Is Squarespace Still Worth It in 2026? What a Year of Its Own Records Shows

Is Squarespace worth it in 2026? Yes for a portfolio, a service business or a small shop that values design over control. No if you sell courses, handle health data or need someone on the phone. I went through Squarespace’s own record instead of its marketing: every outage it posted in the past year, Chrome’s speed data for real Squarespace sites, and the contract you sign.

That record is what the reviews ranking for this question skip. I read twelve of them on October 23 and 24, 2026. None cited Squarespace’s status page, none used field speed data from Chrome, and none quoted a line of its Terms of Service.

Is Squarespace worth it? The short answer by site type

Squarespace is worth it when the website is your shop window and you’d rather never think about hosting, plugins or security patches again. It stops being worth it when the site is the product itself: a course business, a store that needs deep customization, or anything that touches patient data. My verdict, site type by site type:

• A portfolio or personal site: yes. This is what Squarespace does best. The templates hold together on a phone without any work from you, and nothing on the site needs updating.
• A service business that takes bookings: yes, with one condition. Acuity Scheduling is Squarespace’s own booking tool. It accounted for 11 of the 35 incidents Squarespace posted in the past year. On October 21, 2026 it went offline for nearly six hours. Keep a backup way for clients to reach you.
• A small store selling physical products: yes on Core or above, where Squarespace adds no transaction fee of its own (card processing fees still apply). On Basic it takes 2% of every sale.
• Courses, memberships or digital downloads: usually no. Squarespace takes 7% of digital revenue on Basic and 5% on Core. Plus cuts that to 1%, and only Advanced reaches 0%.
• Therapists, clinics or anyone collecting health information: no, unless every form runs through a HIPAA-enabled Acuity account. Squarespace’s own help center says its form blocks can’t be part of a HIPAA-compliant setup.
• Anyone who needs phone support or weekend live chat: no. Squarespace doesn’t offer phone help, and its live chat runs on weekdays.

Those answers rest on three things a pricing page can’t show you: how often the platform breaks, how fast real Squarespace sites load for real visitors, and what the contract lets each side do.

How I checked Squarespace’s record

I wanted an answer to “is Squarespace worth it” that rests on records, not on taste. So I skipped the template gallery and went where a company has to write things down.

For reliability, I pulled every entry from Squarespace’s public status feed between November 1, 2025 and October 23, 2026. I did the same for Wix, as a baseline, under the same rules. For speed, I used HTTP Archive’s technology report, which reads Google’s Chrome UX Report: field data from real visitors to real sites. I also ran PageSpeed Insights on eight of Squarespace’s own template demos.

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For the contract, I read the full Terms of Service, the AI Terms, the Privacy Policy and the help-center pages on support, health data and security. For the money and the ownership, I read Squarespace’s last annual report and the filing that closed its sale. For owners, I read forum threads and checked every quote I use against the original post.

What I didn’t do: I didn’t buy a plan or run a live store for a year. Meikuio doesn’t pay for products it reviews. Where this article says “I,” it means I opened the page, ran the count or read the clause.

What you get for the money in 2026

Squarespace is a hosted website builder: one subscription covers the site, the hosting, the security certificate, the templates and support, and you never install anything. In the US it sells four self-serve website plans: Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced. Basic starts at $19 a month on annual billing or $25 month to month. Core is $29 or $39, Plus $49 or $65, and Advanced $99 or $139, according to the US pricing page I pulled from a US connection on October 24, 2026.

One warning before you compare prices. Squarespace sets the page by country. From outside the US I saw three plans and lower prices on the same address. Squarespace ties the Plus plan to whether Squarespace Payments works in your country. Every plan, fee and renewal number lives in my full Squarespace pricing breakdown, so I won’t repeat that math here.

What every plan shares is the part people pay Squarespace for. Every tier includes hosting, SSL, a free custom domain for the first year on annual billing, mobile-ready templates, basic analytics and the ability to sell something. Core adds unlimited contributors, full CSS and JavaScript customization and professional email through Google Workspace. Plus and Advanced lower the payment-processing and digital-content fees as you sell more.

