Squarespace vs. Wix: Which Should I Choose for a Real Estate Website?

At first glance, Squarespace and Wix seem like similar website-building platforms. These two sites combined make up 55% of the website builder market. Both share the same basic premise: they allow virtually anyone to build a website from scratch. But, how do they stack up against each other? In this article, we’re going to put these two platforms head to head and tell you which you need to start a new website for your real estate business.

Where They’re Similar

Both Squarespace and Wix have easy-to-use tools that allow you to create a website in no time. Build by simply adding content blocks to a visual editor and dragging and dropping elements like photos, frames, contact forms, text, and photo galleries into the site. You can even customize the pre-designed templates to fit your exact needs, changing the text, colors, etc. 

Additionally, a big bonus is that both platforms have excellently integrated and easy-to-use SEO. If we’ve just introduced another foreign concept, don’t worry. Check out our blog post on the SEO basics and how to start using SEO for your website! Other fantastic features from Wix or Squarespace include adding alt-text to every page and integration with Zapier so that you can create custom integrations based on your user’s activity. 

However, let’s get into the key differences between these two website builders that may convince you between one or the other. Once you start using either platform, you’ll quickly notice the differences we’ll discuss below. 

Squarespace Features:

Squarespace is a beginner-friendly website design platform with straightforward, customizable templates. Their templates also automatically readjust for tablet and mobile view and look super sleek across all devices. Squarespace has a great built-in online store for e-commerce, which allows you to sell both physical and digital products, services, and import/export data, track conversions, and has Point of Sale integration with Square. 

Squarespace also includes templates specifically designed for restaurant menus and allows you to have a “donations” feature. Finally, Squarespace is the only website builder that syndicates podcasts. So, if these are important to you - this may be the platform you’ve been looking for.

Little known tidbit: if you join Squarespace Circle (meaning you’ve created more than two websites using Squarespace), you’ll be invited to exclusive seminars and tips that help take your websites to the next level. If you’re interested in Squarespace, they offer a 14-day free trial before limiting access to your site. This will allow you to build a website for free until you’re sure it’s exactly what you need!

Wix Features:

Wix is the chaotic cousin of Squarespace that gives you more freedom to customize your site. Not only can you adjust any template by dragging elements anywhere onto the page, but you will have to edit the tablet and mobile views separately. They also have great membership pages, which would enable your users to access exclusive content via your website.

Wix also has its own variety of add-on apps that allow you to customize your website further, including Wix Live Chat, Wix Forum, and Wix Events (for RSVP and ticketing). Each of these services requires a third-party integration, so if you already have a platform you use for any of those services, you may find yourself adjusting to one that Wix supports. The good news is that Wix has excellent help features and many in-site articles that lead you directly to problems they know they have within the platform. 

Like Squarespace, you can start using Wix and many of its features for free and only pay when you choose to launch your real estate site. 

Main Differences: 

• Page editors. Wix has an unstructured editor, meaning you can drag elements anywhere on the page. In Squarespace, they snap into place in structured columns and rows. 

• Templates: Wix has more, but Squarespace has the best templates of any website builder. 

• Features: Both have the core features you’d expect of a website builder (photo galleries, maps, forms, audio players, etc.), but Wix may have a few more features beneficial to you depending on what kind of website you are building. 

So, Wix versus Squarespace... which should you choose?

Our personal preference is Squarespace for real estate websites . It is what we personally built our site on and have found it to be a client favorite. The pages are clean, easy to navigate, and modern. Plus the customer service is top-notch.

The drag-and-drop builder allows you to create a website quickly with pre-set tools and designs. You can even customize the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of your page if you’d like. With Squarespace, all pages are optimized for SEO so you don’t have to worry about that either.

If you’d like to get in touch with us about building your real estate website, we would love to tell you more about what we do!