Squarespace vs Showit - Features, Functionality, Design - Which Website Builder Platform Is The Best?
Squarespace vs Showit: Features, Functionality, Design - Which Website Builder Platform Is The Best?
Choosing the right website builder platform for your business is a big decision - you want to make sure you’re choosing the one that will work for your business both now and in the future, you want to choose one that will have all the functionality you need, be easy for you to create, update and maintain, it needs to be good for your SEO and just generally support your business in as many ways as possible.
Squarespace and Showit are two of the most popular options right now — especially among photographers, creatives and service-based business owners. But which one is right for you?
Well, as with many things, there’s no one size fits all answer - both platforms can be truly brilliant in their own right, but they cater to different needs, priorities and skill sets.
Let’s break it down feature by feature - from functionality and ease of use to design flexibility, blogging, and SEO - so you can make an informed decision based on what matters most for your business.
Prefer to listen to this article? Head over to my podcast and listen to this episode below.
FEATURES and FUNCTIONALITY
Squarespace is widely known as an all-in-one platform. Out of the box, it includes nearly everything you could want from a website builder:
Built-in blogging
Instagram and Pinterest integration
Appointment booking
Domain purchasing
Online store with customer accounts
Online course set up with customer accounts and paywalls
Email marketing
Pop-ups and forms
Free and paid stock images
Security maintenance
Built-in analytics
Custom SEO tools
That’s a long list — and it’s all native. Which means that you don’t need to purchase or install any 3rd party plugins* to get any of the above to work. While not every feature would be considered best-in-class, and there will be better 3rd party options available, the sheer convenience of having everything in one place is unbeatable.
*some things do come at an extra cost to your Squarespace subscription - appointment scheduling is an extra £11 a month, for example, but you’re still paying this to Squarespace, and your account is all managed in one place.
Showit, on the other hand, is more like a blank canvas with incredible design power — but very little built-in functionality. You’ll need plugins or third-party tools for just about everything: want to add a blog? You’ll need to integrate with Wordpress. To optimise for SEO? You’ll need Yoast. Want to add a single product? You’ll need to integrate with Shopify. It’s the same with forms, appointment scheduling, analytics, you name it. Most things will require you to purchase and / or install a plugin to get simple functionality to work with your Showit website.
The only elements in the above list that you can do natively in Showit without having to install a plugin (which often comes with tech headaches, no matter the platform!) is integrating your Instagram feed and your SEO settings.
EASE OF USE
At first glance, both platforms seem equally easy to use - they offer drag-and-drop builders that let you move elements around with a few clicks. However, my personal opinion is that Squarespace is actually much easier to use, and feels a lot less overwhelming if you’re building a website from scratch.
Squarespace is a very intuitive platform, and it’s one of the many reasons I love using it for clients. I can hand over their Squarespace site and they are able to do any future updates themselves without having to rehire me.
Showit’s builder can take a little more to get used to in the beginning, however, like anything, the more you use it, the easier it will become. As a designer myself - and, again, this in complete personal opinion - I find Showit quite overwhelming, and I find myself googling how to do things that should be very straight forward.
DESIGN CAPABILITIES + VISUALS
This is where Showit truly shines — and why many designers (myself included) have been tempted by it for years. Showit offers complete creative control, down to the last pixel. It feels like designing in Adobe — and you can place anything anywhere.
Want a headline to intersect an image just so? You can. Want total freedom with no grid? It’s yours. Want to add cool features, animations or effects? You can do that too.
This is one of the downsides to Squarespace. While you absolutely can create the exact same cool effects on Squarespace, you do need to know how to code a little bit to do so.
Squarespace also used to feel very restricted. But with the introduction of their Fluid Engine in recent years, the gap has narrowed significantly. The updated builder allows much more flexibility and precision, and most users won’t even notice the difference unless they need absolute creative freedom.