The design side is still the reason most people sign up. The editor, Fluid Engine, lets you drag blocks anywhere on a grid. The grid stops you from overlapping text and images or breaking the mobile layout. Blueprint AI will draft a multi-page starting site from a short questionnaire. Squarespace has spent 2026 adding AI tools on top, including an image generator called Image Studio. The catch is the ceiling. Once a template’s layout fights you, switching to a different design on a finished site built on 7.1, the current version of the platform, is harder than the gallery suggests.

Marketing tools come bundled, at a price. Squarespace sells Email Campaigns, and since September 2026 SMS campaigns too, from inside the same dashboard. If email is the business rather than a side channel, a dedicated newsletter platform gives you more for less. The same goes for social posting, where a social media scheduler does the job Squarespace only half covers.

Why is Squarespace so expensive, then? Because you’re paying for the absence of maintenance. A WordPress site can run for a few dollars a month on cheap hosting, but somebody has to update it, back it up and clean it up when it gets hacked. Squarespace folds that labor into the subscription. Whether that’s a good deal depends on how much your own time is worth, and on the next three records.

How often does Squarespace go down? What its own status page shows

Between November 1, 2025 and October 23, 2026, Squarespace published 35 incident reports and 3 maintenance notices on its public status page. Twenty-four of those incidents concerned the website platform itself, and eleven concerned Acuity Scheduling. Wix, counted the same way over the same months, published 32 incidents and 1 maintenance notice.

A status page is a public log the company keeps about its own problems. Squarespace’s covers 13 components, from Site Loading and Site Editing to Commerce, Domains, Email Campaigns and Acuity. So read my count for what it is: the number of problems Squarespace chose to report, not a stopwatch measurement of downtime. I pulled every entry from both companies’ public incident feeds, set planned maintenance aside, and sorted each incident by the product its title names.

The two platforms look alike in volume. Squarespace marked 4 of its 35 incidents “critical,” and Wix marked 5 of its 32. Squarespace’s website incidents were short, as published: Squarespace closed half of them within about an hour and a half. The longest, “Site Loading and Editing Issues” on April 27, 2026, stayed open from 12:09 to 18:20 Eastern, a whole afternoon for anyone trying to edit or load a site.

The rest of the list reads like a normal year at a big platform. On November 3, 2025, Squarespace marked “Site Loading and Editing issues – due to 503 errors” as critical. On December 16, sites on non-English templates had trouble for about four hours. On January 24, 2026, login verification emails ran late for more than three hours. On February 3, editing failed on some older 7.0 sites for about two and a half hours. On March 10, domain registration and billing broke for over two hours. March and April were the busiest months, with six incidents each.

So is Squarespace worth it if your site can’t go down? For most small sites, yes. Squarespace posted about three incidents a month, most of them short, and Wix posted a similar number. If your business can’t take an afternoon offline, though, no hosted builder will promise you otherwise, and Squarespace doesn’t even try.

Acuity is where the year got rough. Its admin app crashed for iPhone owners after the iOS 27 update, from September 18 to September 22, 2026. Then on October 21 Squarespace pulled the whole booking tool offline from 9:00 to 14:42 Eastern, and said why on the status page: “To protect your data, we’ve taken Acuity offline while we address PHP2SHELL, a critical security vulnerability rated 9.2 out of 10 for severity.” Taking a tool down to patch it is the responsible move. If your clients book through it, it’s still nearly six hours without bookings.

That figure sits in Squarespace’s last annual report as a public company, filed with the SEC in February 2024: “We have a 99.9% uptime for our products.” The Terms of Service say the opposite of a promise. Squarespace “makes no warranty or representation that the Services will: (a) be timely, uninterrupted or error-free.” CNET’s review still tells readers that “Squarespace offers the industry-standard 99.9% uptime guarantee.” I couldn’t find that guarantee in any contract Squarespace offers ordinary customers.

The uptime numbers you’ll see in other reviews come from monitoring one site. Tooltester watched its own Squarespace demo for about half a year and logged 99.96%. That’s a fair test of one site on one plan. It can’t tell you how often the platform as a whole has trouble, which is what the status page records.

