Shopify vs Squarespace 2022 - Which is Best to Create a Website?

Shopify and Squarespace are easy-to-use for beginners. However, Shopify is more customizable on the front-end and the back-end. With over 6,000 Shopify Apps, you can tailor Shopify to suit your needs, from converting more traffic into sales to streamlining shipping and fulfillment.

Shopify and Squarespace both let you sell on Facebook and Instagram. But with Shopify you can also sell on Amazon, Walmart, Google, Pinterest, Snapchat, and in person with a first-party POS solution.

Squarespace and Shopify both offer over 70 website templates. All of Squarespace's templates are free to use and cover a broad range of website types, from online portfolios to blogs. Shopify has both paid and free themes that offer specialized designs and feature sets built for selling. There are ready-to-go website themes for crowdfunded businesses, restaurants, large catalogues, and services, all designed to help you sell more.

With Squarespace you can edit the CSS for your website theme to customize the design, but you’ll need to enable Developer mode and use a third-party software like Git to access the raw HTML. With Shopify, on the other hand, you have direct access to your theme’s code, with the ability to edit your HTML and CSS, whether you want to work with a developer or do it yourself.

With Squarespace’s website editor, you can drag and drop components to customize the look and feel of your website to build gorgeous static web pages. But online stores require a solution that allows you to make changes quickly and easily, to accommodate seasonal sales, updates to your product catalog, featured collections, and more. Shopify’s sections-based editor makes this easy by allowing you to show, hide, and rearrange specific sections of your homepage in seconds.

A fast-loading website is a must for today’s shoppers. It not only increases your chances of showing up first in Google search results, but visitors will leave if your store doesn’t load in seconds. Shopify websites are built for speed because they compress all your images to the smaller WebP format and provide a store speed report to uncover opportunities to further optimize your load times.

With more payment gateways and more ways for customers to pay—from Google Pay to Bitcoin—Shopify stores are convenient to shop so more visitors convert into customers. Choose from over 100 payment gateways to sell locally or globally, including Shopify Payments.

Shopify Payments (available in 17 countries around the world) is Shopify’s own payment gateway that supports most major payment options with 0% transaction fees. With it, you can enable Shop Pay: Shopify’s accelerated checkout option, which allows customers to opt in to have their information pre-filled at checkout.

Shopify isn’t just a website builder. It’s a platform for entrepreneurs to build their businesses on. Whether you’re looking for small business loans throughShopify Capital, afree logo maker, abuilt-in QR Code generator, or aShopify appto add specific features to your store, Shopify has you covered.

Both Shopify and Squarespace stores come with SSL certificates, which are a signal of trust that customers look for when shopping online. Shopify also provides greater security for you as a business owner with built-in fraud analysis to help protect you from fraudulent orders.