[96] Before You Cancel Squarespace: What It Really Takes to Host a Site Yourself

In the middle of 2026, Squarespace raised prices, adjusted the increase a few days later, and set off a wave of "I'm leaving" posts across Reddit and the Squarespace forum. One comment kept coming up: I'll have AI build my site and host it somewhere cheaper. For some sites, that's a reasonable call. In this episode I walk through what you'd be taking over yourself if you did it, and who I think should go anyway.

You'll learn the difference between a website builder and a website platform, why AI can help you build a site but not run one, and the three categories of work Squarespace handles behind the scenes: security, including SSL certificates and where your form data goes when someone hits submit, discovery, including sitemaps and 404 pages and why an invisible website never throws an error, and functionality, including everything around a blog post and everything around a checkout that isn't the page itself. I also get honest about the price increase, the strange second email, and the switching costs that make leaving harder than it looks.

Timestamps
00:00 The price increase and the comment that started this
02:56 Website builder vs. website platform
04:08 SSL certificates and why they fail quietly
05:10 Where your form data goes when someone hits submit
06:00 Spam protection you never see working
06:30 Sitemaps and the invisible website problem
07:05 404 pages, the one everybody forgets
07:54 Blogs and stores are systems, not pages
09:33 Who should leave, and who should stay
10:22 What you're really paying for

