[00:03] of the biggest website builder platforms that are out there and you might be wondering which one you should choose I definitely was when I decided I was going to redo my main website last year and then this year I was launching a new
[00:18] Squarespace for the redo of my main website and then this year I've built a new website on Shopify so in this video I'm going to break down for you the differences between the two of them because while from the outside and
[00:33] looking at just the facts about them they sound pretty similar I was were on the back end so I'm going to bring you into my computer and show you the back end of both of my websites on Squarespace and Shopify so that you can
[00:47] make an informed decision about which of these platforms will be best for you okay so here you can see on the left the back end for my Squarespace website and on the right the back end for my Shopify website and you'll probably know notice
[01:00] one immediate big difference which is that Squarespace is very focused on the visual side of things whereas Shopify has no kind of mention of that visual part of things at all and it is focused more on the analytics and that actually
[01:15] throughout this video Squarespace is more focused on appearances while Shopify is a lot more focused on functionality speed analytics that sort of thing now because you can't see my Shopify website in this View at all I
[01:29] this is the website I'm talking about so this website is startup society. shop and by the way your Shopify website does not need to be do shop I just chose that for my shop um and then over here this is Gillian perkins.com okay so what I'm
[01:44] going to be doing is comparing Squarespace versus Shopify in eight different categories those categories are their page builder the visual appearance that you can create with both of them their capabilities or
[01:57] functionality the organization of a back end which turned out to be surprisingly kind of a big thing um the ability to create and manage products with each of them the analytics of each of them the site speed that each of them has created
[02:12] site speed that each of them has created for me and then also the pricing of each so starting out with the top one which is the page builder so over here we've got Squarespace now if you want to edit a page on Squarespace what you got to do
[02:25] is first of all navigate to the page you want to edit so you can click the link so for example if I wanted to edit the work with Gillian page I can click on that right there and then what you have to do is click edit and it pops you into
[02:39] their visual Page Builder and this is very much a drag and drop page builder drag it around on the screen now there are some limitations about where you can drag it I can drag it this way and I can drag it down and make the page a section
[02:54] bigger but I can't drag it up into the margins without changing some settings which are not super super easy or intuitive how to change now one thing that I do really like about Square spaces page editor is that you are able
[03:10] to put elements on top of each other now I won't want that button there for sure layer things a little bit and Squarespace gives you that capability and it also is just really intuitive and easy to use to move the different
[03:25] elements around and make your page look pretty much exactly you wanted to look into some challenges when you are trying to get things to look good on mobile
[03:37] because they might look good on desktop and then you come over here into Mobile and they look pretty funky and also just because it is this super easy to use because it is this super easy to use intuitive page builder uh sometimes you
[03:50] are creating things that don't have a solid foundation to them so that's why it's extra important to check both views and why you can potentially get into some trouble with that really easy Squarespace page editor but it is really
[04:04] easy to use okay so now let's come over here and look at how you edit a page with Shopify so with Shopify first you got to get to the page that you want to edit as well so you click on online store and then my online store is
[04:17] currently built with this theme called Cornerstone so you click on customize and from here you can either choose what page you want to edit so for example I could click into products and I could change one of the product pages um or I
[04:31] could go to my privacy policy if I wanted that and you can go to that page and then you can edit it from there and I think this is a good time to point out the Squarespace page editor which is that it can be tricky to navigate to the
[04:47] page you want to edit because if you can't just click on it from your main navigation or somewhere on the page you have to go over into pages and it gives you this huge long list of all of the pages on your site now my website looks
[05:00] pretty simple from the outside but we've got a lot going on behind the scenes so there are literally hundreds of pages pages of content pages of opt-in forms all sorts of different things and very bizarrely there's no search
[05:13] functionality over on Squarespace so you have to do your best to keep things category right here called sales Pages you can expand and collapse it and so if you keep it really organized then it's not too bad but I really wish there was
