Is Square the same as Squarespace?
As web developers, we often work with people who, understandably, don’t know a lot about how a website is built. Part of our job is to figure out what someone means when they don’t have the knowledge or experience to use the right terminology.
We have had clients ask us to build their website using Square. We have also had clients ask us to use Squarespace to process credit card transactions. Neither of these requests makes sense.
Square and Squarespace are two companies that people often confuse with each other. However, they are very different, and in this article we’ll explain the key differences between them.
Are Square and Squarespace the same thing? If not, how are they different?
SQUARE
At the simplest level, Square (also known as Squareup) is a point-of-sale application that allows merchants to process payments using a range of devices.
You’ve probably seen the little white credit card reader that attaches to a mobile phone. You may have also seen merchants using an iPad at their checkout instead of a traditional register. Both of these have become popular in shops and restaurants, and at farmers markets and other similar events.
The general term for this type of system is point of sale (POS) and what Square has done is dramatically simplify and reduce the cost of getting set up with a POS system.
Square also offers a platform for building online stores, but it has significant limitations. We don’t consider it to be a good solution for anything but the most basic eCommerce.
SQUARESPACE
Squarespace, on the other hand, is an all-in-one, general-purpose platform for building websites. It has pre-built templates and uses its own hosting. There is no support for third-party apps, plugins or extensions, and opportunities for SEO are limited.
A Squarespace website can include eCommerce, processing online transactions using Stripe, Square or PayPal as the payment processor. Stripe, Square and PayPal (among others) can also be used as the payment processor for a non-Squarespace website. This is probably a source of at least some of the confusion between Square and Squarespace. The fact is, Square and Squarespace are separate companies that just happen to share part of their name.
Do you have any additional questions about Square vs Squarespace?
This article is just a brief comparison between Square vs Squarespace. It is not meant to be a comprehensive explanation of either. If you have any additional questions about Square and Squarespace, please call us at (518) 392-0846 or email [email protected].
Finally, learn more about our website design and development services, as well as hosting and maintenance and search engine optimization. Visit our blog for more short informational articles about website design and development.
I have been using Square as a payment system for a long time. I then learned of their free online website years ago and built a website. It was a very primitive website platform in that there was no SEO functionality. But I made some sales. Square recently bought the Weebly platform and migrated all the Square Online users to Weebly managed website editor. It allowed you to rebuild your website with a few more features. But after building my new Square/Weebly store I encountered some things. First is their Weebly App/plugins store, while full of useful apps and plugins, they are not available the Square/Weebly users. NONE. I was looking to use a valuable Multi-Language paid app that is in the Weebly store but discovered the app was not available to me. I check other apps and discovered all the apps cannot be used. No one, in support, would answer my email inquiries directly. I contacted someone in their community support bu their response was not definitive on when any of the apps/plugins would ever be available.
Secondly but most importantly. In the Weebly online store editor, there is an “embed code” widget. This would be used to add the much-needed H Tags for the SEO. In Weebly blogs, there are tutorials on adding these tags and other code for plugins and other structured data. The Embed Code widget does not function correctly. Whatever code you add into the Embed Code widget, saving a publish the output is corrupted with added elements added to the code I just had written.
It was Bing tech support that told me what was wrong as all SEO analyzers I used gave me results that I had no H tags on any of my pages. Yet if I go into my website editor it is clearly seen that I added the correct code. And when you View Page Source you can see how the widget corrupts the code, making it useless for SEO purposes. I have plenty of screenshots.
Third and last. Tech support for Weebly users is horrendous. On several occasions, I log in to my account to spoke to tech support and the technician told me that my email address was not on file, nor my name. That was crazy. On other occasions, I was told that my case number was still in the queue after I already reported 2 weeks prior. You cannot talk to anyone in higher tier level support.
I am already looking for another platform, unfortunately. I spent almost 2 months doing much of the work and have a great looking site but on the Weebly site, I have underlying technical issues that have yet to be fixed. Tech support is extremely important and Weebly just does not have an effective team nor is the platform fully available. I would never recommend this platform. Before the Weebly purchase, Square was top-notch with an effective tech support staff.
Hi Karl,
That sounds really frustrating. Maybe Square will fix some of these issues as they work through the integration of Weebly into their platform. However, if you’re already looking for another platform, we can vouch for the SEO potential of WordPress (with WooCommerce for the store).
Good luck!