I run a VC firm. I'm a full stack engineer who's built core infrastructure that runs on billions of devices and handles trillions of server side requests a year. And yet I choose to use squaris Squarespace for our website. It's just way easier and more reliable than building it myself despite being more than capable. I don't want to deal with maintenance, mobile, upkeep, etc. I have better things to do than to maintain our website.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
The appeal of using a static site generator is that its output is, well, static. Deployment is something simple like copying some files to an s3 bucket. If I need to host an app for the CMS portion, I'm not any better off than using wordpress or another full suite CMS. It's also not clear to me from the docs what responsibilities the content creator have in the workflow (in my experience, teaching github or markdown makes things a non-starter most of the time)
Likewise. I did our wedding site in it with a wufoo form back in 2015. Spent an evening at it, sent out email. Done! Literally never touched it again. Simply done and well executed.
Yes! This is a value I kind of missed in my description. We have a static html site right now, its lightning fast and easy enough for me to maintain, but we'll be moving to Squarespace internally on the next site update. Right now our contact form is annoying to maintain, non-developers can't easily make changes and images aren't automatically optimized. It just solves too many problems at too low of a cost, in dollars and other things.
