Are Squarespace websites good for health & wellness businesses? Review 2023

Squarespace has become one of the main options for creating a small business website, and you may have heard a lot of business owners rave about it. But, is it actually that good for health and wellness businesses like pilates and yoga studios, psychologists, naturopaths / nutritionists, physiotherapists, doula, mindfulness / life coaches and wellness retreats?

The short answer is yes, absolutely. We regard it as the best platform for the vast majority of health and wellness practitioners and businesses because it allows you to focus on your business (instead of the tech). But there are a few design limitations and functions in the website CMS/builder, so you need to know these before you dive in to using Squarespace. You’ll also need to know why Squarespace is probably hands down the best solution for you if you are a health and wellness practitioner.

An all in one time-saving website solution

Squarespace is among the main website Content Management Systems (CMS) that small to medium business owners use to create websites, and are among the ranks of Wordpress, Joomla and Wix.

CMS is basically a fancy word for a framework that your website is created on, so that you, the user, can update information and upload blog posts or pages without using code. But first off, we need to make it clear that Squarespace is not just a CMS (like Wordpress).

It's also a website builder, host, security manager, website maintenance, social media plugin, scheduler, payment gateway, domain name registrar, SSL certificate and email list builder all in one!  (Amazing? Yes!)

In other words, this means Squarespace makes all of these things so easy you don’t even have to think about it.

For those using other websites such as Wordpress, maintaining your website so it is secure, up to date and has an SSL certificate is almost a part time job, unless you outsource this job which can be very pricey!

The last thing that we want is for your focus to be taken away from your mission of helping people become well, which is why I strongly recommend to not use Wordpress. We specialize in creating Squarespace website for health & wellness businesses, or if you prefer to DIY you can check out our course and membership here.

So, what are the limitations of Squarespace?

There are not many limitations at all in Squarespace, but there are a few. For example, if you want a very specific and unusual design for your website, then it may be difficult to achieve with Squarespace. On the other hand, an unusual design can be pretty, however it’s not usually very user-friendly, which we don’t recommend for a health and wellness business. For this pilates studio, we made something very easy to navigate, as well as a members only area for online classes.

You can still create a beautiful and stylish website with Squarespace, that are also very interesting. Check out our Squarespace website we made for a doula. The design is unique and reflects the business owner’s personality beautifully.

If you need a lot of advanced functions, and interactive maps Squarespace is probably not the right CMS for you. 

For email list building, only Mailchimp and Squarespace’s built-in email list provider is offered. However, there are alternatives if you use simple code and embedded forms, like our favourite alternative email service Flodesk. (click here to get 50% off the first year)

Previously, you were not able to backup your website manually, so if anything goes terribly wrong, you would not have a copy to use to restore it online. Thankfully, in 2020 Squarespace added this ability for Squarespace Circle members (which we are members of) so we can backup your website.

Squarespace’s ECommerce

Paypal, Square and Stripe are the built-in payment processing options, and Afterpay has now been added to that list for products.

However, if you are a purely eCommerce business, Shopify may be best for you as the ability to organize stock and also combine products is amazing. However, if you are selling fairly simple products, and want to have a blog (which is a great idea) Squarespace is the way to go, which would be the case for many health and wellness businesses.

In fact, Squarespace makes it easy to diversity your health and wellness business - offering your services that can be booked easily online, having an online store for your line of products, as well as even Members only areas where you can nurture your inner circle of people.

Squarespace can be tricky to setup - but so easy to use!

Squarespace is touted as easy to use and create a website, but in reality it can have a pretty steep learning curve for most people to setup and design a website. As long as you are willing to spend some time to learn how to use it, you can create a simple website.

Many small business owners struggle to create a finished website and find it very frustrating to use at first. But we can assure you, once you’ve completed a training session or some online courses, the website is so easy - dare I say, a pleasure - to update.

Quite a few business owners find they can't finish their website to where they are happy with it, and get help for their Squarespace website, which is thankfully not difficult to organize. (Get in touch, we can help!)

Squarespace SEO is great!

Squarespace website are great for SEO, and we find they can easily out rank many other websites in organic searches after 6-12 months.

There are some unfounded rumours that Squarespace SEO is not very good. In fact, we think it’s the opposite for small business owners. That’s because Squarespace includes all the good stuff in their package: things like SSL certificate, security updates, easy to use SEO settings and very easy to keep content fresh and updated (very important).

There are over 1000 factors that affect SEO, yet some SEO companies focus on the couple of things that are not doable on Squarespace. Seeing that no SEO company could ever focus on all of those 1000 things, we think that focusing on those couple of things is ridiculous.

We’ve found that mostly their complaints are simply that they don’t actually know how to use Squarespace properly. (Seriously!)

When getting help marketing your business it’s important to choose businesses that understand your website builder as well as your industry.

Squarespace Scheduling (Acuity)

Squarespace Scheduling, also known as Acuity, is absolute gold for service based health & wellness businesses.

We use this for the majority of our health and wellness website builds, and it works for group classes, workshops and one-on-one sessions.

Clients can book, pay and also agree to terms and conditions before they even show up to their class or session.

This frees up so much time and mind space for busy wellness businesses, you could perhaps schedule in a few well earned breaks during the day?!

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