Squarespace vs WordPress for Forest Therapy Guides

Squarespace is a website builder. Squarespace is only used by customers through a web browser or the Squarespace app. Squarespace, the company, looks after all of the software behind the scenes within their own hosting and customers only experience the drag and drop interface for building their website as web pages.

WordPress, since it is Content Management System software, has to be downloaded and installed on a web server. Luckily, this step is often done by third party website hosting companies and customers do not have to do this unless they want to. However, this hosting does add to the cost and complexity but also the customization power of WordPress.

Additional tools that supplement a basic website are available as integrations within Squarespace. Squarespace does the work of assessing these third party tools and making them work within the hosting environment for customer websites. However, there are a limited number of options; fewer than a hundred.

A huge and constantly growing and changing ecosystem of third party tools surrounds the WordPress platform. Over 10,000 themes, 55,000 plugins and more add ons are available. This makes WordPress incredibly customizable. However, it also requires more work to research, select, install and configure.

In the end, the cost of Squarespace is mainly within and through Squarespace and is generally lower than WordPress. You only pay for your subscription, any domain names you need and any optional integrations. For a typical guide’s operation as an individual on private land, the most common operational and ecommerce integrations are likely needed to enable scheduling, email marketing and sales. For this approach, you can expect to pay about $12/month for the base subscription, $20-30 per domain name per year, and $5-40 for integrations per month. This all adds up to about $350 annually. Themes, hosting and security are covered, and you will not face increasing costs or time and effort on future maintenance. Upgrades will be made available without any further work or expense too.

Luckily, the cost of the WordPress software itself is free! But, because of the range of hosting, themes, plugins, and security tool add ons needed to have a complete website using WordPress, the costs increase beyond the level of Squarespace. For a typical website that an individual guide might need, you can expect to pay $200-250 in initial set up costs and then from $20-50 monthly for a total first year cost of $500-900. More complex plugin tools, increased traffic requiring heavier hosting, and advanced customization requiring professional help will all add more cost, but are not likely needed in the first year of operation unless a larger operation on private land is being planned with a bigger overall operational investment. Then, WordPress and plugins have to be monitored and updated regularly.

• Typically, the basic setup of Squarespace would be the following high level sequence of steps all carried out within the Squarespace web interface and related integration tool and social media websites:
  • create initial account for the Squarespace subscription
  • choose and register up to 3 domain names – you can always add more later
  • choose from one of the 110 professionally designed Squarespace themes
  • set up and configure integrations for:
    • scheduling with Acuity
    • email marketing with Squarespace (you can use third party integrations like MailChimp instead, but at a higher cost)
    • a custom email at your new domain with a Google Workspace account
    • payments with Stripe and/or PayPal
  • develop your content outline – also known as information architecture – and set up and configure content on your pages
  • create social media accounts and set up your social media account links
  • Launch your site!

• A wide range of approaches to setting up WordPress is available, depending on the hosting selected, but here is a basic workflow sequence done in the hosting web interface and other tool websites:
  • select a host, choose a hosting plan and set up your hosting account
  • choose and register up to 3 domain names – you can always add more later
  • install WordPress in the hosting environment – leading hosting services usually include this as a “one-click installation” option
  • choose and install a theme – this is also usually provided within the hosting environment
  • set up and configure plugins for:
    • a security tool to scan, block and remove threats from your site such as Sucuri, Wordfence, JetPack Security or others
    • functional tools for contact forms, testimonials, social media integrations, newsletter subscriptions (such as MailChimp, MadMimi, iContact or others), scheduling (such as WooCommerce Bookings , Bookly, BirchPress, in the theme, or others), Search Engine Optimization (such as Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, RankMath or more), ecommerce (such as WP eCommerce, WooCommerce or Shopify), multilingual functionality or more
  • develop your content outline – also known as information architecture – and set up and configure content on your pages
  • create social media accounts and set up your social media account integrations with plugins
  • Launch your site!