[05:28] a search function it and that's really different over here on Shopify and something I much prefer is you can search for any page on your site and get to it to be able to edit it really quickly and easily okay so for right now
[05:40] though I'm going to go back to the homepage and I'm going to open it up so it fills up my whole screen because I find that the Shopify page editor is a lot easier to use in that way and the first thing you're going to notice as
[05:53] far as a difference goes is that Shopify is not really what I would call a drag and drop editor so you can click these little plus symbols to add a section and then there's all these different types of sections so you've got sections that
[06:07] are products laid out next to each other featured collections um product feature sections sections that are just text a slideshow a contact form but you have to
[06:19] slideshow a contact form but you have to choose one of these sections and then here we've chosen this section that has this image on the right and this text on the left then you can click on any of these elements and it will open it up
[06:32] and you can change the text and you can change the size um or I could click on this button here and I could change you know what it's linking to and what the text of it is but you are much more locked in and the appearance of
[06:46] everything is much more controlled by the theme that you chose now to be clear this theme that's Cornerstone it did not look like this out of the box at all a theme and that's something that you can do when you install a theme on your site
[07:00] is configure the settings so we chose these colors we chose these button Styles I had my designer come in here and choose specific fonts and program them into this theme and all sorts of things like that and now that all of
[07:13] that stuff is configured now it's really easy to come in here and just choose one of these sections that I want to add to the page and then customize it with the right text and whatnot but it is a lot less flexible than squares spaces page
[07:28] builder now there's pros and there's Cons with that um on the one hand I do think that I would say squares spaces page builder is a lot easier to use and it's a lot easier to get your website looking how you want it to and so I'm
[07:41] going to give the win to Squarespace for page builder but as you're going to see when we get into looking at things like sight speed and analytics Shopify ends up scoring some points and it's partly thanks to the way they've built their
[07:56] page builder Squarespace had to make some sacrifices to be able to let you just drag things around it makes the code on the back end end up quite a bit Messier whereas the Shopify code on the back end ends up much cleaner and it
[08:10] loads a lot faster so let us briefly talk about our next category which is visual appearance now you can make a great looking website on either of these platforms so I'm not going to spend much time here but as I've covered it is
[08:23] easier to customize the Squarespace websites and to make them look exactly how you want them to look so if we go in and we look at my websites for both so we go to Gillian perkins.com and we go to startups society. shop both of these
[08:37] websites they ended up looking really nice um really professional polished and I would not necessarily say that one of them looks much better than the other them looks much better than the other but the fact is that I was able to make
[08:52] Gillian perkins.com look exactly how I wanted in so many little tiny detail ways whereas the startup shops website it is more template based and I decided before we even went into building this Shopify website that I was not going to
[09:08] be attached to any specific way for it to look I just wanted it to look good and professional and have essentially like the vibe that I wanted it to have loved working with Shopify but if I had had an exact way I wanted this site to
[09:21] look I might have been kind of frustrated anyway as far as visual appearance goes I am going to give that one to Squarespace I do think that that is what Squarespace has really focused on making websites that are really easy
[09:35] to create and to run and also that just look really good okay so so far it's been two points for Squarespace and no points for Shopify but now we're going capabilities of the website what can these websites do and I'm immediately
[09:52] going to give this point to Shopify and here's the reason why with Squarespace capabilities that Squarespace gives you they give you contact forms and you can manage your subscribers to some extent
[10:08] and you could add scheduling because Squarespace has partnered with Acuity with them they bought AQ scheduling so now you can add scheduling capabilities to your Squarespace website um and you can add products and services and sell
[10:24] those things on your Squarespace website but you are limited to what square space gives you it is essentially a closed ecosystem with Shopify though we experience something really different out of the box your Shopify website has
[10:41] perhaps slightly fewer capabilities it can't do things like collect contacts or manage your contacts um although it certainly can do things for managing certainly can do things for managing your products and creating products but
[10:54] why I give this point to Shopify is because of the Shopify App Store so Shopify has this huge App Store and as you can see over here on my Shopify site these are apps that we have installed and if I click on this little arrow it
[11:06] pops up the complete list of apps we have installed but if you want to find an app to do something else like if you want to be able to send SMS messages marketing you just search for what you're looking for and then you can go
[11:22] to the Shopify App Store and you will see a whole bunch of different apps not just created by Shopify in fact most of them are not created by Shopify but created by other brands and companies some of which you might recognize like
[11:36] MailChimp and some of them which exist solely to have created that one app uh and you can get your Shopify site to do almost anything you wanted to and this
[11:48] reminds me a lot of back when my websites were all on WordPress and we could install those plugins on WordPress to again give the website pretty much any like feature or functionality that we wanted it to have so the point easily
[12:01] goes to Shopify when it comes to capabilities or functionality all right now the next category I'm going to score Squarespace and Shopify on is the category of backend organization now this is not a category I would think
[12:14] that I would need to score them on but after using both of them one of them is gave you a hint earlier when I was showing you how you have to navigate the pages on your site in the back end of Squarespace and that's kind of how all
[12:29] of this goes I just haven't found that the organization here is very good or intuitive there are a lot of settings that it is hard to find and sometimes just settings that straight up don't exist so while these categories sound
[12:45] pretty simple and straightforward you get into any of them and you're wondering for example where in the world are my forms I have these forms on my website I can't find them in my pages I can't find them in my Styles where are
[12:58] those forms it took us so long to figure out where the responses to the forms on our website are I think they finally ended up being under contacts and you have to click on lists and segments and then you have to click on form
[13:13] submitters and then each of these is somebody who has filled out one of your forms and you can click on it to see their responses to your form but that is just one little example of how things are kind of buried in squar spaces
[13:26] backend and I think it's because they tried to make things look so simple on the outside again they're very focused on appearances whereas over here in different I would say that this first level of organization here is pretty
[13:40] similar in terms of how well it is laid out and organized but you click on any one of these things so for example if I click on products you can just see products you can get into any of the products you can add a new product there
[13:55] are more actions and any related settings to this particular category you can get into from here and we really haven't had any trouble finding any of the settings especially because you can always search for not just different
[14:08] apps but you can search for payout settings or whatever you are looking for and Shopify search works so well so not only is shopify's backend just overall better organized I would say but that search functionality makes it so much
[14:22] more usable so definitely giving that backend organization point to Shopify now the next topic we're going to look at is products and you can probably predict who's going to be the winner here the one that is built to sell
[14:35] products so you can certainly create and sell products on both of them and I pretty good job with this it is pretty easy to come in here and to create a product you can create a physical product a service um a camp and
[14:49] certainly a download which is basically like a digital product and then over in Shopify you can very easily add a product and and Shopify doesn't try to slot you into a specific type of product there's a lot more flexibility here it's
[15:05] just a product and then what you do is you use the apps over here to configure depending on what sort of product it is so for example in my Shopify store all of the products are digital products so we installed this app right here called
[15:19] fil Monk and what filem monk does is it does digital product delivery so it sends each new customer an email and you can come in here and you can configure all the settings for your digital products and exactly what those emails
[15:32] look like and there is a portal that your customers can go to to access the downloads they've purchased in the past and all sorts of things like that so I do find that it is just a lot more flexible over on Shopify and again you
[15:46] just have a deeper level of organization with your products and there also are just more like layers of settings that you can get into to configure the products over here not to mention or I guess to mention um everything you can
[16:01] do with the apps so I was saying you know we use this fil monk app for shipping a physical product then you would probably want to install an app or a couple of apps to help you manage your shipping processes for example and print
