Squarespace vs. WordPress vs. Showit

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by one of my favorite podcast editing tools, Descript. Please forgive any typos or errors. Melissa: Welcome to The Wit & Wire Podcast. I’m Melissa, a former Teachable employee and marketing director turned full-time course creator, and I help entrepreneurs turn their skills and passions into profitable online businesses. I don’t believe that business is one size fits all. That’s why this season I’ve invited industry experts to compare today’s hottest sales and marketing strategies to empower you to use your strengths and create a personalized online business plan. At a certain point in business, every entrepreneur will need a website. But depending on what you sell, how tech savvy you are, how far along you are in business and how much you’re willing to pay. You may be wondering which website platform is really best for you. Should you go with a classic like WordPress or a more modern option like Squarespace? The truth is that Squarespace and WordPress are more fundamentally different than you might realize. And that’s why today I’ve brought in two experts to help us answer these three key questions. First, how do you create a website step-by-step in Squarespace. And how is that different from WordPress? Second, we’ll talk about choosing the right template for your website, plus how to customize it. So it doesn’t look just like the template and we’ll bust some myths about SEO because a lot of people believe that Squarespace is worse for SEO. And that just isn’t true. Third, we’ll talk about cost comparison. And finally, Who do we recommend should choose WordPress. And who do we recommend should choose Squarespace. To help us explore both sides. I’ve invited two very special. Guests to join today’s panel. First up we have Chelsea Pimienta, a squarespace website designer and the founder of 23 & nine creative. So chelsea you’ve been doing this for a while, but how did you first get into web design? [00:01:52] Chelsea: It started back in college. Actually. I had an Etsy shop, selling resume designs. and then people started asking me to do logo design. And then. People started asking, well, I need actually a website to go with my business. and I totally loved that because it took my love from like the journalism side of what I learned in school, the showing information and telling people stories through design and being able to do that in a more creative way. [00:02:18] Melissa: And I chose Squarespace because it was, easiest for my clients to be able to update And I think a big reason why Squarespace even came to be is because they offered an all-in-one solution, which if I were to talk high level about the difference between the two right off the bat, I would say Squarespace is like all in one where WordPress is more of a choose your own adventure. [00:02:39] Chelsea: Within Squarespace, you have all of those, you know, pieces and tools that, in other platforms you might need different plugins and people just want like 1, 2, 3 done. so it’s way easier for them to just be able to have it all in one place. [00:02:53] Melissa: we also have Davey Jones. Davey and his wife run Davey & Krista. Where they share at WordPress and showit templates for creative professionals. He also runs till agency for Facebook ad management and is the host of the brands at book show. But between the two it’s Krista who had a background in web design. [00:03:11] Davey: Krista, she started her first business, which was actually a wedding photography business and at the time had built her own website. all on her own. [00:03:17] Melissa: And this is on WordPress. This is like before the days really of like page builders and, you know, real options, like Squarespace Wix and, people were like, Hey, can you build my website too? And so that’s what started, you know, at the beginning of the website design, business. And all those squarespace is newer and an all-in-one solution wordpress has come a long way and the tools today are much more modern than they used to be [00:03:41] Davey: When we first started designing websites, WordPress was difficult to package in a way for clients where they could update it on their own. So, you know, to Chelsea’s point, I think that’s why, Squarespace has been appealing fast forward a few years later, and you have new page builder plugins, like Elementor, which I think really sort of reshape the landscape for WordPress. So, we started, building all our WordPress, designs using Elementor because then we could pass those designs off to our clients and give them, something that was relatively easy to update. It’s still very much a choose your own adventure. You know, it’s not the same sort of all in one, neatly packaged, site that you would get with something like show it and, Squarespace. But for people who are looking for some added, flexibility, like if you want to do something on your website, WordPress probably has a plugin or tool for you to do that. [00:04:31] Melissa: this segues nicely into a big first topic I want to cover, which is ease of setup. So when you go in to start a new Squarespace book site, you have templates that you can choose from that are, created by Squarespace. The version previous to this 7.0, which a lot of people still