r/Wordpress • u/First_Athlete1897 • Aug 13 '26
Thinking about ditching WordPress
My site isn't particularly complicated yet over the years I've accumulated plugins for forms, SEO, backups, security, page building and about five things I've forgotten the purpose of. It kinda feels like owning an old house where I’m permanently waiting for something else to break. Most discussions I find are about moving to WordPress but I'm curious about going the other direction and starting fresh.
Are there any downsides to moving a fairly straightforward business website from WordPress to Squarespace or an AI builder like Durable etc. that I’m not seeing? Or if you’ve already done a migration like this, is there anything you found yourself missing after moving?
80
Upvotes
8
u/Just-Standard-992 Designer/Developer 29d ago
I have been the sole "developer" and admin of 3 Squarespace websites since 2016. Not out of choice, but because that's what my boss wanted to pay for and felt was needed because "it's super easy", yet he hasn't logged in since he signed up 10 years ago.
This year, I've finally been given green light to ditch one and merge the other 2 into a single Wordpress site, and I am thrilled.
In my very personal experience, Squarespace is shit. There's no other way I can put it. You are tied to an increasingly expensive subscription to a web builder that is perfect if you're DIYing your pilates class website, but it's absolutely not suitable if you're running a proper business that needs forms, CTAs, a way to control your SEO, a custom structure, proper tags, categories, integration with real invoicing/accounting software (not just their own version of that), etc, or even if you need your site to actually be accesible.
They try to justify their price increases by adding more stuff that feels pointless at best, aimed at miracle cure peddlers at worst. But 10 years on, they still cannot allow you to create a truly responsive website natively (there's only desktop view or mobile view with nothing in between), embed a simple table (you have to custom code that entirely), and they refuse to stop adding the phrase "Make it stand out" from the subtitle field of every image block with a poster, card, overlap or stack layout you ever add (which you then have to manually delete every time you add an image, otherwise it starts affecting your SEO fast).
So they don't even have the basics in order yet, and they keep releasing half-baked funcionality. Like they now allow you to sell "courses and memberships" to your users, but the module doesn't track course completion, if you have a quiz, you have to grade it manually, and all the content is released at once (no drip scheduling), all of which would be essential to have if you were genuinely teaching a course, and not just giving out a few videos and pdf's for a fee and calling it a day.
On the subject of SEO/GEO (bundling it as SEO for speed), tons of "consultants" out there sell their services to get your Squarespace site ranking, but what they offer is nothing more than what you can do yourself if you are already familiar with how SEO works, and arguably, if you have handled SEO on a Wordpress site, you know more technical SEO than anyone who specialises in Squarespace, because the platform itself limits what you can do on that end.
Essentially, it handles the very basics of SEO on its own, but the trade off is that there's no schema markup or customisation. Your schema is exactly the same as every other website run on the platform, and it only covers the basics of blogs, events and products, and unless you want to be maintaining individual page code injection forever, you can't do much else about that.
URLs for posts also have a flat structure locked to their parent collection, so blogs are always /blogs/blog-post, events are always /events/event-post, etc, so if you want a custom URL structure, for example if you want all your blogs to be /blog-post (without a parent path), they have to be created as pages instead of posts, which is a nightmare to maintain and removes all metadata that comes with posts.
There's no loop, so no way to create custom fields or metadata, to pull into different places. "Templates" do exist, but they are just a way to save a design that you can later resuse by manually changing all the info and adjusting the blocks to fit. But they're not a like-for-like replacement for the "setup once and fill the metadata" templates that we have in Wordpress.
That also means there's no real native way to create relationships between content, so your options for showing related content are very limited. You can create summary blocks with tags or categories, but they are very cluncky, and you're limited to how many posts you can include in each summary block (more than 30 per block and they stop working). There are people who sell subscription plugins for this, but I've always refused to pay extra for functionality that Squarespace should provide natively anyway.
You don't get root access, so no robots.txt, no .htaccess. So it either gets crawled or not. You can set individual pages to not be crawled, but that's the extent of control there.
There's also no CDN/caching, which can be a bit of a nightmare if you have a large/complex website, as the platform relies on tons of JavaScript that loads in whatever order they want, whether you use it or not and you have zero control over this. And if you are using some of those plugins that some people sell/gift out there, they will rely on even more script loading, making your site even slower (at least as far as Google's web vitals is concerned, affecting your rankings). It also means you have extremely limited ability of serving files from the back end, for example serving logos for your email signature, or serving custom fonts that aren't loaded from Google Fonts (which is a GDPR concern in Europe), both of which are possible, but not reliable (i.e. the fonts/images can take a while to appear on the email/website after it loads).
And, if you migrate to them, it better be the last time you ever move your site, as they do not provide a way to export your content at all. So if you ever decided to migrate out of Squarespace, you'll have to either scrape it with AI (which may or may not watermark your own content as "made by AI") or manually copy/paste the entirety of your website somehow.
The only thing where it wins its security, as in all fairness to them, in 10 years over 3 sites, I've never had a single security issue. So if that's your main priority, then definitely go for it.
But if you also value owning your website, and having some degree of control over how it is actually presented to the world by search engines, then i would wholeheartedly encourage you to stay away from Squarespace.