Bluehost vs Squarespace: Which one should you select for your website?

Bluehost vs. Squarespace, which one will be effective for your website? Both are highly rated platforms and can help you design a professional website. However, they are quite different from one another in various aspects. 

• Bluehost is a popular hosting provider. It offers a solid foundation to develop a site using another platform like WP (WordPress). Bluehost boasts of having its very own builder named, the ‘Bluehost Builder’ that comes with basic features. If you are well-versed with WP or eager to learn it, then you can select this hosting provider. 
• Squarespace is considered to be an all-in-one site builder. Although it is expensive, you can develop as well as publish a functional site on this platform itself. It is beginner-friendly, faster and can help you provide life to your website quickly. 

Bluehost vs. Squarespace – Know the difference

Bluehost is a hosting provider, offers you the much-needed foundation to develop your site. On the other hand, Squarespace is a site builder and provides you with end-to-end site solutions. 

Bluehost vs. Squarespace – Know the Pros & Cons

1. Bluehost

Pros:

• The options provided in this platform to develop your site using WP is limitless. It is also considered to be among the most popular customizable platform for site development. 
• It is also quite affordable. 

Cons:

• To derive optimum benefits from this platform, it will be useful to have some coding or designing experience. 
• Different components are to be acquired from different places, thus making it tough to get a proper grip. 

2. Squarespace

Pros:

• Provides an all-in-one solution. No need to organize or invest in anything apart from this platform. 
• It offers a wide range of templates.
• You can develop a beautiful and functional site within few hours. 

Cons:

• Those seeking complex or custom design will find limited features.
• Expensive when compared to Bluehost.

Bluehost vs. Squarespace – Ease of use

When compared to Bluehost, Squarespace is much easier to use. Although Bluehost is considered a supportive and easy-to-use provider, Squarespace offers an easy route to develop a functional site. 

Bluehost has an easy-to-navigate dashboard. Also are provided powerful help & support option. From the Bluehost dashboard, you can easily install WP with just a single click. 

Squarespace, however, is not that easy to use as a website builder. To get a better grip over this platform, you will lots of patience, putting in some quality time and knowledge. But, it wins hands down if you seek a platform to develop a site easily and effortlessly. Due to its nature, the site development and designing process is quite simpler. In addition, there are numerous templates offered which you can use without much hassle. 

Using a powerful site builder, you can introduce necessary changes to the site very easily. You need to move some elements around or include new ones as desired. Using a platform such as WordPress to develop your website is somewhat different.

Trying to personalize the design does require having some coding experience or knowledge of using additional plugins. However, it is not as complicated as you imagine it to be. But it is a bit tough and takes a long time compared to a website builder. 

Bluehost vs squarespace – Value for Money & Pricing

When compared to Squarespace, Bluehost is said to offer value worth your investment. Squarespace offers greater convenience and is well-organized, allowing you to get all the essential features from a single place. But Bluehost offers a ‘bare bones’ option.

• Bluehost: Charging $2.95 a month, it provides ample space on its powerful servers along with essential resources. It includes storage space and bandwidth. The annual plan comes with a domain name. 
• Squarespace: It charges $12 a month. It allows you to develop as well as publish your site for which you can use its template as deemed fit. You can host your site on the platform’s servers. You also get a free domain on opting for its annual plan upfront. 

Hence, both platforms do offer amazing value for money, however, in their way. Bluehost is quite affordable to help your site go live. It also comes with powerful features. However, Bluehost Builder is not exactly recommended for your site design. Rather, you can choose WP for a small amount to build your site. Although WP is free to use, it charges for providing some optional extras like:

• WP Plugins: Free to $10 a month each
• WP Theme: $0 to $13 with on-off payment option. 

The value offered by Squarespace is somewhat different. Its storage and bandwidth come capped in all its plans, thus making it ideal mainly for media-heavy websites. Using its template, you can easily and quickly develop a functional site. However, the WP site will take more time to set up and edit, if required, in the future. Nevertheless, when all-in-one convenience and time-saving are concerned, Squarespace does offer some value. 

Bluehost vs squarespace – Security & Performance

Bluehost is known to offer enhanced security and amazing performance. But this does not make Squarespace to be insecure or a poor performer. On the contrary, however, Bluehost has been designed to withstand extreme pressure and offer fabulous results. 

Features offered

• Storage space: Bluehost offers 50 GB to unlimited storage space while Squarespace provides unlimited options with all its plans. 
• Domain Name: For the initial year, Bluehost offers a free domain name after which it is renewed at $15.99 to about $72.99. Squarespace is offered for free in the initial year after which they charge $20 to $70 on renewal. 

Both are matched pretty evenly if compared in these primary areas. However, it is only under extreme traffic pressure that the differences tend to show up. 

Bluehost provides users with a dedicated server hosting package for about $119.99 a month. It is designed to accommodate traffic in huge amounts. Large sites seeking enterprise solutions can choose Squarespace Select. So your busy site can easily cope up with growing traffic on Squarespace servers. But it is Bluehost that offers a wide range of hosting plans and types. This means you are not likely to get under-resourced or overpay. 

