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0 pointsdebaserab25y ago0 comments

I chose Squarespace for my company's marketing site, and I'd mostly agree with some caveats:

* The developer mode is poorly supported. For example: you can't copy your site if it is in developer mode (which means you can't setup a staging environment and everything you push to your site will be live instantly). The local development server is also very buggy and inconsistent with the production behavior. It feels like something that they developed early on in their road map and haven't spent much time on since then. If I could go back and do this over again, I'd pick an existing theme and just customize it instead of building out a whole theme in developer mode.

* The site is S-L-O-W with tons of bundled assets that it injects into your theme. I have no idea what any of it is doing, but it definitely increases page load.

That said, if you find yourself wanting a solid CMS that has the full breadth of WordPress like features but don't want to deal with the hosting, SquareSpace is a solid choice.

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7 comments · 3 top-level

kevinob115y ago· 2 in thread

How slow is it? Genuinely asking because I wonder if it is much larger / more complicated than sites I've built so far.

Most sites I've created are _usable_ in about ~500ms, though they take quite a bit longer to fully load. There do appear to be tons of scripts and tracking crap loaded after initial load, but through (what appears to be) above-the-fold handling and a pretty quick (200ms) time to first byte they appear fast-ish.

Do you add a lot of custom scripts?

debaserab2OP5y ago

Zero custom scripts other than some vanilla JS I wrote that loads on a few pages. Your numbers are pretty similar to mine. It's not that much different than the WordPress site that replaced it, but it still seems higher than it should be.

kevinob115y ago

Good to know, thanks!

zitterbewegung5y ago· 2 in thread

Have you tried using a static site generator instead? I have used one for my personal site on S3 and it works pretty well. In my opinion figuring out Squarespace was harder for me .

debaserab2OP5y ago

I'd love to use a static site generator, but no simple WYSIWYG for the people that create content on the site make that a non-starter.

luke2m5y ago

Check out https://forestry.io or something on https://jamstack.org/headless-cms

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telesilla5y ago

Dedicated hosts like Kinsta are a great alternative to self hosting WordPress, though you still need to maintain plugin security updates yourself.

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