have was very different in this respect, but in 7.1, all the templates have the exact same capabilities. So I just choose a blank one, but there are plenty of different options for you to choose from, [00:04:58] Chelsea: and then from there, you basically plug in your styles, you plug in your colors and you can choose your thoughts and you drag and drop in different blocks is what they’re called, which are like images, textbox galleries, and, you start to play around, you can move sections up and down and it’s all right on your screen. So it’s like a drag and drop platform. [00:05:17] Melissa: So you go to squarespace.com. You make a website, you build the website, and it sounds obvious until we started talking with Davey, because the first thing you do to build your WordPress site is not go to WordPress. So talk us through what it would take and give us the types of tools or platforms that we might need just to get our site up and running on word. [00:05:37] Davey: you know, If you were to go to wordpress.com, for instance, you’d be signing up for a very different WordPress and we’re talking about today. what we’re talking about is wordpress.org. basically you’re going to need, a few different things to get started with your website. First, you’re going to need to register a domain name. you can do that through couple of different sites. We recommend Google domains because everybody seems to have a Google account and it’s just easy to manage everything there. So you’ll probably pay something like $12 a year for your domain name, but it varies a little bit [00:06:03] Melissa: For the sake of a fair comparison you’ll also need a domain for a squarespace site so they are equal when it comes to domains although you can purchase a domain through squarespace i recommend purchasing it through a separate domain registrar like google domains or namecheap because it gives you more flexibility if you want to move your site later on [00:06:23] Davey: then from there, you’re going to want to choose a host. Your website host is kind of where your website lives, there are a number of different companies that do this, we used to recommend SiteGround, we don’t love them quite as much anymore. [00:06:33] Davey: we’ve been pointing people towards flywheel and WP engine. Those are two of our favorites, but you’ll sign up for an account with them. They’re going to make it very easy to actually install WordPress and get it set up. where you get into, set up with a theme or a design. So if you were using one of our designs, for instance, we package everything in a way where you just kind of unzipped the files in your account. Um, and then you start customizing from there. both of you mentioned themes templates. I feel like that’s where we should go next because they’re super different for both. And they’re really crucial. Davey, I think a misconception people may have about WordPress themes is that they only dictate the way that a website looks like branding and colors. lot of people do describe themes as sort of like a skin for your website, but like you said, it’s more than that, because it really does dictate functionality as well. [00:07:20] Melissa: I’ve built websites in both and bought themes in both. So with WordPress, one of the first themes had no ability to edit the footer of my website like if that developer hasn’t decided to make it easy for you to edit your footer, then you’ll be living in 1999 where you still had to code the entire website by yourself. So that’s a huge consideration, I think, with WordPress themes. And I do want to touch on just one more concept of page builders before we go over to Squarespace. [00:07:48] Davey: Your page builder is actually going to give you those non-coding tools to actually update your website. You’re going to be able to slide a text box in there and that’s going to give you more drag and drop functionality. So something that, feels maybe a little bit closer to a show it or to a square. So. [00:08:02] Melissa: yeah, I would say the whole internet. That’s probably too big a claim. The whole internet is moving towards block style building, but I think between WordPress Squarespace certainly was a huge pioneer I think, and kind of like the block building structure for things. And even now productivity tools like notion operate in the same kind of block structure. So I think that’s a definite trend that is continuing to grow, but kind of coming over to you, Chelsea, the concept of templates is a little different in Squarespace because there is a built in option, but then there are third-party templates. So can you talk about the difference between. [00:08:36] Chelsea: Yes. so when you go into Squarespace to start a website, you have to choose a template to start with. And designers like me or other website designers are creating a pre-made design. [00:08:48] Melissa: And since both of you sell such beautiful templates in your businesses, what tips do you have for people who do purchase a template so that it doesn’t look exactly like the template? Like how can they really make it feel like it’s their own? And like, it’s been customized. two people can use the same template and if they don’t have strong brands, design is going to look basically the same, you know, it’s going to look like a template. if you’ve