I Made The Leap From Wordpress to Squarespace
Wordpress is home to millions of users. They claim to welcome 50,000 new sites everyday. EVERYDAY.
Those are pretty impressive numbers. They impressed me and I built (er, tried to) build a website on the platform. I learned and researched and built and struggled and tore it down to rebuild a-fresh only to grow frustrated that the options I was looking for were always just out of reach.
On top of that, I hated the backend. It was ugly and reminded me of something from the 1990s.
I don’t know about you, but I”m a visual person. It was uber-frustrating to me to have to make an adjustment and click back and forth between the back end and front end and constantly have to refresh the front end page.
And so went 3 years of my life floundering on it. I couldn’t create anything I was proud of and therefore, never had incentive for anyone to come and visit my site. Except for my mom and dad. (Thanks, mom and dad if you are reading this.)
And then, Squarespace.
*Cue Angelic choir*
I built my site on Square Space in 3 days. Like, a site I was proud of showing off. This was a site I could send people to. Talk about a game changer.
I found the back end to very easy to master once I took some time to just explore. I thought it was quite intuitive and therefore, a time saver. I like saving time navigating instead of having to think through, “Now, where is this setting again?” and click on settings, then theme options, then customize. All those labels are really vague. I just don’t have time to hold the difference in my head.
Just label things what they are. Pages. Design. Help.
Thank you, Squarespace.
In fact, this one aspect saved me so much time that I realized how important it is to outsource the things I’m not interested in doing or learning so that I can focus on what I love.
ADVENTURING. DESIGNING.
WRITING. TEACHING. LEARNING.
I also love helping people pursue their dreams, not learning CSS just to adjust a line or color. (But I AM grateful that I was forced to learn it because now I know how to make HTML and CSS adjustments in Squarespace - look for the small wins.)
Like most bloggers in the start up phase, I had a serious bootstrap mentality. Cut corners. Save dollars. Hack it. But the price of Squarespace in ratio to the value of my time and professional appearance is a far greater return on investment (ROI is the fancy term for all you new entrepreneurs) than all the time I wasted on Wordpress not getting ANY return on my investment.
Now, I’m not a hater.
Wordpress taught me a lot and it works for millions of people. It's still a great solution for many industries. It just didn’t work for me. Primarily because I wasn't a developer. I was wasting time on not teaching people how to launch into their own entrepreneurial adventures.
Lesson numero uno of being a successful entrepreneur is learning to outsource things as soon as it is financially viable. One I owned that my strength was not as a web developer but in other places, I started making serious forward motion.
That’s why I had to tell Wordpress to take a hike and embrace other platforms that might be a few dollars more but in the long run could pay for themselves. It's been one of the best decisions I've made in my business.
What platform are you on? Why do you prefer it?
Love Squarespace as much as me?
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