks!
Sell subscriptions: If you want people to sign up to continue receiving your paid products or services on a weekly or monthly subscription basis, there’s no way around it, you’ll be needing this plan. Depending on how much you bring each month in recurring subscription sales, it could quickly make up for the few extra dollars you’d be spending to upgrade.
Custom discounts and promotions: With other Squarespace plans that offer e-commerce, it’s possible to mark down the price of single products, but if you want to throw a site-wide sale, you’ll want to save yourself the work and upgrade to make use of Squarespace’s advanced discount feature.
Premium Features:
Once you've chosen the right Squarespace plan for your needs, it's time to explore the premium features available to you. These features can help you customise your site, improve your SEO, and boost your traffic. Here are some of the most useful premium features to consider:
Custom CSS: With Custom CSS, you can customise the design of your site beyond the built-in templates. This feature is available on all Squarespace plans.
Email Campaigns: With Squarespace Email Campaigns, you can create and send professional email newsletters to your subscribers. This feature is available on the Business Plan and above.
Advanced Analytics: With Squarespace Advanced Analytics, you can track and analyse your website traffic in more detail, including page views, visitor demographics, and referral sources. This feature is available on the Business Plan and above.
Custom Pop-Ups: With Custom Pop-Ups, you can create targeted pop-ups to capture leads and grow your email list. This feature is available on the Business Plan and above.
Announcement bars & Promotional Pop-Ups: this is a great way to shout out your current sales, draw attention to your freebie opt-in gifts, or encourage visitors to book a consult call to get started with whatever it is you offer right away. This feature is available on the Business Plan and above.
Gift Cards: This feature allows you to use your online shop to automate the sale, delivery, and redemption of gift cards making it easy for people to give the gift of what you do, or pay upfront to treat themselves to a future product or service. This feature is available on the Business Plan and above.
Donation block: This is also useful for fundraising or for non-profits looking to support their cause. This feature is available on the Business Plan and above.
Menu Block: If you are running a restaurant, salon or spa - this is the easiest way to go about adding a menu, without the need for coding. This feature is available on the Business Plan and above.
Third Party blocks & Integrations: Over the last years squarespace has partnered with a few different companies. Here you have a few of the most popular ones: Amazon, OpenTable, Zapier, Stripe, Unsplash, Mailchimp. For a more in-depth list check this link.
Squarespace Prices:
As we mentioned above, plan prices will change depending if you are paying for a monthly or annual subscription, like you see on every.other.subscription out there these days.
Squarespace Monthly cost
• Personal Plan: 15€ /month (x 12 months = 180€)
• Business Plan: 24€ /month (x 12 months = 288€)
• Basic Commerce: 28€ /month (x 12 months = 336€)
• Advanced Commerce: 42€ / month (x 12 months =504€)
Squarespace Yearly Cost (Pay Annually)
• Personal Plan: 11€ /month (x 12 months = 132€)
• Business Plan: 17€ /month (x 12 months = 204€)
• Basic Commerce: 24€ /month (x 12 months = 288€)
* this is the price of the Business plan if you paid monthly!
• Advanced Commerce: 36€ / month (x 12 months = 432€)
So if you take only one this from this blog post - you can clearly see from the above exercise that you need to be paying for an annual subscription in Squarespace!
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Happy Musings!!