actually invested in brand design, then that, website’s going to reflect them. [00:09:13] Chelsea: I can’t agree more with that. Like Having strong branding is the number one thing. if you’re starting a business, you should not go spend all of your money on a brand because your business is probably going to grow and you don’t know where you might end up, but there are a lot of reasonable options out there, even on like Etsy and creative market of pre-made brands that you can buy. [00:09:33] Davey: 100% agree, and I would also say, you know, find a template, you like that you really like the structure of, and that’s important because you don’t want to go into the template and decide, oh, I’m going to change. everything. You know, there’s a reason that you sought out a professional website designer and bought something from them. Right. And so you should trust to a certain extent, how things may be are laid out or how things are put together. [00:09:52] Chelsea: I think that’s super important because people ask all the time, like, how do I know which one’s right for me. And I do like to tell people like, look past the fonts and colors, cause that part can change. [00:10:02] Melissa: One thing that I admire about both of your templates is that they’re designed for conversion versus just having beautiful photos and fonts . That reel people in. So I try to erase the photos and instead I ask, okay, how has this photo placed next to text? If I’m looking at an about page, I want to keep the structure of how the about page is built, because it was designed in a certain order. But I want to make sure that I’m not just buying a template because it’s in my brand colors. So that’s why I think it’s important to look at it’s called like the wire frame of the page. Look and see what are the sections on this page or these sections that you would want to fill out because it’s very easy to swap out photos, but it’s much harder to decide that you don’t like the order of the page or the way that the website has. [00:10:46] Davey: Absolutely. [00:10:46] Chelsea: hundred percent. [00:10:47] Melissa: Well, another thing that we have touched on, but I think is a huge topic is plugins. this is a big part of the WordPress ecosystem, but it’s not so much a big part of Squarespace. So, David, can you talk about what a plugin is and maybe offer a couple of. [00:11:02] Davey: Yeah. You can think about plugin as sort of this, out of. the box tool that you can install on your website. That’s going to give you functionality without having to know how to custom develop that functionality. you might want to add a pop-up to your website. really that’s one of the areas that WordPress really shines there’s such a big, , WordPress developing, community that there are just so many tools that can add functionality to your website without having to figure out, you know, a lot of workarounds or again, spend time on customer. [00:11:30] Melissa: I agree. Anything from adding like shareable social media buttons to my blog posts, to installing a Facebook pixel, to connecting with an email service provider, or like you said, email pop-ups the plugins are really, I think the magic of WordPress and a big reason why people choose it because you can customize in any direction you want. It’s almost like with great power comes great responsibility. Like you can do a lot and it can go wrong in a lot of ways. But I do think that that’s a huge advantage for the right person to want to choose WordPress. [00:12:01] Davey: There’s definitely a flip side you add a hundred WordPress plugins to your WordPress website. You’re going to have some performance issues, right. there’s a trade off just in terms of like how quickly a page loads and things like that. you know, you want to make sure that plugins play nicely together. Certain plugins are going to conflict in different ways. But there are definitely other considerations. [00:12:18] Melissa: Chelsea, we don’t really have plugins in Squarespace, but there are some small things I know that developers do and recommend to people. [00:12:25] Chelsea: plugins in Squarespace are basically, written code that you can copy and paste into your custom CSS. But a lot of the things that you just mentioned, for instance, like a pop-up or social media, icons and stuff like that are already built into Squarespace as options. But for instance, for testimonials, there’s like the slider block and it shows a photo at the top with texts underneath, and that’s just how it looks naturally in Squarespace. But if you wanted it to be like fancy and, you know, have the picture to the left and have the text on the right and have animation or something, that would be something you would purchase a plugin for, a K just copied and pasted code that would do what you want it to do. [00:13:08] Melissa: I think that hits on one of the downsides, I’m going to call it to Squarespace, which is that it’s all in one, but it does mean that you can’t quite customize some pieces in the way that you might want to without coding. with WordPress, you can do anything. You may have to search a little bit to find the thing that you want, but it’s definitely possible out there with Squarespace. You may sacrifice a little bit of your 100% design vision or functionality, vision to work within the