The Case Against Squarespace
A platform on platforms
January 1st is not that far away. It’s not the next month exit, or the exit after, or the exit after that, or even the exit after that, but with the holidays kicking off culturally with football season and spiritually on Halloween and practically in the third week of November, it’s not unreasonable to see August as an inflection point, to begin making the requisite physical, mental and metaphorical moves to get from the HOV lane into the Exit Only. Despite wishing my brain and pursuits were impervious to the constructs of the calendar, being a societal participant means I am not immune to the vibes and effects they carry. I don’t intend to kick the tires on the year, but that hasn’t stopped the rumination on what has and hasn’t been done the last eight months from smacking back onto my windshield as I roll on towards fall, with just a season to go ‘til champagne and Auld Lang Syne.
One of the stickiest creative ‘hasn’t been dones,’ one that’s stuck for a long while, coincides with the first day of the new year: the renewal of my website subscription with Squarespace. 2025 would mark my fifth year with the platform, an anniversary that I’m not thrilled to consider celebrating. If I do renew, it will cross the one thousandth cumulative dollar spent on their services. For any unaware, Squarespace is a company that helps you build your own website code-free, offering a suite of cross-platform integrations, online tools, and domains (acquired from Google) at various paid tiers. The org is over twenty years old with close to five million subscribers, projected to hit $1.2 billion in annual revenue in 2024. Despite its many competitors in the space, Squarespace has remained successful maintaining its brand as the platform for creators, artists and entrepreneurs to grow their web presences; touting an intuitive drag and drop user interface, a design-forward simplicity, templates favoring serif fonts, clean color palettes, and tasteful geometry. Squarespace knows who they’re for, what they’re for, and are willing to spend ~$350 million dollars (about 50% of their 2023 operating expenses) a year to get new whos onboard.1 Like Betterhelp, Athletic Greens, and DraftKings, Squarespace is one of the most familiar advertisers you’ll find paired with social, video, or audio content, and even pop up during the Super Bowl. In the photography/creative-focused YouTube space (one that I frequent), one doesn’t have to watch long before you’ll be presented with the brand’s squiggly insignia floating onscreen with an introductory discount code.
This post is not to harp on their strategy or advertising. Its charms appear to be working, and once found its way of working on me. In 2019, I was in the market for a personal actor website as it was mandated by my theater program to perform in our (COVID coinciding) professional industry showcase. Nothing was prescribed, but website builders were featured as a sensible option to thread the needle of time, value, and optics. We weren’t budding computer scientists, so it stood to reason to not perspire over Javascript and use that sweat elsewhere. I browsed Squarespace’s templates and the sites of every one of the previous year’s senior class who used them (a good chunk had). They all loaded like a creative site and scrolled like an creative site and clicked like an creative site and fonted like a creative site, so surely it would present me as one too. Like buying the wine bottle with the coolest label, I stepped into the ecosystem; to be in sync, to keep it simple, to represent my name and potential on the World Wide Web…can you really put a price on that?
In time, as my interests have shifted across disciplines and mediums, my Squarespace-built site has been serviceable to make the adjustments and house the projects I’ve developed, or at least point those interested to the right links and PDFs. I could’ve put far more intent into learning the interface’s ins and outs to optimize my vision, while also calling out Squarespace’s grab-bag of faults (smotheringly confusing style toolbars, meh mobile configuration, shameful file storage limits). In all, the experience has been up to par, and there’s the rub. Year after year, I’ve settled into the cozy choice to pay a good amount for an outcome I like just enough, to be content in a walled garden that checks the box of online presence while offering few ways to flex and scale for a lifetime of work to come. I’m renting a McMansion in cyberspace. It’s fine and it’s mine, but it’s not.
I’m still a believer that what’s put in the house is more essential than the house itself, but as I’ve considered this devil’s advocacy, this has become an excuse to not budge. Like many I admire, form best dances with function over settling for functional or familiar, and the more the maker, their work, and the ways it is presented are aligned, the stronger every aspect of their artistry becomes.2 This alignment might not ever drive more site traffic or generate sales, but it can contribute to creating better conditions for creation and expression. Doing so will zap time, inject resistance and perhaps incur more costs than what Squarespace can neutralize for $168, but I’m certain it can’t foster the WWW forever home I seek to be proud of. This mindset is pushed by a desire for a home base that’s more “me,” but far more importantly, taking steps towards greater responsibility and ownership as an artist in the world today.
