Squarespace blogging case study: How I built my blog to 130,000 monthly visits
If you’re wondering whether Squarespace is good for blogging, here’s my story of how I successfully grew my travel blog.
It drives me wild when I see blogging ‘gurus’ say that you can’t build and grow a blog on Squarespace.
One of the main reasons I started High Alpine Creative is because I wanted to create the blogging resource I wished I could find.
I desperately wanted to find examples of travel blogs on Squarespace, to validate my decision to build my independent publishing business on this platform. I found a few, but I also saw so many posts in Facebook groups where other bloggers would say that Squarespace is a terrible idea, it’s impossible to monetise, you’ll never have good site speed, and so on.
Well, here I am.
I’ve grown my travel blog to 130,000 monthly views. My Squarespace travel blog makes me steady income — it’s the perfect case study for proving that you can build a successful blog on this platform.
It goes to show that Squarespace is good for blogging.
If you’re here because you want to know whether you can grow a successful blog on Squarespace, I want you to know that yes, you can. There is a loud majority out there who will try and tell you Wordpress is the only way forward, but Squarespace work for me — and it can work for you too.
Below, I’ll run through all the reasons I love using Squarespace, which might help you decide whether or not you should use it for your own blog.
I chose to build my blog on Squarespace because it’s so easy to get started
You can build a successful blog on Squarespace if you publish valuable content. And writing and publishing content to a blog on Squarespace is straightforward, thanks to the simplicity of the platform.
These are the key reasons I am an advocate for Squarespace as a blogging platform.
Squarespace is a drag and drop website builder, which means it’s perfect for anyone new to publishing content.
You don’t need any coding knowledge to start on Squarespace. You also don’t need to make any decisions about hosting, SSL certificates, or even domains if you don’t want to — you can get everything you need to get a blog live through Squarespace itself.
On Wordpress, you need to choose things like hosting, pick a theme, and manage a clunky backend. The learning curve is steep. And even once you’ve got the hang of it, the backend remains clunky.
I tried multiple times to start a blog on Wordpress, and failed each time. That wasn’t necessarily the fault of WordPress — it takes a lot of commitment to run a blog — but having a website platform that is easy to manage definitely makes it easier to stay the course.
Squarespace doesn’t have these hurdles, and on 7.1 there’s no difference between templates (they all have the same functionality, just different design).
With Squarespace, you can set up a site reasonably quickly and hit publish on content fast. Blogging templates mean you can have your website up and running within a few days.
The backend is pretty intuitive, and even if you’ve never worked on a website before, you should be able to get used to the basics of content publishing pretty quickly.
I like being able to use custom CSS to tweak things on my blog, but aside from that, I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of a self-hosted platform like Wordpress.
With all of the backend blog management simplified, with my travel blog, my focus is on writing the best content I can, and building an audience.
I have been able to grow my website to nearly 130k monthly views, which goes to show that if you understand SEO, the platform doesn’t matter.
I can make money from ads and affiliates, integrate my newsletter platform (Kit), and do everything else I want to do, while using Squarespace.
Squarespace is an all-in-one platform (you don’t have to worry about endless plugins)
With Squarespace, unlike on Wordpress, you don’t need to install any plugins as the platform already offers easy ways to customise your blog.
There are blog plugins for Squarepsace available to buy through third parties. Squarespace plugins are just pieces of code you can use to further customise your site, but they mostly make things look pretty — you don’t need them for functionality.
The only plugin I have ever used on my site is one that makes it easier to mark affiliate links as no follow.
A comment from a successful travel blogger in a Facebook Group
This makes it easier to ensure you have things like title tags, alt text, and a clear heading structure.
There is a common myth that Squarespace is bad for SEO (which I will dive into further down), but in fact it makes SEO for beginners pretty straightforward.
This is one area where Squarespace has improved a lot in recent years, and while it’s still not perfect, no platform is — I know from my experience as a digital content manager that all content management platforms have their niggles when it comes to SEO.
If Squarespace really was bad for SEO, I wouldn’t have built my blog from ~1000 to 100,000 monthly visitors in less than a year.
It’s not the platform, it’s the content.
Google doesn’t pay attention to which platform a website is hosted on; I have worked with CMSs you’ve probably never heard of (Silverstripe, anyone?) that rank very high in search.
The key to SEO is solid, original content, which has nothing to do with where you’re publishing and everything to do with what you’re publishing.
It is true that Wordpress sites can be faster and more fully customised than a Squarespace site, but if you don’t know what you’re doing you can still have a slow and un-optimised Wordpress site.
The design elements of Squarespace are hard to beat
User Experience (UX) design is becoming increasingly important for travel blogs, which is another reason to choose Squarespace.
You can definitely achieve the same clean, sleek look typical of Squarespace sites on other platforms, but you would usually need to get pretty skilled in coding to get there.
What I like about Squarespace is that I can put together a blog design I’m proud of, with minimal code. I use basic CSS to tweak the default site styles, and that’s enough for my blog to look beautiful.
I love it when readers compliment my site design — it goes to show that people do appreciate things that look good.
Monetising my Squarespace blog has been straightforward
A sassy comment I love from the creator behind Micro Four Nerds. For the record, she might think she's bad at making websites, but hers still looks great.
I have no idea where this one comes from (maybe because you can’t put ads on Wix?) but it is entirely possible —easy, even — to monetise a Squarespace website.
I run Mediavine ads on my site and make a decent income from them.
I also include affiliate links in my content. This is usually one of the key gripes people have about blogging on Squarespace, as you have to work a little harder to mark a link as no follow — but once you implement the workaround, it’s fine.
Squarespace isn’t perfect: These are the downsides to using Squarespace for blogging
No blogging platform is going to meet every one of your needs and expectations. As with most things in life, there will always be some compromise.
These are some of the trade offs I make when I choose Squarespace.
Some actions take more work on Squarespace
On Squarespace, you can’t bulk edit the tags and categories attributed to pages.
You might want more customisation for your site
I do occasionally get frustrated with the things I can’t do on Squarespace. For example:
I would love to be able to edit category pages, which are given a default URL and content, but I can’t.
I have struggled to set up some parts of my site, like the main navigation, in the way I would like.
But on the whole, being limited in some ways isn’t a bad trade off for having a sleek, manageable site. At least for me. And constraint can be great for creativity.
Of course, Squarespace isn’t the right fit for everyone.
If you:
Have a lot of coding experience, ie work as a software developer;
Run a shop with a lot of digital products;
Or don’t mind spending a lot of time learning to code;
You might be better off on another platform. There’s more than just Wordpress out there — I’ve met people who publish on Webflow, so there are lots of options. It’s all about finding the right fit for you in terms of ease, design, and cost.
Most people who tell you Squarespace is bad for blogging, don’t have blogs on Squarespace.
When they say it’s a bad platform, they are often just repeating common ‘wisdom’ shared by other bloggers.
Wordpress as a platform does have advantages, and can be better than Squarespace in some scenarios.
But it’s a steep learning curve if you’ve never worked in a content management system (CMS, or the backend of a website) before.
I have worked with many different CMSs through my work as a digital content manager, and I can tell you I still much prefer the simplicity and ease of building a blog with Squarespace.
So, when it comes to choosing a platform for launching your blog, I really encourage you to make the best choice for you.
Thanks for reading this far! If you found this helpful, you might enjoy my other posts on blogging on Squarespace:
