How Much Will My Squarespace Website Cost?
If you’ve decided that you want a Squarespace website for your business or blog you’ll probably want to know more about the costs involved before you make any commitments.
There are three basic costs that you need to budget for:
Website design and development
Hosting fees
Domain fees
There are also these additional and optional expenses which you should consider:
Online marketing services
Web maintenance services
In this blog post we’re going to explain these fees in more detail to give you a clear understanding of how much your Squarespace website will cost.
Website Design and Development
The cost of the design and development of your site will vary depending on your exact brief. Your web designer will quote accordingly taking into consideration the number of pages you need, any specific functionality that you may require such as e-commerce, integrations with third party platforms or any CSS coding that you may want to add to enhance the site. The quote will also be based on whether you will provide all the copy and image content yourself or whether you will need our team to assist with copywriting or purchasing stock images, creating a logo etc.
Our prices start from £1,500 for a simple Squarespace website of up to 5 pages, which would typically include: Home, About, Services, Testimonials, Gallery, Contact. Here's a 5 page website we built for Spring Cottage.
Some of the more complex websites which we have designed and built have cost upwards of £3,900, however these sites have required specifications such as e-commerce, integrated CRMs, custom booking forms etc, plus we’ve also added coding to these sites to make them look more bespoke – in some cases we’ve added so much code that the site has become unrecognisable as a Squarespace template and instead it looks like we’ve built the site from scratch.
Check out our own Portfolio page and the filter we’ve included to find your type of business and the work we’ve done in that area. This has all been coded too and isn’t available natively with Squarespace.
Of course you can save money by building your own Squarespace website, but unless you have design and programming skills or experience it could take you weeks or even months to create, and it’s unlikely that your website would have the impact that it would if you hired a professional. Plus you should bear in mind that if you’re spending weeks or months designing and building your own website you won’t be focusing on your business.
Hosting Fees
In addition to the expense of the design and development of your website, you’ll also need to budget for web hosting and domain hosting.
Web hosting and domain hosting are two different services. Web hosts allow you to create and store your website on an Internet server. Domain hosts provide domain names, which help visitors access your web content.
If you think of your website as a store, a web host provides the physical space where you display your store’s products - the text, images, videos and other content that make up your site. When you build a site with Squarespace, Squarespace is your web host and they provide a place on the Internet to display your website. Every Squarespace site is stored on their servers, similar to how physical stores rent space in a shopping centre.
Squarespace offer four web hosting pricing plans ranging from £10 to £30 per month if you pay annually.
When we put together proposals for our web design projects we include a quote for the relevant web hosting, however the client pays this directly to Squarespace.
Remember that if you use our services to design and build your site, you’ll get 20% off the first year of hosting fees for the first 12 months if you pay annually.
Domain Fees
A domain host provides a domain name (website address) that visitors can use to find you.
Domain hosts store domain names and facilitate their registration.
If you’re using a domain registered through a third-party provider, like GoDaddy, they’re your Domain host. If you own a domain name purchased through another provider you can connect it to your Squarespace site through a process called domain mapping.
Alternatively you can register a domain through Squarespace which avoids the need to register it with a third-party provider. All Squarespace domains are officially hosted by their registrar, Tucows, and managed through your Squarespace site. If you're on an annual Squarespace billing plan, you're eligible for one free custom domain - if it's available. If you're on a trial, a monthly plan, or if you want multiple domains, you can purchase them for $20 to $70 per year.
Regardless of who hosts your domain, once it is connected to your Squarespace site, visitors to your domain name will see your website hosted by Squarespace.
You could say that getting a website is like getting a new mobile phone; the cost of the website design and development is like buying the actual phone, and the hosting fees are similar to your monthly phone bill - you may own the website/phone, but you need to pay for the service of being able to use it. Your domain name is like your phone number as it’s a unique way for people to get in touch with you.
Additional & Optional Costs
When considering the overall costs of having a website we recommend that you also think about additional expenses, such as online marketing and web maintenance services.
Online marketing services
Before you launch your new Squarespace site you should ideally have a strategy about how you’re going to promote it and get people to visit it.
Social media marketing, newsletters and adding blogs to your site are fantastic ways to drive traffic to your website, however this can be time consuming and you may want to use the services of an online marketing company instead so that you can focus on running your business.
Social media consultancy, newsletter and blog writing are all services that we offer here at Manage My Website and we’d love to help you with this. All work is quoted on an individual basis subject to your requirements.
Web maintenance services
After the launch you’ll need to ensure that you keep your site up to date with new text and images as you don’t want to spend money creating a beautiful website and then ignoring it as it will soon start to look stale.
Updating your site with new content is an essential part of web maintenance. Not only does it keep it interesting and engaging, it can also boost your search-engine rankings. Google and other search engines love websites that are updated frequently; adding fresh content shows them that your website is active and this will help your chances of ranking higher in searches.
Many of our clients with Squarespace websites use our web maintenance service as it means that they can focus on running their business rather than spending time updating their website. The cost of this service is £80 or $110 per hour for adhoc requests, or alternatively we have options for monthly or annual web maintenance contracts.
We think that is important to be as transparent as possible with regards to the costs involved with having a Squarespace website. We always ask our clients for their full brief and then we quote accordingly, including the relevant Squarespace hosting fees.
If you’re interested in getting a new Squarespace website or perhaps switching over from another platform, we’d be happy to discuss your brief with you.