[16:15] labels and things like that whereas over in Squarespace while it's nice and simple you might be missing some functionality you need for delivering creating and selling for example if you're selling those digital downloads s
[16:29] how is the customer going to access them yes an email can go out that gives them it to work some other way like giving them password protection or having them have an account you might run into some shortcomings when it comes to
[16:43] Squarespace so when it comes to creating products selling products managing product inventory definitely giving the point to Shopify although I think with this now next we're going to talk about analytics so both Square space and
[16:59] Shopify have analytics so we'll go over to the analytics here in Squarespace and into shopify's analytics and I would say that when you first glance at them they look pretty similar there are nice graphs in both of them that show you a
[17:13] variety of things and yeah it's pretty like nicely visually laid out but you probably notice immediately that there is more going on with Shopify because with Squarespace what you see right here is almost all the data you have you can
[17:27] click into things a little bit so you could you know click on this bounce rate and see a few more details here you could click on the unique visitors um you can click over into traffic sources and there's a little bit more
[17:39] layers deep you've got that surface layer and then one more layer after that but with Shopify not only is there just a lot more data about a lot more things but you can drill down into these things pretty much as deep as you want to go
[17:55] and filter them and sort them in all sorts of different ways so for example if we are looking here at our sessions over time and we click on this well we can first of all see exactly how many visitors are on your website every hour
[18:10] of every day okay so that's pretty detailed but then you can also go in and you can decide how do you want to group it and what time period you are looking at and what time period you are comparing it to and you can sort it in
[18:22] all sorts of different ways and Export it and print it and honestly Shopify has some of the best and most robust analytics I've seen on any platform yes you can get even more with Google analytics itself but shy of that this is
[18:37] pretty much the gold standard so while squares spaces analytics are nice to have we've found that they're not that helpful because they don't go deep enough so definitely giving the point to Shopify for analytics now something that
[18:51] goes almost hand inand with your analytics is your site speed so we're going to look at the site speed for a few of my different websites so first of all Gillian perkins.com and by the way I'm using Google's page speeds insights
[19:04] to do this and so Gillian perkins.com is built with Squarespace and I ran it here our SEO looks great we are doing everything right but and yet the performance of the site overall is not that great and this mostly comes down to
[19:19] speed it's taking almost 12 seconds for the site to load overall and I will say that when you go to Gillian perkins.com it does not seem to take that long long to load at all and that's because I do think Squarespace does a good job of
[19:32] quickly so it looks like the site is here but the rest of the page isn't necessarily all loaded and I guess there are some backend things that are not quite ready to go yet so Google's not too happy with the speed of that
[19:47] definitely something I'm going to be working on but now let's go look at a different one so my other Squarespace website is Creator fasttrack.com so I'm just going to type that in now it's not looking much better for Creator
[20:00] fasttrack.com which by the way if you were thinking maybe it was just because website with all those pages I showed you on the back end creative fasttrack.com is a much smaller simpler website and yet still we have a pretty
[20:13] bad performance score and a speed index of over 10 seconds so not very fast even though we kept it pretty simple but now I've typed in startups society. shop which is my new Shopify store and it looks just as full feed and pretty on
[20:29] the outside and yet we've got a much better performance score and a speed index that is about half of we what we saw with those two Squarespace websites now I know this is a really small sampling and so I wouldn't say this is
[20:43] 100% conclusive but from a little sample here it definitely looks like Shopify is creating some much faster websites so obviously when it comes to speed we got to give that point to Shopify okay now for our final category of compar
[20:58] comparison let's look at the pricing of each one so over here on the left we've here on the right we have Shopify pricing and as you can see Squarespace has some cheaper monthly plans than anything that Shopify offers and so I am
[21:14] going to give the point to Squarespace when it comes to pricing however I do think it's important to have some Nuance here if by who has the better pricing you just mean who has the cheapest possible plan like how can you get your
[21:28] website up and running with the least amount of money then Squarespace is the the point but if you are looking for essentially the functionality you can get out of Shopify you will need squares spaces Commerce plan which is very