blocks that they are literally giving you. [00:13:36] Chelsea: Exactly. [00:13:36] Davey: That’s one of the interesting things I think about this comparison is, you know, it’s nice that Squarespace has some of these things out of the box, like an email sign up and, with the testimonials, for instance, like I can already think about how easy that would be on the WordPress side of things, just with the page builder, so it’s really interesting. this conversation is fun. I think because you know, if we were to write these articles individually, you know, just like Squarespace versus WordPress, right. I feel like you don’t quite get the other side. so [00:14:02] Chelsea: Amazing. And actually, David, you brought up email, which is the specific topic I wanted to hit on next because for online business owners list building is so crucial. And so I wanted to talk about how each platform can enable the business owner to collect email addresses. Squarespace has Squarespace campaigns, which is built right into Squarespace and there is a newsletter block. So I talked about how things are kind of in blocks, and you can connect your Squarespace campaigns or, MailChimp or Google docs, right within the block. We can also do third-party in a different way, but you can upload your styles straight from your website. So it’ll import whatever fonts and colors you’re using, so that they’ll look the same. And then the email builder is exactly the same as Squarespace. So it’s like block-based, drag and drop. And then you can send to different lists. You can segment, you can set up automations, blasts, [00:14:54] Melissa: whatever. out of curiosity, what do you think of the native Squarespace email campaigns tool? [00:14:59] Chelsea: I really like it. And I used it for a really long time. The only reason that I switched was because I started . Using, um, a quiz on my website and, , I needed to be able to connect a zap from their answer to a certain segment. And you can’t, use zaps . With Squarespace campaigns [00:15:20] Melissa: And then Davy, there’s obviously no built in option because this is the choose your own adventure out with WordPress. But there are some ways that if you have an email service provider, you can integrate it with WordPress. [00:15:33] Davey: whatever email platform that you use, you can integrate with WordPress. I haven’t come across one that you can’t, uh, yet. So whether that’s a flow desk or convert kit or a MailChimp, I hope it’s not MailChimp, but you can, with WordPress, with flow desk you create your form in your email service provider, and then you would embed it on your, WordPress website. , however other email platforms like convert kit have a WordPress specific plugin that you could download that would create that integration for. [00:16:00] Melissa: I think what we’ve learned is that a lot of the email service providers today, you can use that tool separately and create an email opt-in and then copy and paste. What’s called usually a code snippet or an embed code onto your site. So I wanted to bring that up because this works with both Squarespace and WordPress, where too often, I feel like people are asking about plugins and they’re asking about integrations, but really all you need sometimes is just to ask the question, can I embed something? Can I copy and paste an embedded email opt-in or an embedded Calendly form or in my world and embedded podcast player. So none of these tools have to necessarily be integrated. They just have to have some copy and paste code that you can. [00:16:42] Davey: This is one of the reasons that I personally love WordPress is yes, there are a lot of different pieces that make it work. But you get a lot of flexibility so it looks exactly, how you want it to look [00:16:50] Melissa: and speaking of integrations, can you talk a little bit about how you could sell things through your site? [00:16:56] Davey: Woo commerce is a plugin. If your design comes with shop templates and things like that, those should automatically apply One thing I will say, though, it would be, deceptive to say that WooCommerce is free,because There are tools that you’ll probably want to use on your WooCommerce shop, that cost money. Pretty normal to get single license for a WordPress plugin, you know, somewhere around like $49, $45, you typically pay on a yearly basis. But of course that kind of stuff does add up. [00:17:24] Melissa: And then with Squarespace, they have a native feature. It does bump you up on their monthly payment plan, but there is shopping. So Chelsea, can you talk a little bit more about what that’s like within Squarespace? [00:17:35] Chelsea: Yeah. So you add your shop page, you can have digital products, physical products, gift cards, also memberships, and then you can also do recurring payments , which is something that’s newer. What the actual page looks like with your product and information. You can style, change your colors, fonts, whatever. Yeah. But there is no real, difference in the look. And the checkout is always going to look the same. It just is what it is within Squarespace. [00:18:01] Davey: I was just doing some consulting for a company that had a Squarespace, shop and one of the real struggles, I think, when you’re looking for ways to increase the purchase value of any given order, , that gets a lot harder to do on Squarespace. And there are ways that you encode that functionality in, but with something like a WooCommerce, it’s just so easy to add a tool like cart flows that really lets you customize the entire checkout experience. And then using. a page builder is going to give you a ton of extra functionality and then there’s plugins that you can get as well. [00:18:30] Chelsea: point so SEO in particular, there’s this myth that Squarespace sites are worse for SEO, So I think that that myth comes from there not being a plugin, like what WordPress has, but the reason for that is because it’s already built into Squarespace. For instance, every page also has an SEO title and SEO description that you can fill out and then you can also connect, Google search console, Google analytics, like you can still connect to everything else, so that’s kind of the basics of, the the SEO squarespace’s side. [00:19:05] Davey: that’s really interesting because we,, battled that a lot with show it, people saying, oh, I heard show is bad for SEO. And, think it’s just the wrong way to think about search engine optimization in general. At the end of the day, a lot of it’s just going to come down to the quality of the content you create on your site, and if you’re doing that well, typically a lot of the other things fall into place. It is true that WordPress is more optimized rubble, there Are tools that make it really easy. Rank. Math is our favorite Yoast is a long time. favorite of many, I don’t recommend Yost anymore. but use it for a long time. So there are tools that give you maybe a little bit more control, [00:19:38] Melissa: yeah. And I think with SEO, the biggest misconception is that the plugin itself causes you to have better SEO. I see the plugin as a calculator, and I think that WordPress has the best calculators. Like I use rank math as well after using those for years. And when you have this SEO plugin, it will analyze your blog post. To tell you if there are some known strategies that you could use to increase your odds of ranking, but it’s still just a calculator. It’s still just a guess. And so at the end of the day, if you put the same blog post on a WordPress site and a Squarespace site, that’s not going to be the difference between if you rank or not. [00:20:18] Davey: Yeah. It’s funny like people being like, well, I got all green lights in Yoast. Why isn’t my page ranking? Or, you know [00:20:23] Chelsea: one? [00:20:23] Davey: yeah, exactly. it’s because Yoast isn’t actually communicating anything, through those green lights to Google, it’s not like it’s flagging, Google down and saying, Hey, this person has, uh, all green lights, it’s just telling you whether you have optimized for the keyword that you put in the box, [00:20:37] Chelsea: I think another SEO thing overall, it’s super important for people to understand is the day you launch your site, if you’re a brand new business you’re not going to be on the first page And I’m very sorry to break it to you, but it takes time for like new content blogging, having the right words. it’s a combination of all of those things and it’s not just existing. [00:20:56] Melissa: and The word optimization brought up. One more topic, I think is really crucial, which is designing for mobile today. So many people see websites on their phones instead of just their computers. So maybe each of you, can you talk a little bit about how can you make sure that your website is mobile friendly? [00:21:13] Chelsea: So how Squarespace works is it adapts the design to your screen size? And there are some settings that you can change in mobile, but Squarespace prides themselves on their design is going to just automatically fit correctly. But in 7.1, you also have options of adding, your own mobile logo, and then you can also change what the navigation looks like on mobile, but for the most part there aren’t settings like specifically for each block or page for mobile design because it kind of already does it. [00:21:44] Davey: Yeah for WordPress, , at least with any sort of like modern set up, things are going to be responsive. And much the same way, one additional benefit of WordPress and show it for that matter is you can customize the mobile layout So if there’s certain design elements, let’s say that you only want visible on mobile or desktop, you can set that up within ELA mentor but the downside of show it is that, you actually have to design mobile version of your website. So there are things that do click into place and carry over from the desktop version to the mobile version. But, if you were to, sign up for a show at account design, your entire desktop version of your website, and then, you know, not pay attention to your mobile at all. You’d be in for a rude awakening. When you visit your website on a mobile device, the flip side though is you can design a version that’s. well-made a mobile. [00:22:31] Melissa: I do think this is a great moment, Davey, where maybe you can tell us a little bit more about show it and some of the advantages or downsides to choosing, show it over Squarespace or WordPress. [00:22:42] Davey: Yeah, absolutely. So I think showing a combined some of the best of both worlds, , show it is, comparable to Squarespace in that. You go, you sign up for a show at account, you can design your show at website, you choose from templates you can get started with for free, or you can purchase a design from third-party like, us. Similar to Squarespace. You’re not going to go out and find hosting somewhere like you would with WordPress. you are going to pay show at a monthly fee just as you do a Squarespace, it’s truly drag and drop. So it doesn’t work in blocks in the same way that Squarespace does. but it’s very much a drag and drop put, elements anywhere, kind of setup, [00:23:16] Chelsea: You can design more in show it like you can just overlap text and photos. You can just move them on top of each other where Squarespace you can’t do that. [00:23:23] Davey: Yeah. you know, I used to compare it to like the Adobe suite for creatives who are familiar with the Adobe suite. It kind of has maybe a similar feel. I think that’s why so many creatives, gravitate towards it. it integrates with WordPress, which is awesome. So you get some of that. power of WordPress in the way of plugins. So if you blog your blog would actually be done through WordPress, , everything lives at the same site. So even if someone’s on your blog, they’re still on your URL. So it’s a nice, neat integration. We’re huge fans of show it. But we had a lot of people who are still asking for WordPress. and with the rise of some of these page builders that make WordPress easier, that’s one of the reasons why we decided to start adding WordPress again, [00:24:01] Melissa: it is interesting to have this conversation right now, because even a few years ago, The way you would build in each of these, I think would look very different from each other. But Davey, I love the page. Builders has been such a theme of this conversation because I do think they have made a huge difference in building in our own WordPress sites. I don’t think that that was as possible, nearly as user-friendly. So they do feel more similar today than ever, which I think leads nicely into some of our wrap up starting with pricing. So I think it is a misconception that WordPress is the cheapest because Davey, as you hinted at, there are certain elements as you start to get into it that you start to pay for. [00:24:39] Chelsea: So Chelsea let’s start with the more straightforward, which is the Squarespace pricing. so there are four different tiers. It starts with personal and it goes all the way up to advanced e-commerce, which gives you. Anything you could ever need in more. And then the only ad-ons to those would be if you were to do the marketing or scheduling, which are around 10 to $15 extra a month. But for like the basic personal hosting plan, it’s around a hundred dollars for the year. And then, the most advanced e-commerce, I want to say lands around 400 and you can pay monthly or annually, but there’s a huge difference. If you pay annually, there’s there’s quite a savings. [00:25:17] Melissa: And then Davy to talk about WordPress. Can you maybe list through the type of tool you might pay for what you would expect and then see if we can get some kind of annual. [00:25:27] Davey: Yeah. So you can get really cheap hosting. You can pay, $4, $5 a month for hosting, but you get what you pay for. So you should probably be paying in the ballpark of $20 a month. flywheel, like I said, WP engine are good places to go to check out, and then, WordPress to install is free, but then when you get into plugins, that’s where you’re going to start paying for things. Elementor or the page building plugin is going to be about $49 year for a single license. I’d say most of the paid plugins we use are around e-commerce, so cart flows would be an example of that. And it’s hard to say like, what site would need pay plugins, versus not like if your website is going to be relatively straightforward you’re probably I’d say in the ballpark of 300, $400 a year, but when we’re looking at different tools that we’re going to, add to our website, a lot of it has to do with the return. We feel like that tool is going to provide. So, yeah, hard to put, you know, an exact number to it. [00:26:16] Melissa: yeah, so I do think the most direct comparison you could make is just the price of Squarespace or the price of show it. And then compare that to the price of WordPress hosting potentially plus the WordPress theme, because in Squarespace, I would say a lot of people opt to purchase a template to make the website look a certain way, but you don’t necessarily need one. Squarespace does come with templates. So it’s not a requirement. I would say though, with WordPress, almost definitely. You’re going to be spending a minimum of $60. And the quality is definitely reflecting. and the functionality as well. It’s not just the design. [00:26:53] Davey: Yeah. And the support, I think, is a key aspect of that. You know, you get what you paid for. If you’re paying, $60 shore theme, the support that comes with it is probably not, great. [00:27:01] Melissa: I hope people take away that they’re actually pretty similar. I feel like that’s really, what I would say is that there is not a huge difference between them. Yes. It might be a few dollars per month, different depending on DB to your point, how many plugins you end up purchasing? And I do think that most people believe that Squarespace or even show it