If you’re new to any kind of coding and you want to use Squarespace but create the same effects as Showit, a quick google online will give you tonnes of CSS and coding snippets that you can add to your site to get the result you want. I know that might sound a little scary if you’re not used to it, but there are so many incredibly easy-to-follow tutorials online that I promise you you’ll be able to follow!
If I had to give a downside of Showit’s freedom? It would be lack of structure. While you can align things manually, there are no real drag guides or snapping grids like you have in Squarespace, which can make clean layouts more time-consuming to create.
RESPONSIVE DESIGN
Responsive design is incredibly important, not only for making your website look good, but for making it easy to use, for your Google rankings, to keep people on your site, and to maintain a good conversion rate.
Responsive design is making sure that your website looks and works just as good on any device. So, whether you’re browsing on a laptop, a tablet, your phone, or on a huge monitor, your website needs to look and feel excellent.
While not perfect yet, Squarespace has one of the smartest architectures for creating responsive sites. It uses what we call a fluid grid system which, while you don’t need to know the technicalities of how it works, essentially means that it allows all elements on the page to scale.
Showit, on the other hand, is more adaptive instead of fluid. Images and other elements, for example, are defined by fixed widths, which means that if you increase the size of the device you’re viewing on, these elements won’t automatically get bigger. Instead, they’ll stay the same size and you’ll end up with lots of empty space around them. On a big screen, this could result in elements being smaller and harder to view.
Squarespace serves images to you in an optimal format and size, based on the screen size or device you’re viewing on. This ensures that not only do the images scale with your device size, but they retain their quality whilst also minimising the time it takes them to load - another super important factor in your website performance and subsequently Google rankings.
One thing to bear in mind is that Squarespace doesn’t support a tablet breakpoint - this means that your desktop site will be served to anyone using a tablet, instead of a specific layout designed for tablet. However, when you consider that less than 2% of web traffic worldwide is on tablets, it doesn’t appear to be of huge significance, yet.
And remember, with Squarespace’s fluid grid, it’s still going to look pretty great!
However, if you are concerned about it, you can check your sites analytics to see how many of your audience are viewing on tablet, and make a considered decision from there.
ACCESSABILITY
Accessibility in website design is another topic that I’m really passionate about. I truly believe that everyone (or as many people as possible) should be able to use your website, and I will always do my best to design website for my clients that adheres to accessibility guidelines.
This is the main point where I find Squarespace blows Showit out of the water. Squarespace - again, while not perfect - is the most thoughtfully considered website builder out of Squarespace, Showit, and Wix, with the only platform beating Squarespace for accessibility being Shopify.
It has great built in features such as focus outlines and automatic motion reduction for users that have that setting turned on on their device. There’s lots of easy customisation for accessibility without needing additional coding, and the way Squarespace serves it’s images, means you can easily add alt text to every image.
There’s an incredible study by Rache of Squarestylist and Amber of Equalize Digital that explores the accessibility features of these main website builders, and the results might really shock you if you’re a Showit fan.
“Showit seems to have relegated accessibility to the back burner” is the main finding from the joint study, with a lot of critical flaws in relation to navigation, which means if you’re an advanced coder, you would struggle to override a lot of this set up to make your site accessible.
If you’d like to read the full study, you can do so here - https://www.squarestylist.com/blog/accessibility-study?rq=showit
SEO
Okay, what about SEO? For me, Squarespace wins this one too.
Squarespace makes it super easy to manage and optimise your SEO, from SEO titles and descriptions for each page and blog posts, to automating the technical things like your sitemap and your product collection page static URLs, to adding descriptions and alt text to your images.
Squarespace also integrates with Google Console, which a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results.
For Showit users, on the other hand, it’s a bit trickier. Showit offers basic SEO tools, but you will need the Yoast plugin, for example, when integrating Wordpress for your blog, to manage your SEO in this way.