[21:43] similar in price to shopify's basic plan so the pricing ends up being pretty similar if you want to be selling products on your website and having what I would call some sort of e-commerce website and we can't ignore the fact
[21:57] looking at the backends and looking at those apps and whatnot you do get a lot more functionality from Shopify now as you can see Shopify has a much more expensive plans but one of the main features of these more expensive plans
[22:11] is that you get cheaper processing fees and so the idea here kind of is that if you're doing a bigger volume of sales then you can end up actually saving money by choosing one of shopify's more expensive plans because you'll save
[22:26] money on your processing fees now now you would have to be doing a a big volume to be getting into that situation but it's just something to keep in mind again giving the point here to Squarespace but I think we're kind of
[22:40] just comparing apples and oranges at this point now at the end of the day obviously the big question is which of these two platforms is right for you and your needs now we looked at eight different categories and Squarespace
[22:52] only won three of the different categories Shopify one five and I would agree that overall I do think that Shopify has a better more robust platform but that does not at all mean that it is the winner for everyone that
[23:08] it is what everyone should choose I am going to stick with Squarespace for the Squarespace already and that's because I chose Squarespace because I wanted something that was really easy to use that had a dragon drop page builder that
[23:21] that had a dragon drop page builder that was just simple for us and inexpensive so it is checking those boxes for me and I think that that goes for you too if you just want to create a simple website and you just want it to look great and
[23:33] you don't want it to be too expensive then I would recommend going with Squarespace despite its shortcomings but on the other hand if you are going to be especially if you're going to be managing inventory or shipping things
[23:46] out or even sending out digital downloads then I would recommend going with Shopify I think it's worth a slightly higher price tag and slightly steeper learning curve because you end up with a faster website much more
[23:59] robust analytics and just a lot more capabilities overall now if you're going to move forward with either Squarespace or Shopify and you found this video helpful in making that decision then consider using my affiliate links that
[24:11] are down in the description below if you use my affiliate link I'll get just a small Commission on either one that you choose I tried to make this video as unbiased and just straightforward as possible I as I said get a small
[24:25] choose but I think that that is such a great way to do affiliate sales or affiliate marketing is to give honest opinions on multiple products and let
[24:37] you make a fully informed decision so if you appreciate that and you want to support that then you can use my link and I do want to give you something as well we were looking at the startup shop in this video if you are an online
[24:50] of launching your online business and you would find it helpful to have some templates or swipe copy for writing your marketing emails or a layout for your sales page or for your homepage or you need a template for writing a business
[25:05] plan for your new business you can find all of those things at the startup shop so what I'm going to do right now is I'm just going to pop in here into Shopify going to click on discounts and I'm going to make a coupon code just for you
[25:18] and you can also see how easy it is to make coupon codes with Shopify so all you do is you click create discount and then I'm going to choose the amount off order option and then I'm going to make the coupon F code YouTube because it is
[25:30] just for you guys who are either watching here on YouTube or possibly listening to the podcast but it's it's for the people who are my subscribers and I'm going to give you a hefty 50% off discount for just your first
[25:44] here and we're going to change it to limit to one use per customer CU I would love to see you just get into the startup shop and try our products out so I want to make that as easy for you to do as possible and it's not not going to
[25:58] be able to be combined with any other discounts and I'm going to set the end discounts and I'm going to set the end date on this to be the end of March so it'll be good all the way through the very end of March but then this coupon
[26:10] code won't be good anymore so then we'll just save that discount and that is created so you can go to Startup society. shop and use coupon code YouTube to get 50% off one order and it will work for your entire single order
[26:25] so thank you guys so much for being here with me for today's video if you're interested in learning more about how I launched my Shopify store you want to see what went into that process of building the store itself and creating
[26:37] all the products you can check out this video right here where I break that all down talk about how I made that decision to finally start that store and everything that went into building the store itself