Nearly two years ago, I wrote about moving to Squarespace. Today, I’m writing about why I’ve moved away.
Before Squarespace my site was in a constant state of rebuilding. I was overwhelmed by features, half-written case studies and a friction-laden publishing pipeline. Squarespace gave me what I needed: write, publish, forget. And it felt like a worthy compromise. Not the platform I wanted, but the one that finally got me publishing again.
I went from a half-built, neglected site to something that worked. Posts, weeknotes, case studies – all the things that had been sitting in drafts, half-finished, for years, suddenly existed.
Squarespace solved the problem. But not for long…
In that original post I listed a few frustrations with Squarespace that felt minor:
- Not being able to create an automated feed of case studies on the homepage
- No control over author bio on blog posts, or even removing the default author name
- No visibility into how images or assets were being compressed
- Very limited control over small-screen layouts without breaking the large-screen design
And I discovered many more small-but-frustrating constraints.
On their own, they were easy to ignore. Over time, and together, less so.
The 80:20 rule
Squarespace is very good at the 80%. It excels at removing friction. No build pipeline, no deployment, no decisions about infrastructure. You log in, write, publish. That’s it.
For a while, that’s exactly what I needed. I was writing again, a lot. I was adding long overdue case studies. I iterated and tweaked content I hadn’t touched in years. Without Squarespace my site probably wouldn’t exist.
The remaining 20% is where it started to fall apart. It’s in the details that something feels well put together and considered, the difference between good enough and great. Squarespace got me to good enough very quickly. It was much harder to get to great 11 Remind you of anything?.
It wasn’t long before the missing 20% got in the way of my original goal: to write more, with fewer excuses in the way. I wasn’t proud of the site any more, and that makes it much harder to put things out into the world.
At the start, the trade-off was clear. Less control in exchange for more momentum. But over time it stopped feeling like a trade-off and started feeling like a limit.
There’s a difference between choosing not to do something and not being able to do it. Once you cross that line, the tool starts to get in the way. Squarespace did what I needed it to. It got me unstuck and actively writing again. But I couldn’t live with constraints for long.
Nothing dramatic happened. The site stopped feeling like something I’d made. It looked fine. It did its job. But it felt generic in a way I couldn’t fix.
Moving on
I needed to get back to something I could fully control, so I rebuilt the site using Astro, deployed on Netlify.
The approach was like-for-like first. Improvements second:
- Rebuild what exists
- Migrate the content
- Improve it afterwards
To most people, the site will look identical. This was intentional. If I grew the scope of the rebuild beyond like-for-like I’d be back where I was two years ago.
Now I have a platform that is flexible, extensible, and ready to help deliver whatever comes next.
Squarespace and platforms like it package up publishing, hosting, design, and infrastructure into a single system. That convenience is attractive, and it’s valuable, but it comes at the cost of ownership and flexibility.
Like many, I’ve taken the decision to start moving away from these platforms22 I’m in the process of moving away from Google, that’s a whole other story. Moving from Squarespace is a touch more philosophical than others; returning to a version of the web where we own our content, and the means of publishing once more.
Where I’ve landed
Choosing Squarespace was about removing friction. Moving away is about regaining control. Now this site can be exactly what I need it to be next, rather than what someone else’s platform allows.