What Squarespace 7.1 Gets Right (And What Still Frustrates Me)
I build on Squarespace 7.1 every week. I've built over 100 sites on this platform. I'm committed to it. I recommend it to most clients. But I'm not going to pretend it's perfect, and I'm not going to be a tribal evangelist defending every design decision.
Let me give you an honest assessment of what works and what doesn't.
What Squarespace 7.1 Gets Right
Fluid Engine. This is the foundation, and it's genuinely good. The visual builder is intuitive. You can create sophisticated layouts without writing code. Designers can control the customer experience visually. The ability to create custom layouts for different pages, different sections, different contexts is powerful. You're not constrained by a theme. You're designing.
The Fluid Engine's greatest strength is that it's liberating without being overwhelming. You have creative control without needing to be a developer.
Built-in e-commerce. Squarespace e-commerce is genuinely functional. It's integrated. You're not mixing a website builder with a separate shopping cart. Inventory, orders, fulfillment, tax, shipping, all in one system. For small to medium stores, it's more than sufficient. For large complex stores, Shopify is better, but Squarespace is no longer a compromise for basic e-commerce.
Member areas. This is a genuine differentiator. You can build membership sites, communities, and gated content natively. You don't need a separate membership plugin. It works. It's secure. It's well thought through.
Design flexibility. You can make Squarespace sites look dramatically different from each other. The platform doesn't enforce a corporate template look. You're limited by your own design imagination, not by the platform.
SEO basics. Squarespace doesn't do everything, but the SEO fundamentals are built in and they work. Meta descriptions, structured data for the most important content types, mobile optimisation out of the box, clean URLs, sitemaps. You're not starting from zero. A properly built Squarespace site has SEO legs.
Reliability and performance. Squarespace doesn't break. Sites don't go down. Performance is solid. Updates happen seamlessly. You're not managing servers or worrying about infrastructure. That consistency is genuinely valuable.
Security. SSL, DDoS protection, regular security updates, compliance handling. You're not responsible for security. That's a feature, not a limitation.
What Still Frustrates Me
Blog functionality is limited. This is my biggest complaint. The blog system is functional but constrained. You can't easily create custom blog layouts beyond the built-in options. You can't easily filter or sort posts by custom criteria. You can't create multiple blogs with different workflows. You can't easily create complex blog-related functionality without custom code.
If your client's business is content-driven, WordPress or a headless CMS is often a better choice. Squarespace blog is fine for a company blog. It's not ideal if the blog is the core of the business.
No native version control for custom code. If you're doing custom CSS or JavaScript, there's no version history. No rollback if something breaks. No way to compare changes. You're working in a black box. You have to manage your own backups and version control outside the platform, which is cumbersome.
Custom CSS limitations. You can write CSS, but it's global. You can't scope styles to specific pages. You can't easily target Fluid Engine-generated classes without reverse-engineering the DOM. Some things that should be simple CSS require workarounds.
E-commerce feature gaps compared to Shopify. Squarespace e-commerce is good, but it's not Shopify. Inventory management is basic. Product bundling isn't available. Advanced shipping options are limited. The checkout experience, while solid, isn't as optimizable as Shopify. If you're building a serious online store, Shopify's still the better choice.
No staging or preview environments. You build on the live site. You can use a draft mode, but it's not the same as a staging environment. If you're making significant changes and you need to test before going live, you're working in a limited way. This is a genuine limitation for complex projects.
Template restrictions. If you're using a Squarespace template as a starting point, some things are locked. You can override most of it with CSS, but it's not ideal. Custom code is required to work around template constraints.
Limited API access. If you need to build custom integrations or connect Squarespace data to external systems, the API is limited. You can't do everything you can do with WordPress or a more open platform. This is fine for standard use cases. It's limiting if you need deep integrations.
No native multilingual support. Squarespace has basic language switching, but it's not a true multilingual system. WordPress with WPML or Polylang is far superior if you need genuine multilingual functionality with different content structures per language.
The image handling is inconsistent. Sometimes images crop awkwardly on mobile. Sometimes image sizes behave unpredictably. Sometimes background images don't behave like you'd expect. It's not broken, but it requires more testing and adjustment than it should.
Why I Still Choose Squarespace Despite the Frustrations
The frustrations are real, but they don't outweigh the benefits for most projects.
I choose Squarespace because my clients get a professional site that they're not paying me to maintain forever. Because timelines are predictable. Because I can focus on design instead of server management. Because security and reliability are guaranteed. Because the platform gets out of the way and lets me design.
The limitations are real, but they matter less than the stability and simplicity. If a project hits those limitations, I talk to the client honestly and we either find workarounds or we move to a different platform. Most projects fit comfortably within Squarespace's capabilities.
And frankly, the platform is improving. Squarespace 7.1 is light years ahead of version 7. Version 7 had legitimate limitations. 7.1 addressed most of them. I expect the platform to keep improving.
The Bigger Truth
No platform is perfect for everything. Squarespace is exceptional for 85% of the projects I see. For the other 15%, something else is better.
WordPress is more flexible but more responsibility. Shopify is better for e-commerce but overkill for a simple product page. Webflow is more design-flexible but more expensive and more complex. Static site generators are technical and not client-friendly.
Squarespace hits a sweet spot for most client projects. It's the right tool for the job most of the time.
The frustrations I listed are real and worth knowing about. But they shouldn't overshadow what Squarespace does well: it makes beautiful, functional, reliable websites accessible to professional designers without decades of platform expertise.
That's its real value. That's why I recommend it. That's why I'll keep building on it.
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Tools That Help
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