Is Squarespace fast? What Chrome’s field data says

In September 2026, 71.0% of Squarespace sites measured by Chrome passed all three of Google’s Core Web Vitals on mobile, up from 65.0% a year earlier. That puts Squarespace level with Webflow, behind Duda, Wix and Shopify, and far ahead of WordPress. The chart below has each platform’s figures for both years.

Core Web Vitals are Google’s three page-experience scores. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is how long the main content takes to appear, with 2.5 seconds as the good mark. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is how fast the page reacts to a tap, good at 200 milliseconds or less. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is how much the layout jumps while loading. The Chrome UX Report collects these from real Chrome users, and HTTP Archive groups the results by the platform each site runs on. Squarespace’s mobile score came from 89,052 sites.

Squarespace’s weak spot is loading, not responding. On mobile, 78.0% of Squarespace sites hit the good mark for Largest Contentful Paint, against 84.8% on Wix, 87.7% on Shopify and 94.0% on Duda. Layout shift is the other gap: 89.5% pass on mobile against Wix’s 97.9%. Responsiveness is fine at 97.3%. On desktop the overall pass rate is 76.1%, up from 69.1% a year earlier.

I also ran Google’s PageSpeed Insights on eight of Squarespace’s own featured template demos on October 24, 2026. They scored between 48 and 63 for mobile performance. The main content took between 8.9 and 19.2 seconds to appear on the simulated slow phone the test uses. Layout shift was close to zero on all eight. A lab test of a demo is a stress test, not your future site’s score, and the field data above is the better guide. Still, if your site will look like those demos, test it on a phone before launch.

The field data also settles two conflicting claims. LitExtension writes that “Squarespace is on top of the CMS Page Speed Performance Ranking Both Desktop And Mobile,” without naming the ranking. Tooltester’s tests of live sites put it last of 12 builders on Google’s mobile performance score. Chrome’s data from real visitors puts it in the middle of the pack.

Is Squarespace good for SEO, then? On speed, it’s good enough: seven in ten sites pass on mobile, more than WordPress manages. The control side is a different question, covered in my comparison of the SEO settings each builder lets you control. Squarespace holds code injection back for Core and above.

What you agree to when you sign up

Squarespace’s Terms of Service, in force since March 27, 2025, renew your plan automatically and let Squarespace change its fees with notice. They send US disputes to individual arbitration and cap Squarespace’s liability at $20 or whatever you paid in the previous twelve months, whichever is greater. I read the whole contract on October 24, 2026. Most of it is standard for the industry, which is why it’s easy to skip.

Renewal is automatic by design: “To ensure uninterrupted service, we’ll automatically bill you for certain Paid Services.” Fee changes come with a heads-up and one remedy. “We may change our fees at any time. We’ll provide you with advance notice of these fee changes via the Services.” If you don’t agree, you can cancel before your next payment date. That’s the clause behind the July 2026 price increase, and it’s the same pattern I’ve seen in how auto-renewal terms catch people in other subscriptions.

The liability cap matters more than it sounds. If an outage takes your site down during a launch, the contract says Squarespace’s total liability won’t exceed “the greater of twenty US dollars ($20) or the amounts paid by you to Squarespace in the twelve (12) months” before the problem. For a Basic site on annual billing, that’s one year of fees. Your lost sales are your problem.

Squarespace can also cut you off quickly. It may suspend or disable access “at any time at our sole discretion and without notice,” and in the same section promises only that it “will endeavor to provide you reasonable notice” when it suspends an account for breaking the rules. Your content stays yours, but you give Squarespace a “non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free” licence to use it “for the limited purposes of allowing us to provide, improve, promote and protect the Services.” The main terms don’t mention AI training. A separate set of AI Terms has been in force since June 25, 2026. It lets Squarespace’s conversational AI “edit, add, enable, disable, remove, publish, purchase, alter, change and/or modify” your sites and subscriptions when you ask it to. Know what a terms of service actually grants you before you let a chatbot buy things on your account.

Disputes are where the contract leans hardest. US customers agree to settle claims through individual arbitration, and claims “can only be brought individually, and not as part of a class or representative action.” There’s an exit, and it’s easy to miss.

None of this is unusual. Shopify’s terms carry the same kind of disclaimer: Shopify “does not warrant that the Services will be uninterrupted.” The difference is that the reviews buyers read don’t mention it: none of the twelve I read quoted it.