Show notes & resource links:
insidethesquare.co/podcast/96

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In the middle of 2026, Squarespace surprised quite a few of us by sending out an email about a spontaneous price increase. Now, a few days later, they sent out a second email that adjusted that price increase so it wasn't as big, but it was still an increase. Both emails caused a pretty big backlash in the Squarespace community. And a lot of people were hopping into forums like Reddit and even the Squarespace Forum talking about changing to a different platform. And one type of comment really stuck with me. The folks who said they're going to just use AI to code their website and host it somewhere else that's cheaper. To be totally honest with you, for some of you listening, that might be a good option. If you've got a single page site that acts like almost a digital flyer, just information on a page, you can probably do it cheaper yourself. Vibecode it, host it, point the domain there. It's not that complicated. But for a lot of us, there are things that Squarespace does behind the scenes that we just don't have to think about. And that's what we're paying for. So if you're someone who's thinking about jumping ship and hosting your website somewhere else, or even building it yourself, this is the episode for you. Welcome to Think Inside the Square. I'm your host, Becca Harpayne, and I share tips and tricks for creating a Squarespace website that you're proud of. In this episode, I'm going to be talking about all of the important things that Squarespace does for us behind the scenes because your website is so much more than just code on a page. For a transcript of this episode, along with the links to resources that I'll mention, be sure to visit insythesquare.co forward slash podcast. I also want to mention the term Squarespace is a trademark of Squarespace Incorporated. This content is not affiliated with Squarespace Incorporated. I'm a fan of Squarespace. That's really not a secret. I have been for years. I've worked in WordPress and Wix back in the day. I even dabbled with Dreamweaver. And over and over again, I found myself returning to Squarespace. So I've stuck with it. I'm even hanging out at Squarespace headquarters this year for Circle Day in October, and I hope to connect with you there. I'm going to be live on stage for the first time, and I'm so excited about that. But that being said, Squarespace is not sponsoring this episode of my podcast. This is just my honest opinion as a designer. And again, this episode isn't affiliated with Squarespace. But this recent price change and that backtrack moment, it's not making it easy for everyone to love Squarespace right now. So in this episode, I'm talking to those of you that are on the fence, those of you who feel like you're stuck in Squarespace and you want a way out. Those of you who are ready to jump shit but don't know where to go. And those of you who really need a little bit of support in justifying the price that you're now paying to use Squarespace for your website. This episode is for you. I want to start with the distinction because I think that's where this whole conversation gets tangled up. There's a website builder and then a website platform. A builder is where you make the page. I'm talking the layout, the fonts, the colors, the code that renders the thing your visitor looks at. A platform runs the site. Everything around the page that makes that page reachable, findable, safe, and still working next month. AI has gotten genuinely excellent at the first job. I'm not going to sit here and tell her that it hasn't. The tools we have access to have gotten very good. So good that I've started teaching people how to direct AI to bring their design vision to life. But AI can help you build it, not help you run it. I don't want to spend this episode just listing a bunch of different tech terms for you to go and check off a checklist, but here's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about security, we're going to talk about discovery, and we're going to talk about functionality. Three key aspects of a website platform that you don't really think about when you're actually building. So let's go ahead and kick things off by talking about security. One of the most basic forms of security that a website has is called an SSL certificate. It basically scrambles the information traveling between your visitor's browser and your website so nobody in the middle can read it. It's a safety thing and it's pretty standard. Now Squarespace issues yours and renews it for you, so you don't really have to think about it. There are a lot of hosting providers out there that will provide one for you for free, so getting it isn't the hard part. Keeping it is. These certificates expire. The renewal cycles keep getting shorter and shorter, and automatic renewals fail quietly. So you might not know when your visitors see a warning page instead of your website. With all the websites that I've built and managed throughout my career, setting a calendar reminder to check my encryption has never been a fun thing on my to-do list, and Squarespace does it for me. That's part of the price that I pay, and I'm comfortable with that. Another level of security that people really don't think about is the form data on your website. The most simple website often has a contact form where someone sends their name, their email, maybe their phone number, little message, they hit submit. Where does that go? On Squarespace, the data from that form is securely stored and encrypted, and you can get notified or connected to Google. You can set up some way to track that information. But a site that you built using AI and host yourself, it doesn't really have anywhere to go. Receiving and storing information securely, that is an entirely separate system outside of designing a website. You either need a form service or some type of database. And again, that database should probably be secure. Now, this is not legal advice. I'm just talking about some industry standards out there. But this is exactly where AI built sites are failing. These working parts that we don't really think about because they're such a natural part of Squarespace. Now, when it comes to those forms, spam protection is another thing that Squarespace does for us. They don't catch it all, but they filter out a lot of it. And you don't really think about it because you never see the filter working. That's what makes it so easy to forget that it exists. But if you're building your own forms, you need to make sure that the data not only goes to a secure place, but you're bolting on a little bit of bot protection for yourself. Now, speaking of those bots, let's talk about discoverability. Your site can be gorgeous, it can be live, it can be loading fast, and it can be completely invisible when someone's looking for it. Now there's a thing out there called a site map. A site map is a list of every page on your site written in a format that search engines can read sitting at a fixed web address. Squarespace creates this for you, but on your own website, you need to generate that and have it hosted at the right URL and then keep it current forever, every time you publish anything. That's something that I don't like having on my to-do list, and I love that Squarespace does that for me. Now let's also talk about something that's so common, we often forget about it, your 404 error page. When someone goes to a page on your website and maybe they spell the URL incorrectly, or maybe it's a broken link and you've taken that URL down. Squarespace serves up a 404 error page that says, nope, what you're looking for isn't here. Now in Squarespace, we can customize that and use a completely custom page with whatever content we want to have on that page. But if you're building your website yourself, you need to make sure that you create a page like that or at least double check to see what your hosting provider or content management system is sending people to if there's a mistake. That's something a lot of people don't think about. So we covered basic security, we covered basic discoverability. Let's talk about some basic functionality. If you want to have a blog on your website, a blog is so much more than just the design of the blog post. You need to have ways to organize the content like categories and tags and excerpts. You need to make sure that you have the ability for maybe an author profile or a chance for people to leave comments. All of these are separate systems that you'll need to set up for your blog. In Squarespace, it's just like two clicks. And then we have a blog and we can start adding and editing content. That ease of use and not having to think about how to create all of that functionality is definitely a plus in my book. And I've got multiple blogs on Squarespace for that reason. Now I also want to talk to those of you out there that are selling things. If you're going to sell things on a website, you don't just need the product page. You need a checkout, you need confirmation emails, you need tax information, you need inventory tracking, you need refunds, order records. All of these things are systems, not pages. And you're not just protecting a mailing list anymore or data submitted on a contact form. You're protecting purchase history, you're protecting names and addresses. Yes, you can connect to a payment processor to a site you built yourself, sure. That handles the card, but it doesn't handle everything around the card. That is your responsibility now. Let me take us up to that 30,000-foot view. All right. If your site is genuinely static, no forms, no store, no blog, no logins, no digital course, if it's basically a digital flyer with information and Squarespace is getting too expensive for you, that's something that is very easy to create and host yourself. Now, if you've got a real technical background and you enjoyed this work, if you knew what I was talking about and this episode sounded like a normal Tuesday to you, go forth and build something awesome and send me a link. I'd love to see what you're creating. But if you handle anyone else's information, if you want to run a blog or a membership or host an online course, that is a darn good reason to stay. And if you didn't think about form data collection and 404 error pages and sit maps 20 minutes ago, that is totally fine. And that is the point I'm making. You've been handed all of this for years without being told that you needed it. Now let me be clear about one thing before I sign off on this episode, because I don't want this to sound like a love letter to Squarespace, okay? The price increase, that's stung. Mine went up about $30 a month across the sites I pay for for a product doing exactly what it did the month before. And the second email, that price adjustment, that was a strange way to handle it. Squarespace, if you're listening, that was not your best communication moment. You might want to change that approach. I'm also aware that everything I described in this episode is really a knowledge gap. If we're talking about the flat fee of switching, the cost itself, taking your content off of Squarespace and putting it onto another website platform is expensive. It can make leaving harder, and Squarespace knows that. And that's part of why the price can go up, and part of the reason why so many people are frustrated. That's the business model. I think it is perfectly normal to be annoyed about that and be frustrated about that, but also be comfortable staying where you are. So this isn't me saying that Squarespace is a great deal. It's me saying this is the reality that we're working with. There's an actual product behind the invoice, and most of it is stuff that we never see and we never think about, which makes it very easy to forget what you're buying. You can build the website. The question is whether or not you want to run one. I'm Becca from Inside the Square, and I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, give it a like, leave me a comment, let me know your thoughts, and forward this along to any Squarespacer you know who's frustrated about that price increase and is thinking about jumping ship. Thank you so much for tuning in. And most importantly, have fun with your Squarespace website. Bye for now.