However, one thing I would like to clarify is that when it comes to overall SEO, one platform will never be better than the other. I hear a lot of people saying that WordPress is the best for SEO and Squarespace is rubbish. However, this statement, is actually what is rubbish.
SEO ranking highly depends on how well your website is defined with keywords, structured correctly and optimised for speed.
The below is an excerpt from an interview with Matt Callahan, an SEO expert on SEO and Squarespace -
"Question: I’ve been told that no Squarespace website will ever be as good as a Wordpress website for SEO, particularly because you can't use the Yoast plugin with Squarespace. Is Wordpress actually better for SEO?
Utter Balderdash. While there are some platforms out there that are genuinely crap for SEO, Wordpress is no better than any other website or CMS platform in existence. In fact, here are three reasons why I greatly prefer Squarespace to Wordpress for SEO:
Security
Wordpress is in the dark ages when it comes to security (see: plugin vulnerability, platform vulnerability, PHP vulnerability, hosting vulnerability, I could go on and on) — and in this day and age, it’s extremely important to Google if your website is secure or not. Squarespace’s lack of plugin infrastructure is actually really helpful here — fewer logins + fewer accounts + fewer updates + free, automatic SSL = a secure website.
Mobile Responsiveness
It’s hard to believe that this is still an issue, considering that we were warned back in 2013 that Google was going to start to prioritize mobile optimization. Squarespace websites are all responsive by default. With Wordpress websites… it depends on the theme, it depends on the version, it depends on the update. Also, unless you install a site builder plugin (again, vulnerabilities though), getting your Wordpress theme to be mobile responsive and actually look nice can require a ton of coding.
Squarespace Enables The Person Doing The Optimization
At the end of the day, any decent SEO can easily overcome particular platform issues. What separates decent SEO from really, really great SEO isn’t about the platform at all — it’s about understanding the industry you’re in, the goals you’re trying to attain, and the ability to answer questions and truly create a resource out of your brand. That involves creativity, great writing skills, the ability to improvise, and most importantly, the ability to understand what your users want and how they’re feeling. Once you have those things, Squarespace makes implementing them (implementing anything, really) so much easier than Wordpress. "
SECURITY
In terms of security, both Squarespace and Showit provide free and easy SSL certificates for your site, and they are both closed-source software (vs WordPress which is open-source).
This means that WordPress, for example, as an open-source software, they make their code publicly available for anyone and everyone to modify, resulting in significantly less security than Squarespace and Showit, whereby this isn’t possible.
This is why if you have a WordPress site, you need to regularly do security maintenance on your site.
However, because you need to use a multitude of plugins on your Showit site, it does open up your site to potential security challenges, as you need to make sure that each plugin you utilise on your site is secure.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Customer support on both platforms is not something that I can comment on personally, as I’ve only ever dealt with Squarespace support. However, there are a number of reviews and other articles out there that suggest that Showit is better for customer support.
PRICE
I will preface this section by saying that Squarespace are currently - as of May 2025 - in the middle of rolling out new pricing tiers - however, from what I’ve seen, the overall price levels aren’t going to change massively, I think they’re more trying to streamline each tier and be clearer on what you receive.
However, both Squarespace and Showit have very similar structures and values, and so I wouldn’t recommend making a decision on which platform to use based on pricing alone.
That was a pretty long discussion, wasn’t it!
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, I know that choosing the right website platform for you is super important, as moving from one to the other can be a lengthy process and headache inducing.
This is why I wanted to go into as much detail as possible for you so that you can absolutely make the best, and most informed decision, as to which platform will be best for you and your business.
And finally, if you’d like to handover the design and development of your website whilst you carry on doing what you do best - running your business - you can work with me 1:1 on any of my website packages, and I’ll take care of all of this, and more!
Hi, I’m Soph!
Founder & Creative behind Studio Zosia.
Combining timeless aesthetics with elegant user experiences, I help modern founders, creatives and brands show up with confidence with beautiful websites and branding that match the premium service they provide to their clients.