Squarespace website design: DIY or hire a designer?

Short answer: Squarespace website design costs about $190 to $280 a year in plan fees for most small businesses at the time of writing, plus $12 to $20 for the domain, if you build it yourself. Hiring a Squarespace designer typically adds $500 to $1,500 for a template customization or $1,500 to $6,000 for a full small business site. Do it yourself if you have a weekend and few pages. Hire help when the site must bring calls, when you want the text written, or when you have more than eight pages.

Squarespace is the builder people choose for looks: restaurants, salons, photographers, therapists, small law offices, and design-led businesses of every kind. It is also the one owners most often ask us about, usually in the form "should I just do it on Squarespace, or pay someone?" This guide covers what Squarespace costs at the time of writing, what a Squarespace designer or expert charges, what the platform does well and badly for Google search, and when it is time to move off it. We do not build on Squarespace, so we have no reason to talk you into or out of it.

What Squarespace does well

• Templates that look designed. Fewer knobs than Wix, so a first-timer ends up with something clean.
• Everything in one bill. Hosting, security certificate, updates, and support are included. There is nothing to patch and no plugin to break.
• Good built-in blocks. Menus, galleries, appointment scheduling (paid add-on), forms, and a simple blog are all native.
• Phone-friendly by default. Every template is built to work on a phone without a separate mobile view.
• Fair basic SEO. Titles, descriptions, sitemap, and clean addresses are handled without extra tools.

What Squarespace plans cost

Squarespace shows a monthly price but bills yearly for the discounted rate. These are typical prices at the time of writing; check the current plan page before you buy.

Add to that:

• Domain: free for the first year on a yearly plan, then typically $12 to $20 a year.
• Business email: not included; Google Workspace through Squarespace typically adds about $6 to $8 a month per mailbox.
• Scheduling, memberships, or email campaigns: each is a separate paid add-on, often $15 to $50 a month.
• Transaction fees: the cheapest plan is meant for a brochure site. If you plan to sell anything, compare the transaction fee on each plan before you choose.

A realistic do-it-yourself total for a service business is about $200 to $350 in year one and a little more each year after. Over five years that is roughly $1,000 to $1,700 for a site you cannot take with you. Our best website builders for small business comparison puts that next to Wix, GoDaddy, and WordPress.com.

Doing it yourself: a realistic plan

Most owners who finish a Squarespace site do it in a weekend plus a few evenings. The ones who do not finish usually skipped step one.

1. Write the text first, in a document. One line about what you do and for whom, a list of services with a price hint, your service area with city names, and a short "about" paragraph. This is the hard part, and no template does it for you.
2. Collect ten real photos. Your storefront, your team, your work. Resize them to under 500 KB each before uploading.
3. Pick a template by structure, not color. Colors change in a minute. Page layouts do not.
4. Build five pages: Home, Services, About, Reviews, Contact. That is enough for almost every local business.
5. Make the phone number tappable in the header on every page, and put a contact form on the Contact page.
6. Fill in the SEO fields on each page: a title with your service and city, a two-sentence description.
7. Connect Google Search Console and your Google Business Profile, then check the whole site on your own phone.

Hiring a Squarespace designer: what it costs

"Squarespace designer," "Squarespace expert," and "Squarespace developer" all describe the same group of people: freelancers and small studios who build on the platform every day. Many are in the Squarespace Circle program, which is a free community for professional designers rather than a certification. Typical prices in our experience, at the time of writing:

Two things to confirm before paying anyone. First, the Squarespace subscription and domain should be in your account, not the designer's, so you keep control if you part ways. Second, ask who writes the text. Many designers expect you to supply it, and that is where projects stall. Our freelance web designer vs agency post has a full hiring checklist.

Squarespace SEO: what it can and cannot do

Owners searching "Squarespace SEO" usually want to know whether the platform will hold them back on Google. The honest answer is that it will not for a five-page local site, and it can for a bigger one.

It handles well:

• Page titles and descriptions, editable on every page.
• An automatic sitemap, secure connection, and clean addresses.
• Phone-friendly templates, which Google expects.
• Built-in connection to Google Search Console.
• Local business details, such as address and hours, on the Contact page.

It is limited on:

• Speed. Image-heavy templates can load slowly on a phone unless you resize photos carefully.
• Structured data. Squarespace adds some automatically, but you cannot control it in detail without code injection on the Core plan and above.
• Many location or service pages. Possible, but each is built by hand and the navigation gets awkward past about fifteen pages.
• Plugins. There is no plugin ecosystem, so features like advanced review feeds or FAQ schema need third-party code snippets.
• Blog structure. Fine for a small blog, less flexible for categories and internal linking at scale.

In practice, the bigger SEO factor for a local business is what the pages say. A Squarespace site that names "emergency plumber in Tucson" on the right page beats a custom site that says "welcome to our website." Pair the site with a complete Google Business Profile and a steady flow of reviews, and Squarespace is rarely the thing holding you back. If you want a full check-up of an existing site, our SEO & GEO service page explains what a setup covers.

When Squarespace is the wrong choice, and how to move off

Squarespace stops fitting when one of these becomes true:

• You need many pages: one per city, one per service, a large blog. The editor becomes slow to work in.
• You need a specific feature such as a customer portal, a complex quote calculator, or a multi-step booking flow that no add-on covers.
• The yearly fees now exceed what a one-time built site would have cost.
• You want to own the files and move between developers freely.

Moving off is a rebuild, not a transfer. Squarespace exports page and blog text in a WordPress-readable file, but not the design, most images, forms, or products. Plan for three steps: rebuild the pages on the new platform, re-upload images, and set up redirects from every old address to the matching new one so you do not lose your Google rankings. Keep the domain in your own name from day one, and moving is a two-week job instead of a crisis.

What we charge

We do not build on Squarespace. We build standalone business websites that you own outright, hosted in your name, for a one-time price. If you already have a Squarespace site you like, keep it; the numbers below are for owners deciding between a builder subscription and a built site, and our website design cost guide shows what the whole US market charges. Full details are on our business websites page.

• Starter, $799 one-time: a one-page, phone-friendly site with call and email buttons and your Google Maps location, live in about 5 business days. Compare with roughly $200 to $350 a year on Squarespace.
• Business, $2,999 one-time: up to 6 pages, we write all the text, a photo gallery and services list, a contact form and call button, and basic Google search setup, in about 10 business days. Compare with hiring a Squarespace designer for $1,500 to $6,000 plus the subscription.
• Growth, $4,999 one-time: up to 12 pages, a blog or news section, full SEO setup for every page, speed tuning, and 3 months of free small changes.

Our team is based in India and works with US businesses by email and video call; we reply usually within one business day. There are no long-term contracts, and the domain, hosting, and files stay in your name. See our pricing page for everything side by side.

The short version

Squarespace is a good-looking, low-maintenance builder that costs most small businesses about $190 to $280 a year at the time of writing, plus a domain and any add-ons. Build it yourself if you have five pages, a free weekend, and your text already written. Hire a Squarespace designer, typically $500 to $1,500 for a template customization or $1,500 to $6,000 for a full site, when you want it done right and plan to keep editing it yourself. Its SEO is fine for a small local site and limited for a big one. Have a site built instead when you want to own it, expect many pages, or want the text and Google setup included in one price. Whichever way you go, keep the domain and the account in your own name.