Is Squarespace safe? The 2024 domain hijacking and what changed

Squarespace is safe for an ordinary business site, with one blemish you should know about. The account side is solid. Squarespace supports two-factor sign-in “with two-factor authentication methods like passkeys, apps, or text messages.” Its last annual report says its built-in commerce tools were certified as a PCI DSS Level 1 service provider, the highest level. The blemish came from its domain business, in July 2024.

Squarespace bought the Google Domains business from Google in 2023, announced on June 15 and completed on September 7. It paid about $180.7 million, according to its annual report. Krebs on Security put the haul at “roughly 10 million domain names.” In July 2024, attackers took over a set of cryptocurrency-related domains that had moved across.

Squarespace’s postmortem says the problem “was detected on July 9, 2024,” and continues: “On the morning of July 12th, our analysis revealed a weakness related to OAuth logins.” Squarespace says it deployed a fix at 12:19 PM Eastern that day. It says “all compromised accounts were using third-party OAuth” and that the migration “involved no changes to multi-factor authentication.” Security researchers told a different story. Citing Taylor Monahan of MetaMask, Krebs on Security reported that Squarespace “did not require email verification for new accounts created with a password,” so an attacker could claim a migrated domain’s account before its real owner did. Krebs later wrote that the company’s postmortem “contradicts the findings presented by the researchers.” I can’t settle that dispute from the public documents.

What it means for you is simple. Turn on two-factor sign-in the day you open the account, and use passkeys if your devices support them. If your domain came over from Google, note one more change: “As of September 7, 2024 all migrated domains renew at our standard rates.” Check the renewal price in your domain settings before it charges.

Is Squarespace HIPAA compliant?

Only one part of it is. Squarespace’s help center says “Acuity is the only Squarespace feature currently designed to offer services consistent with HIPAA obligations.” You can switch on HIPAA for Acuity on its Powerhouse or Premium plans by signing a business associate agreement (BAA). That’s the contract HIPAA, the US health-privacy law, requires between a health provider and its vendors.

Everything else on the platform is off limits for patient data. The help center says “contact form features like the form block, can’t be used as part of a HIPAA compliant solution.” The Terms of Service forbid handling protected health information “unless your Account for such Services is designated as HIPAA-enabled and you enter into a separate business associate agreement with Squarespace.” If you run a practice, put intake forms and booking on a HIPAA-enabled Acuity account or on one of the scheduling tools that will sign a BAA. Keep the Squarespace site itself free of health questions.

What changed since Permira took Squarespace private

Squarespace stopped being a public company on October 17, 2024, when funds advised by the investment firm Permira completed a buyout at $46.50 a share. Squarespace valued the deal at about $7.2 billion. Since then it files nothing with the SEC, so its last public numbers are old: $1.012 billion of revenue in 2023 and 4.631 million unique subscriptions at the end of that year.

The buyout came with debt. The filing that closed the deal describes a credit agreement that includes a $2.1 billion term loan, a $300 million delayed-draw loan and a $250 million revolving facility. Blue Owl Capital Corporation is the administrative agent. Squarespace itself is a guarantor. None of that shows up on your invoice directly.

Three changes since then are visible from the outside. Prices rose: the July 2026 price increase lifted US annual rates on Basic, Core and Plus. Support narrowed: the last annual report described “a global team of product specialists available 24/7/365” working “in six languages across eight time zones,” and today’s live chat runs on weekdays, in English. And the product kept shipping, with monthly update posts through 2026 adding AI site drafting, an image generator, SMS campaigns and multi-currency checkout. Squarespace also sold its restaurant-reservation business, Tock, to American Express for $400 million in 2024.

Is Squarespace owned by Google? No. It bought Google’s domain business, which is why so many Google Domains customers ended up there, but the company belongs to Permira’s funds.

What owners say: support, price rises and leaving

Owners are split, with almost as many one-star ratings as five-star ones. On Trustpilot on October 24, 2026, Squarespace scored 3.5 out of 5 from 6,248 reviews, with 40% five-star and 39% one-star ratings. A TrustScore isn’t a plain average of the stars: Trustpilot weights recent reviews more heavily. Wix scored 3.4 from 29,269 reviews, but with 71% five-star and 22% one-star. Trustpilot shows that Squarespace replied to 97% of negative reviews and pays for a Trustpilot subscription.

