We all know everything is getting more expensive, and it seems almost every single day somewhere a price increase has been announced. The latest being Squarespace, with reports of plans being hiked as much as 26%.

While some may argue they are adding features all of the time, and the background addition of features is useful, it’s not entirely useful to everyone. Especially when you move into the more renting of a website over ownership, platforms can change things behind you, close old parts of the system and force extra stress and work on your website.

Renting A Website

With Squarespace, you’re effectively renting your own company’s website. Sure there’s some convenience with them taking care of most things for the cost, but for true results you require an agency to power those results with careful keyword research, design and execution.

This ends up to a point where you’re paying for a platform which can be quite restrictive, especially with many different SEO techniques simply impossible to execute easily on Squarespace such as specific metadata or sitemap changes to improve your visibility in search engines.

However, it can provide a drag and drop environment with a brand name which is known without requiring any understanding further on how a website works underneath.

Taking Back Control of Your Website

One of our key messages at Invisible Dragon is that we may not be suitable for every client — every agency has types of customers they are not suitable for (if they wish to admit it or not!). Sometimes you only find out months down the line where the emails are not being answered in a productive fashion and is causing a real bottleneck to your business.

At Invisible Dragon, we choose “self-hosted WordPress”, being the WordPress.org option. While we’re happy to host and keep this running for our clients, this also allows clients to have the understanding that they are not tied down to us. They are free to either find their own hosting, or another agency to run things for them and take the website with them.

And we are happy with this. While we may not be able to service every customer to the best of their ability, and neither can every other agency, you can still take the work that has been completed somewhere else instead of renting a website. This also means we do our best to make sure your website is working as best as it can while we keep hold of things.

When you rent a website such as on Squarespace, if you want to move away from Squarespace’s costs: you can’t. You can’t host a Squarespace with anybody else. If Squarespace want to raise their prices again in another couple of months, there isn’t much you can do about it except keep paying those costs — and for some businesses this may be worth paying for, but for many who are feeling the squeeze it might not be.

Actions You Can Take Today

Sadly, as mentioned above, you can’t move a Squarespace website anywhere else so we can’t easily offer a cost-effective option to take over the running of your website as it is.

Our advice to small businesses seeing price increases like this is to reconsider what their business is relying upon for their first impression to online potential customers. While it may look good, and perform today, it’s also important to understand any potential impact from price rises in the future.

The best action is to plan to improve. While not an overnight fix, looking at your available options and where your business wishes to grow in the future. And if that future sounds like having the keys to fully owning your business website, then we recommend moving towards WordPress (although we may have a slight bias).

If all of this sounds like it’s causing a headache, and you just need a website for your small business that performs and you can own, feel free to get in touch.