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Stratasis vs Squarespace

A website built around your business, or a Squarespace template made to look like one. How they differ, what each costs to run, and which one actually brings in work.

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The short answer

Squarespace vs a custom website, in two lines. Who each one is for.

Choose Squarespace if

You want a tidy portfolio or a few pages, and you're happy with a look other sites share.

  • A portfolio is all you need
  • You'll build and edit it yourself
  • A shared template look is fine
  • Bookings can live on another tool
  • You're not counting on search

Choose Stratasis if

Your website is how customers find, choose and book you, and it has to work as hard as you do.

  • Your site should bring in customers
  • You want it built and looked after
  • You want a design of your own
  • Booking, payments or a portal, built in
  • You want to show up in your area

Stratasis vs Squarespace at a glance

Squarespace vs a custom website, side by side. What changes for the business.

Compared

Squarespace

Stratasis

Who builds itYou do, from a templateWe do, from a design for you
How the cost worksA plan, plus scheduling and extensionsA project price, then a monthly fee to run it
DesignPolished, and the same as many othersDesigned around your customers
Load timeHeavy images and platform scriptsOnly the code the site needs
SearchSettings in a panelStructure and schema, page by page
BookingA separate paid scheduling toolBuilt in, tied to your calendar
Selling onlineCommerce on the higher plansYour checkout, your payment account
Owning itIt lives on SquarespaceYour code, domain and accounts
When it breaksEmail and chat supportOne team you can call

What Squarespace does, and where it falls short

Where Squarespace helps, and where it holds a business back. The plain version.

Pros

  • Good-looking templatesClean starting designs, made for big photos.
  • All in one placeHosting, domain and editor under one login.
  • Easy for a portfolioA handful of pages, up in a weekend.

Cons

  • Looks like the restPopular templates mean many sites share the same bones.
  • Rigid layoutsSections move within the editor's grid, and no further.
  • Bookings cost extraScheduling is a separate subscription on top of the plan.
  • Heavy on phonesBig images and platform scripts weigh pages down on mobile data.
  • Search is surface-levelTitles and descriptions, but little say in how pages are built.
  • Can't take it with youThe design stays behind if you leave; only some content exports.

Our take

Pretty, but built for showing, not selling.

Squarespace makes a handsome portfolio. A local business needs more from its site: to be found in town searches, to take the booking, to answer the questions that win the job. That's where a template runs out, and where a site built for you starts paying for itself.

Signs your Squarespace site is holding you back

When a Squarespace site looks good and does little. Eight we see most.

Looking good isn't the same as working.

These are the gaps we find on most Squarespace sites we're asked to replace.

  1. 01Compliments, not customersPeople say the site's nice, and still call someone else.
  2. 02A template you've seen beforeCompetitors with the same layout and the same fonts.
  3. 03Booking on another toolCustomers leave the site to book, and some never come back.
  4. 04Slow galleriesBig photo pages that crawl on mobile data.
  5. 05Thin service pagesOne page for everything, instead of one for each service and town.
  6. 06Missing from map resultsA site search engines don't read as local.
  7. 07Extensions stacking upAdd-ons for everything the plan doesn't cover.
  8. 08No room to growThe portal, quote form or member area you need, out of reach.

Squarespace or a custom website, explained

What to weigh before you choose. In plain English.

What Squarespace is, and what it isn't

Squarespace is a website builder known for its templates: clean layouts, big photos, a tidy editor. For a photographer's portfolio or a one-page placeholder, it does the job.

What it isn't is a site built around how customers find and choose a local business. The template decides the structure; you decide what fills it. Most Squarespace business sites end up as attractive brochures: nice to look at, quiet on the phone.

How the cost adds up

Squarespace sells plans by the month or year, and the features a business needs, like selling online, sit on the higher ones. Scheduling is a separate subscription. Email, extensions and marketing tools add their own charges. None of it is huge on its own; together it's a bill that grows every year, for a site that never changes much.

A site from Stratasis is priced as a project, then one monthly fee for hosting, updates and the changes you ask for. You know both before anything starts.

  • Squarespace: a plan, plus scheduling and extensions
  • Stratasis: a fixed project price, then one monthly fee

Load time and search

Squarespace templates lean on large images and scripts the platform loads on every page. On a desktop it looks smooth; on a phone in a parking lot it can feel heavy, and that's where most local customers are.

The search settings are a panel of titles and descriptions. What moves local rankings goes deeper: a page for every service and every town, structured data search engines read, links between pages that make sense. A template makes all of that awkward.

The template problem

Squarespace is proud of its templates, and they're well made. That's the problem: the most popular ones are on thousands of sites, and a customer comparing three businesses may be looking at the same layout three times.

A design made for you starts from what customers need to see and do, and looks like your business, not like a theme everyone else picked.

Booking, payments and the things a business needs

Taking bookings on Squarespace means a separate scheduling product with its own subscription and its own look. Selling sits on the commerce plans. Anything beyond that, like a quote form with photos, a client portal or a link into your job software, usually isn't possible at all.

A custom site builds those into the site itself, tied to the tools you already use.

Owning your site, and leaving Squarespace

Your domain can move, but your design can't. Squarespace can export some content, like pages and posts, but the layout, styling and most features stay behind, so leaving means rebuilding.

A site from Stratasis is yours: the code, the domain and every account in your name.

Moving from Squarespace to a site of your own

We plan the new site around your customers, bring your words and photos across, keep your domain and redirect every old page to its new one, so search engines follow. Your Squarespace site stays live until the switch.

  • Your domain stays
  • Every old page redirected
  • No day without a website

Questions and answers

Still have a question?

Ask us anything. We'll answer it straight, even if the answer is that we're not the right fit.

Ask us

  • It's good for a portfolio or a simple brochure. For a local business that needs its website to win calls, bookings and rankings, it runs out: templates, add-on bookings and little control over search hold it back.

  • Because most start from the same handful of popular templates. You can change colours and fonts, but the layout, spacing and structure stay recognisable.

  • It covers the basics. What it makes hard is the depth local search rewards: a page for every service and town, structured data, and pages light enough to load well on phones.

  • Yes. We rebuild it properly, carry your content across, keep your domain and redirect every old page, so you keep what you've built in search.

  • Not if the move is done properly. Every old address is redirected to its new page, so search engines carry your rankings across. They usually hold through the move, and often improve once the new pages settle in.

  • You can ask us for any change and it's made for you as part of looking after the site. Where you'd like to edit something yourself, like menus, prices or posts, we build a simple way to do it.

  • Most small sites take a few weeks from the first call to launch, and your Squarespace site stays live until the day we switch, so there's never a day without a website.

Kind words

Hear it from the businesses we've built for. What it's like to work with us, in their own words.

“Our new website and ads brought in more customers than we expected. Stratasis made the whole thing easy from start to finish.”
Anna BorowskaOwner, Apex Windows
“They took our whole website from idea to launch, online booking included, and never made it feel complicated.”
Elizabeth MarkowskiOwner, Virelle
“Everything was built around how we actually work, with the compliance side looked after from the first day.”
Daniel ZhaoFounder, Pelagion
“One team for the brand, the site and the ads. It finally feels like one business online.”
Mark SullivanDirector, Harbor
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