With so many options in the website builder space, it’s hard to find one that fits your needs and budgets. Here we are going to look at SquareSpace, a popular business website management tool, and compare it with SiteJelly to find out which makes the most sense for your business’ needs.
What is SquareSpace?
SquareSpace is a business marketing platform that offers website building tools for businesses. They allow you to create your own website based off of one of their templates to match your business’s look and feel.
When you put a website together with SquareSpace, you use their intuitive, but proprietary, builder to place content and manipulate the layout to your liking. While using their own builder has some benefits to SquareSpace’s customers, it does lock you into using their service forever if you want to keep your website live as they do not offer a way to “export” your full website in a way that allows you to keep the functionality and design in tact for you to host yourself. If you need advanced features, you very well may need to hire a developer or designer to create that advanced functionality.
What is SiteJelly?
SiteJelly is a Website-as-a-Service platform that gives you access to dozens of professionally-designed and marketing-oriented website layouts to pick from that are then customized to your unique brand and site requirements with all of your own content. Whether you need a simple website for your startup company or need e-commerce functions, we work with you to make sure your needs are met.
We have worked hard to bring our customers the industry’s best website for the price. Period. With a one-time flat-fee for the website build plus a monthly hosting fee, you get a lot: A gorgeous & functional website that will grow with you, enterprise-level hosting, and competent web support.
SquareSpace vs SiteJelly Features
Here’s a detailed comparison of the features that both SquareSpace and SiteJelly offer and where they differ:
| SiteJelly | SquareSpace | |
| Who builds the website? | We do. | You do. |
| Who owns the website if I stop paying for hosting? | You own it. | SquareSpace owns it. |
| Can I move my website to another host? | Yes. | No. |
| Do you offer maintenance plans? | Yes. | No. |
| Uptime guarantee | 99.95% | 99.9% |
| Support* | Full Support | Limited Support |
| Who has the better designs? | Well, we think you’ll agree SiteJelly does. | – |
| Can I make edits on my own? | Yes. | Yes. |
| Can I get help with edits? | On the maintenance plan, yes. | No. |
| Can you do edits for me? | On the maintenance plan, yes. | No. |
*SiteJelly offers full support for our customers. All active customers have access to excellent support staff who are happy to help or offer recommendations in the broad realm of websites and hosting. At SquareSpace you are on your own with any custom tweaks you may make. They do not offer support for user-made customizations.
Should I do a DIY website (via SquareSpace) or get a Done-For-Me Website with SiteJelly?
Like a lot of questions, the answer is..
It depends.
Both SquareSpace and SiteJelly offer a great product, but there are a few key differences. Here is the short and simple:
We believe that if you are a business owner you already have plenty on your plate, and you probably have better things to do with your time than learn how to make a website. SiteJelly was started on the idea that a business, no matter how small, should still be able to have a professional website built for them to help them put their best foot forward without breaking the bank (while also owning what they’ve paid for.)
If you would prefer to be locked into using SquareSpace’s platform, learn a proprietary website builder, and handle everything yourself on your own time ask yourself, “why?”
We’d still argue that the hours you would spend learning how to build it out yourself just aren’t worth it.
You have better things to do!
We put the time, effort, and planning into carefully crafting gorgeous, marketable, and scalable websites so you don’t have to. We use the WordPress platform as our foundation so you can put your website wherever you want it to be. We do all of that to make sure that you as the business owner can get stellar support from the people that built your website, have peace-of-mind in knowing that we are here for you as your resource when you need it, and have options if you ever need to do something different.
We know that businesses change all the time, and sometimes you need to make adjustments. By using WordPress, you also have the option to take your beautiful website anywhere you’d like. That means you aren’t stuck with us – or anyone for that matter. Simply submit a support ticket and we will package your website up into a nice format that you can then upload to your choice of host fast and easy.
SiteJelly Hosts Your Website on the Best-of-the-Best
If you are like most of our customers, you’ll probably just host with us – And for good reason: We have partnered with the leading WordPress hosting provider, WPEngine, to make sure that every SiteJelly website has top-tier hosting features that you just don’t get at other hosts:
- Daily backups
- 99.95% uptime guarantee
- Free SSL certificates (through Let’sEncrypt)
- Blazing fast website speeds with CloudFlare’s CDN
- And much more.