Squarespace is not so much a tyrant who must be toppled, instead a prism to assess the major platforms that host our lives, livelihoods and connections—as for profit operations who recognize and leverage their position in the market. The means through which this leverage has been established is complicated (and often suspect), but this is the state of play, and those who want to sign on, as I have, have legitimate reasons to opt in. If we’re keeping with the motif, Squarespace and its web/social contemporaries are homebuilders for millions, opening doors and offering tools generations before us couldn’t imagine. Where I perch, the issue remains that we can’t really control these platforms, or collectively grasp that we have less control than we’re led to believe. I see myself and so many established makers quite trusting and immeasurably banking on a few giga-platforms to lift and hold us up. The platforms’ corporational stewards are not going away any time soon, and appear to only grow more dominant as the market-makers, culture shapers, and literal energy sources for the iterating internet. In their omnipresence, ease of use and network effects, it can be easy to assume my likeness, data, and art will be seen and safe in perpetuity. Yet the future of technology, economics, and foreign/domestic politics feels as volatile and fuzzy as ever, and in turn, these corporations, platforms and the content they contain are at risk of being banned, buried, scraped, copied, hacked or dissolved at any moment for any number of reasons, and can probably be done without consent.3 It’s already in progress, and will continue in ways difficult to notice or comprehend.
I recognize I’ve swerved from cautious techno-optimist towards the territory of ‘the end is near’ main street megaphone squawker, but the uncertainty of tomorrow is something that’s developed with age. Since 2020, I and most of humanity have had to face down an impressive assortment of diseases, crimes, novel double-edged tools, scams, natural disasters and civil unrest; each a reminder of how much is beyond my grip, how much blind faith I often have in institutions and communities, and highlighting my lack of individual preparedness for when the ‘what if’ becomes the ‘what now.’
None of these happenings have turned me into a luddite or doomsday prepper4 , but I’m not ashamed to have a week or two’s worth of water bottles and non-perishables in my closet, to pay up for solid healthcare, have local emergency contacts, document copies, and (very luckily) no albatross liabilities. When it comes to my art and image on the web and in digital spaces, I want to be as vigilant and nimble. That doesn’t mean deactivating Instagram or self-hosting every video scrap or switching to a flip phone, rather a proactive awareness to control the controllables that strengthens and stabilizes my practice for the long run—the race I’m signed up for. If some digital version of a winter storm, robbery, or pandemic threatened me or my work tomorrow or in twenty years, are my bases covered? Can I work around the shifts, supplely land on my feet? Or, if the forces are too unexpected or strong to weather, can I be confident that I did what I could while not resorting to kooky, paranoid measures?
For now, these are my parameters for what concerned5 creative ownership should try to embody, and a move off Squarespace feels like one of the tangible first steps. The subscription auto-renew has been switched off and will not be turned back on, and so the clock ticks towards January 1st. Whatever state my new platform will be in by then, I’ll have to own it. I’m dreading this already, and dread is excellent confirmation that this is indeed work worth doing.
When you click to create a new Squarespace content block, there’s a grouping of boilerplate phrases that pop up onscreen. The last of these sentences reads:
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
Words to heed, I say. Time to get a move on.
Squarespace went public in 2021, but was taken private by Private Equity firm Permira for $6.9 billion in May 2024. It’ll be fun to track how this effects operations, pricing, and ad spend moving forward.
https://craigmod.com , https://www.ribbonfarm.com/ , https://international-institute.de/en/news/ , https://anmyle.com/ (despite being a Squarespace site!)
Because I gave my consent checking the “I agree” box in the terms and conditions way too long to read when first signing up!
Given how I still toss out my email addresses like I’m making it rain and moved to one of the most congested/historically targeted cities in the world, maybe it’s the opposite…?
Concerned in its definition ‘of importance,’ not ‘anxious/worrisome’