Squarespace vs WordPress for Photographers

Having trouble deciding if Squarespace or WordPress is a better website platform to showcase your photography business and build a portfolio website? Oh boy, do I have some opinions.

Every web designer has a different recommendation. Some people worship WordPress, others hate it. Others love Squarespace’s ease of design, while WordPress fans can’t jive with its limitations as a website builder.

So how do you choose which is the best website builder for a photography website? In my honest opinion as of 2024, Squarespace is the best option for photographers managing their own website. But that recommendation is nuanced, because the devil is in the details. 

How much flexibility do you need? How tech-savvy are you? How much do you want to be learning when it comes to website management? 

Let’s dive in.

Why I’m Qualified to Write About Squarespace and WP

In this article, I’ll share my full thoughts on both website platforms that could serve as a photographer portfolio, as someone who has used both for ages and is familiar with nearly all of the website builders out there. I have years of experience actually building websites on these platforms, optimizing them, seeing how they have grown and progressed.

On one hand, I built my first Wordpress website around 2009, and have been ‘pressing ever since. On the other hand, I’m also a Squarespace Circle member, and love working on Squarespace sites with clients.

The Pros and Cons of Wordpress for Photographers

Pros:

• With some web development elbow grease, you can optimize Wordpress to run perfectly as a photography website, including building out photography portfolios and blog posts.

• Its content management system is extremely flexible and you can create custom post-types and really build any type of design you want, with a combination of plugins and technical skills.

• The actual WP platform itself is free, you just have to pay for hosting and any other pro themes and plugins you want to use.

• Because it is so widely used, if you need a specific feature, there is probably already a Wordpress plugin for it.

• This gives you endless customization options.

• You can choose a great host and put in the work to get a great site speed.

• Wordpress has a huge user-base, which means you can likely find the perfect Wordpress theme, hire skilled designers, and find endless resources to perfect your site.

Cons:

• All of the above benefits really only hit home if you have the technical expertise to use them, or the budget to hire someone who knows how.

• Without the right tech skills and overcoming a major learning curve, it’s very easy to create a janky, un-optimized, and slow WordPress site. It’s easy to do without the right expertise or tech skills. This is what happens 99% of the time when a website owner DIYs their own WP site. 

• Because WordPress is so customizable, allowing you to install any combination of themes and plugins on a host of your choice, this opens the door to many site inefficiencies, tech conflicts, and bugs to sort out.  And when they happen, they are up to you to troubleshoot and straighten out.

• There is no official support team for self-hosted Wordpress sites. Your support will be limited to your host’s support.

• WP requires regular care, feeding, and maintenance. You can’t just build the website and walk away.

• Wordpress sites often get hacked, and cleanup isn’t easy. If you don’t have a clean backup, you will struggle to fix it.

• You will often spend time on tech support chat with your host, perusing forums and Facebook groups, or pulling your hair out to figure out how to do the exact thing you want on Wordpress.

• Or you’ll spend a lot of money $$$ just to have someone maintain it.

• You’ll run into decision fatigue when it comes to picking the perfect themes, the perfect plugins, and setting everything up so you can get your photography website found.

My take? WordPress is a great website tool, for some businesses that require some of the custom CMS flexibility WordPress has.

But the truth? Most photographers don’t have any need for advanced features that would require WP in the first place. It's also easy to bog down your site with a Wordpress theme that isn't optimized, or the use of certain Wordpress plugins, and you’ll always be maintaining and updating your site and dealing with conflicts and glitches as they come up.

Now let’s look at Squarespace.

The Pros and Cons of Squarespace for Photographers

Pros

• Anyone can build a Squarespace website whether or not they have web design or tech experience. You can dive right in and begin building a beautiful website right away, hitting the ground running.

• Squarespace sites look great out of the box with minimal customization. With the current 7.1+ version of Squarespace, you can drag and drop anything you want anywhere.

• Mastering Squarespace is much easier than mastering a self hosted Wordpress website. The learning curve is much shorter.

• Squarespace sites tend to look much more refined, with less effort, due to the way their design settings are set up to start.

• You can start with a Squarespace website template that is pre-designed for you, or customize your site pixel-by-pixel using their new Fluid Engine editor.

• There is practically 24/7 support built into the Squarespace platform, so an expert is always available to help you. No relying solely on forums and FB groups for help.

• Squarespace has all of the features photographers need for a perfect website - including SEO settings, blogging, portfolio management, and booking integrations.

• There are plenty of experts available for hire, even if the community isn’t quite as big as the professional WP community.

• You will never spend time on server maintenance, database issues, hosting tech support, integration quirks. Your website will just work, period.

Cons

• It’s not as flexible as WordPress. You can’t build anything you want on it. (But as a photographer who just needs a marketing site with a portfolio and a blog, do you need to?)

• Depending on the Wordpress host you’re comparing it to and the plan you choose, it can be a little bit pricier.

• As a website building tool with hosting built in, you only have so much control, so you'll never be able to fully manage hosting-related site customizations, like your own site speed. The result is that Squarespace site speeds tend to be slightly slower than a perfectly optimized WP site, but they're working on improving this. In fact as recently as Feb, “Squarespace, WordPress and Wix show the highest year over year rate of growth in Core Web Vitals improvements” (source.)

That’s a pretty short cons list, if you ask me. 

Which is better for photographers: WordPress or Squarespace?

If you are dead-set on managing custom post types that you can create using advanced Wordpress addons, need extensive customization that can’t be achieved with other platforms, and are okay investing your time or your money to achieve that, Wordpress might be the right website platform for your photography site.

But you will either spend a lot of time learning it and troubleshooting it, or a chunk of change hiring an expert to do so for you. And even these capabilities are growing on platforms like Webflow, which has a similar learning curve but requires less care and feeding.

If you simply want a site that works out of the box and that is easy to learn, and has all of the features you need - Squarespace is the right choice for you. Unlike Wordpress, the learning curve is really quite short and the platform is more intuitive.

You can style and launch a basic site in a day. Many business owners who make edits to their own website find it far easier to use, and love that they never have to deal with their entire site breaking, getting hacked, or handling server management issues.

As a photographer, you probably want to focus more on your craft than you want to focus on becoming a web server expert. This means for 99% of photographers, Squarespace is a better choice, so you can be managing your business instead of wrestling with your website. Showit is another option to consider, but if you want to blog, you'll still end up using WP alongside the Showit platform.

If you want help building a professional photography portfolio site that is beautiful and can get found on Google’s first page, get in touch. I help small business owners create beautiful websites that can rank in Google and get you more visibility.