might be the more expensive option, but I don’t believe that that is true. But overall, we’ve talked about so many things from the ease of starting the website, getting it set up, plugins, SEO templates. [00:27:29] Melissa: There’s so much that goes into this decision. I think it’d be impossible to say there’s one right fit, but I would love just to hear some closing thoughts on who you think is the right fit for your platform. So maybe Chelsea starting with you, who do you think that Squarespace could be a good fit for? And maybe who is it not the right fit for as well? Because that’s where I really think the answers are going to be more helpful. [00:27:50] Chelsea: So I always tell people that I think it’s great for new businesses, smaller businesses. And I don’t mean smaller as in like revenue or people wise, but just that might not need as much development for whatever it is that they do. Like interior designers, for instance,, they might not need to have all of the development aspects that WordPress or show it offers. I would say bigger companies that might need a lot of options for e-commerce, or if you need to have different types of plugins that you’re not going to get with Squarespace. And it’s definitely something to look up before you choose if there’s something you need, you know, if you need some sort of like specific type of calculator, I don’t know. There’s different things that people want sometimes like that. Just do a quick Google search and see, like, is this something I could get with a plugin in WordPress? Or is that something that would be able to be done at Squarespace? just to kind of see your where, your needs call. [00:28:42] Melissa: That’s a great tip about a special circumstance. Like if you know, going into it that your business needs something really specific, seek that out before you make a choice. I think that’s a great tip. And then Davey over to you, the same question, who do you think is the right fit for. WordPress, maybe show it. And then who do you think could be maybe a better fit for Squarespace [00:29:00] Davey: I would say for WordPress, somebody who values flexibility like if you’re the kind of person that doesn’t mind breaking something , and then figuring it out, WordPress is a great option for you. Whereas if you’re somebody who like doesn’t want to hit a button in like a new program, because you’re like, scared of what’s going to happen, then WordPress is probably not the place for you. when I’m talking to, for instance, custom clients and we’re trying to figure out whether it’s going to be show it, or WordPress, you know, I’m asking about functionality first and foremost. Are you going to have an online shop or are you an e-commerce business? and typically if they say yes, we’re probably already starting to push them towards WordPress. if they’re a service based business, then we’re starting to push them towards show it. [00:29:35] Melissa: Yeah, I think it overall takeaway, I hope people get is that there isn’t a clear right answer, but I want people to see that as a sign of freedom of choice to choose whichever feels right to test it out a little bit to lead as both of you just suggested with the functionality that you’re looking for, instead of asking which one looks better to you ask yourself, what do I need my website to. What is a nice to have, but I don’t actually need it all for my business. And then on top of that, what is my comfort level with putting my own adventure together in the direction of WordPress and really liking a certain customizable route versus Squarespace where yeah, maybe it doesn’t do exactly what I want, but it’s all in one place. And I don’t have to worry about all of these other things. So I think there’s a great choice here for everyone. And I’ve loved having both of you here. And I know from experience, both of you have such great resources for online business owners and creatives to help with their websites. Your templates are, like I said before, not just beautiful, but designed to convert and to have a functioning website. And I cannot wait for people to check both of you out. One last fun thing. I think about all three of us is that we’ve all chosen to put ampersands in our business names and give ourselves a world of troubles. [00:30:42] Davey: That’s right. that’s the takeaway. Don’t do it. [00:30:45] Melissa: that’s the takeaway, you want trademark troubles, choose an ampersand. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of The Wit & Wire Podcast. You’ll find links to Chelsea’s templates at 23 & nine creative and Davey and Krista’s templates at Davey & Krista in the show notes, or you can visit witandwire.com/43. To see all of the links mentioned to all of our favorite tools and all of their templates. All in one place. f you have a friend who would enjoy this episode, I would love if you pass it along and don’t forget to follow or subscribe to this podcast. So you don’t miss any of our upcoming episodes. At N wire I’m on a mission to help more people build businesses. They love. And you can learn more about our courses for podcasters and course creators at witandwire.com/courses, or find me on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube @witandwire. I’m Melissa Guller and a huge thank you again for tuning in. I’ll see you soon.