The angriest threads in 2026 are about renewals. In July, one owner on r/squarespace wrote: “I just received my annual renewal notice. They’re now charging me $208 per year, despite no additional features or functionality.” Another posted: “My site went from $192 to $348.” In October, a third explained why they left: “I am one of many who finally balked at the massive price hikes, year-on-year, for the same average service.”

Support is the second complaint, and it lines up with Squarespace’s own pages. The help article says “We don’t offer assistance by phone” and that support runs “24 hours a day, 7 days a week” by email, chat, X, Messenger and the app. The contact panel on that same page lists “Live Chat Monday – Friday: 4:00AM to 8:00PM EST” and adds: “We currently offer live chat support in English only.” So the round-the-clock part is email and social messages; a live person in chat works weekdays only. Owners hit exactly that gap. One wrote, while their site showed a browser security warning, “And they don’t offer live support on the weekend.” Another described a business site being taken down “without any stated reason,” with “no response to his emails, limited live chat hours, and they have NO phone number.”

The defense comes from people who build on it for a living. An agency owner who has built on Squarespace since 2018 put it plainly: “use Squarespace for what it’s genuinely good at (design, low maintenance, not getting hacked) and go third party for the rest.” That matches what I found. The core product holds up, and the add-ons are where the bill and the frustration grow.

Those quotes come from public forum threads I opened and checked word for word; they’re a sample of loud owners, not a survey. If you’re thinking of leaving, read what a Squarespace export contains first, because your design doesn’t move with you.

Already paying? Is Squarespace worth it at renewal?

If your site is already on Squarespace, the question changes. Moving costs you a rebuild, because the design doesn’t export. So the bar for leaving is higher than the bar for not joining.

I’d stay if three things hold. The site is mostly a portfolio or a service page, not a course business. Your renewal fits the budget once you add the domain and any add-ons. And you can live with email support on weekends. If one fails, price the alternatives before renewing. If two fail, start the rebuild a couple of months before the renewal date, not the week the invoice arrives.

Before you renew, check the price in your billing settings, not on the public pricing page, because long-time subscribers report renewal amounts that differ from the cards. Downgrade unused add-ons before the charge. If the arbitration clause matters to you, note that the 30-day opt-out window opens again whenever Squarespace changes that section of the Terms.

Squarespace pros and cons in 2026

Every point below is backed by a record above.

Pros

• Nothing to maintain: hosting, security certificates and updates are Squarespace’s job.
• Templates that hold together on a phone without any work from you.
• Real sites pass Google’s Core Web Vitals about as often as Webflow sites, and far more often than WordPress sites.
• A published incident log, with short incidents on the website side.
• No Squarespace transaction fee on physical sales from Core upward.

Cons

• Renewals rose in 2026, and the contract lets fees change with notice.
• No phone support and no weekend live chat.
• Mobile loading lags Wix, Shopify and Duda.
• A 7% cut of digital sales on Basic and 5% on Core.
• Liability capped at a year of fees ($20 if you paid less), with US disputes sent to arbitration unless you opt out.
• Health data allowed only through a HIPAA-enabled Acuity account.

Who should skip Squarespace, and what to look at instead

If you want the cheapest possible start or a free plan to test an idea, look at Wix vs Squarespace, because Wix has a free plan and Squarespace doesn’t. If you want full control over code, plugins and SEO, the WordPress route is the answer. Pick between hosted WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress first, as I laid out in Squarespace vs WordPress. If the store is the business, with hundreds of products and complex shipping, a dedicated commerce platform such as Shopify fits better than a design-first builder.

Course creators and membership sites are the clearest skip. Squarespace’s digital-content fees on Basic and Core take a slice that dedicated course platforms don’t, and the cheapest plan that removes the fee entirely is Advanced. Price that against your expected sales before you build anything.

The same goes for anyone who needs a person on the line. If a broken checkout on a Saturday would cost you real money, pick a platform whose support hours match your trading hours, and confirm them in writing before you sign up.

Frequently Asked Questions