Squarespace makes the most attractive templates of any mainstream platform, and its measured numbers are good: 70% of Squarespace sites pass Core Web Vitals on mobile, and its home pages average 33.0 detected accessibility errors against an average across the web of 56.1. For a small professional practice it is often a genuinely sensible answer.
The reason we rarely recommend it to a business planning to grow is narrower and better documented than the usual complaints. It comes from Squarespace's own help centre.
What Squarespace does well
- Design quality out of the box that most agency WordPress builds do not reach.
- Fully managed: no updates, no plugin surface, no maintenance.
- Good measured performance and accessibility.
Where it struggles for a growing business
By Squarespace's own account, the export leaves most of your site behind
Squarespace's own export documentation confirms that style settings, custom CSS, headers, footers and sidebars that are specific to a page, more than one blog page, and other page types including portfolio pages and store pages do not export. What you get is an XML dump oriented toward WordPress, containing some of your text and images. That is a vendor documenting the limits of its own portability, which makes it about as reliable as evidence gets.
The price is not fixed for the life of your site
Like any hosted platform, Squarespace's pricing is the vendor's to change. That is unremarkable on its own — the point is your position when it happens. On a platform whose export leaves most of the site behind, a price rise is not a decision point so much as a bill, because the alternative is a rebuild. Worth weighing when you are budgeting a five year horizon.
Structured technical content is not its strength
Specification tables, filterable product ranges and document libraries are achievable but awkward, and they fight the template rather than working with it.
The honest verdict
CHOOSE SQUARESPACE IF
- Design quality matters more than structure, and your content is essentially pages and posts.
- You want zero maintenance and predictable, if adjustable, costs.
- You are a small practice rather than a business running several sites.
CHOOSE UNITNINETY IF
- You expect to still be running this site in five years and want to keep your options open.
- Your catalogue, projects or documents need real structure.
- You want the design to be yours rather than a carefully chosen template.
- You want every site you run in one dashboard, not a separate account and a separate export process for each.
Sources
Every figure above is linked so you can check it. Where we have made an argument rather than cited a measurement, we have said so in the text.