Bluehost vs squarespace – Site Design

Bluehost, along with WP, offers flexible designs. On the other hand, Squarespace boasts of providing the very best ready-to-use designs. 

If you plan to use Bluehost to design a site, you will likely opt for the WP option and not its builder. WP theme directory claims to offer 3,900+ themes. You can access more through third-party sites such as ThemeForest, claiming to offer 50,000 choices, etc. 

Bluehost Plus WP combo is the perfect match if your site belongs to a niche industry. Here, you are sure to find something that will match quite closely and provide that feel desired by your site. In addition, WP can help you to derive that specific feature/structure/look easily. 

Squarespace offers a well-curated template selection, considered to be among the very best provided by any website builder. You can also easily include different types of elements. But when customization is concerned, you are not offered the much-needed flexibility like that of WordPress. 

Bluehost vs squarespace – Support & Assistance

Support offered by Squarespace surpasses Bluehost. The latter only provides the assistance required to develop your site. But Squarespace offers support on various aspects ranging from tackling design queries to managing technical difficulties. 

• Bluehost: It offers 24/7 phone, email, live chat support and a knowledge base. 
• Squarespace: It provides email support and knowledge base. Live chat is offered, but only from Monday to Friday between 5.30 am to 8 pm, EST time. 

Bluehost offers the very best support and help to all its users, irrespective of the package chosen. They provide prompt, valuable, and friendly responses to queries. However, this platform comes with its limitations. They do offer assistance with technical hosting questions and tackle site downtime issues. But with managing plugins or theme customization, not much support is offered. Moreover, WP lacks a support team. Hence, you are to rely on different forums and get support from other WP users. But you can contact other WP users and share information with them as well as get useful assistance. 

Squarespace boasts of having a well-trained support team to assist in the different stages involved in site-building. Although they offer limited phone assistance, you can get most of your queries cleared by the experts. However, they do assist in troubleshooting custom code blocks that you have included on your site. 

Bluehost vs squarespace – Features

Squarespace provides amazing inbuilt features, however, with a glass ceiling. On the other hand, Bluehost allows you to add just about anything. But it would help if you started from scratch. 

• eCommerce: 
  • Bluehost: Bluehost along with WooCommerce provides eCommerce. For larger inventories, WooCommerce is quite suitable as it is a free WP eCommerce plugin. It is popular and powerful. However, you may need to bear additional costs. Some extras to pay to use along with WooCommerce includes:
    • WooCommerce Pre-Orders – $129 a year
    • WooCommerce Bookings – $249 a year
    • WooCommerce Subscriptions – $199 a year
    • PayPal Pro – $30 a month
    • Shipment Tracking – $49 a year

As VPS hosting comes with enhanced security, you should upgrade to VPS plans of Bluehost to take online payments. Such plans are offered at $18.99 a month. 

• Squarespace: Whatever you require to get your site live quickly is provided by Squarespace. You just need to opt for their Business plan that is charged $18 a month or something higher. This plan involves transaction fees of 3%, but not on the other two dedicated plans, namely. Advanced Commerce and Basic Commerce. The former is charged $26 a month while the latter with $40 a month. Configuring Squarespace eCommerce section is quite easy and you will be able to sell quickly. This section is suitable to promote physical and digital products. To deal with subscriptions, you will require an Advanced Commerce plan. It offers enhanced curated production selection rather than large inventory.
• Resources: Both platforms offer almost similar types of resources. 
• Marketing & Extras: 
  • Squarespace: This platform offers lots of exciting inbuilt marketing features to exploit. It includes the following:
    • Optimizes SEO to boost your site.
    • Creates banner and pop-ups notices. 
    • Designs content exclusively for Instagram stories.
    • Develops creative email marketing campaigns.
    • Includes blog to your website with a couple of clicks.
    • Easy-to-interpret analytics. 

Besides its inbuilt tools, it offers a new library comprising of 3^rd party extensions with which you can link up. It can assist with shipping and accounting procedures. What if you do not derive the kind of functionality that you desire from its external integration or inbuilt feature?

In such a case, things can get somewhat tricky. In this platform, you are free to include custom code blocks. However, it will become a bit more technical, for which you might not get adequate support to ensure smooth functioning.

• Bluehost: It provides all the features as given above for Squarespace along with the WP plug-in directory. Within the directory, there are 58,500+ plugins. These plugins are not developed by WP or Bluehost, but by independent developers. It means they might not be of the same standard as what is being offered by Squarespace. Moreover, you need to pay a small amount to use some of them. Sifting through various options provided for each feature can be somewhat overwhelming. It will also require you to have some understanding and lots of patience. But you are likely to get something for anything you desire. It also includes niche, industry-specific features. 

Bluehost vs. Squarespace – Conclusion

Both are different platforms and have managed to stay at the top for a long time. They offer exceptional features and are applauded for their amazing performance. The hosting platform to select will completely be based on your specific requirements. First, you need to consider your preferred approach to developing a site. Going through the key differences and comparing them will allow you to make the correct choice.