Why You Should Build Your Church Website on Squarespace

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I’ve built church websites on Wix, Weebly, Wordpress, Subsplash, Cloversites and of course Squarespace. I’ve built church websites on many platforms, and all of them (including Squarespace) come with both advantages and disadvantages. 

This post isn’t about bad mouthing those other platforms. In fact, most of them I find to be quite good and useful in certain circumstances. 

Wordpress is great if you want something super customizable. But if you don’t have an affordable developer to help you build and maintain the website, it’s probably going to become a challenge for churches to work with.

Subsplash’s SnapPages is great if you’re also using their mobile app and media resources. But if you’re not, then it’s pretty overpriced and is also limiting on design features.

Wix is great if you want to make your website look like literally anything, but it’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness as designs start to look messy and downright unintelligible on mobile.

You get the idea. When I’m consulting with a church on what platform they should build their website on, there are times when I recommend something other than Squarespace.

But most of the time, it’s Squarespace.

Why is this? Squarespace wasn’t designed for churches. So why do so many churches use the platform to build their website?

Clean & modern design

Squarespace majors in super modern and clean templates and features. You won’t have unlimited choices on what your website will look like, and this is intentional. I’m of the firm belief that most churches do not need to reinvent the wheel with their web design and should instead spend more time on their content and strategy. For this, Squarespace provides a beautifully designed platform that looks great on both desktop and mobile.

Easy of use (CMS)

CMS stands for content management system, and it’s an extremely important feature when it comes to website builders. Your CMS is the interface that allows you to update pages, design, photos, upload video. If a platform’s CMS is overwhelming, unintuitive, and design elements on your website one at a time. This is incredibly frustrating.

Other kinds of CMS lock everything into one particular design for every element, which is super helpful...until you need to change any of those elements. Now you have to bring in a developer (coder) to change those elements, which can be expensive and time consuming.

I like Squarespace’s CMS because it’s the best of both worlds. It’s simple, intuitive and can be changed sitewide at any time without a developer. When I build a church website, it usually takes me one hour to train their staff on Squarespace’s CMS.

Great with or without coding

Squarespace has beautiful built-in designs, but if you’re so inclined, it’s not very hard to customize your Squarespace website with javascript, css, and other embedded code. If you would like to learn more about coding, I would highly recommend our friends over at Inside the Square. She has great beginner resources.

Very affordable

One of the big deterrents of some of the church specific platforms out there is their price tag. 

To be clear, I actually don’t think most of them are overpriced. Technology takes a lot of resources to develop and maintain. Plus, paying a higher premium can get you some cool features. 

However, when you do the math, it’s easy to see how paying their initial start-up fees plus monthly fees can get a little out of hand. 

All platforms have different price points, but if you’re paying two to three times as much for your specialized website over your Squarespace website, that’s an average of almost $500 more per year (but often more) you’re paying for your website. 

Then there are the church website companies out there who claim to build your website for free (which they do), but then you are locked into their platform and management contract for a minimum of around $200 per month. That’s $2,400 per year. Then if you want to leave to spend less, you have to start over with a new website.

Squarespace costs $18 per month (that’s for their 2nd level membership with all the features you’ll need), which means you’re paying $216 per year for your website builder and hosting. Not bad and for churches with a limited budget, this price point just makes sense.

What about the built in church features on the specialized platforms?

Good question. It is cool when you can utilize a sermon archive, small group catalogue, or giving application, all on one platform. But the reality is, most churches are getting most of those features in YouTube/Vimeo and their Church Management System. 

It is actually better for churches to build their sermon archive in YouTube and simply embed it into Squarespace. Now people can find your sermons on YouTube and you didn’t have to upload them to a separate platform. 

For donations, groups, registrations and forms it’s the same deal. You want to create those things in your Church Management System (ChMS) and either link or embed those features in your website. Now you’ve updated one system and it pushes directly to your website.

So at the end of the day, a lot of those premium feature that come with the more expensive websites are things you’re already paying for on your ChMS and social media platforms.

Support

When I say “support”, I’m not talking about customer support. Squarespace’s customer support is just fine. What I’m talking about is hosting your website with a big company that has hundreds of developers on staff, all with the single goal of improving the platform and keeping your website up and running. 

Just last week, one of the websites I manage on a church specific company (who can remain nameless) went down for about 18 hours. This is something that can and does happen when your go with a smaller web company that doesn’t have the systems or staff to troubleshoot big problems that can and will occur.

For some things in life, going with the small boutique company is a good idea. But when it comes to technology and development, that’s just not the case. You want a big and quality company that has all the resources needed to deliver and keep delivering a great product.

The bottom line

Churches have a lot to consider when choosing a website platform. It’s a lot of work and a big investment. But when presented with the options, churches often realize Squarespace, while not created for churches, is a beautiful, powerful, practical and affordable platform to become the welcome mat for new people interested in visiting their church.