Squarespace isn't always the wrong answer. But for any business that needs to rank in search, handle custom logic, or look meaningfully different from every other Squarespace site — it's costing you customers.
Portfolios, simple event sites, side projects, and early-stage validation where you have no budget and just need something live.
Any business that needs to rank in search, handle custom logic, or look different from every other Squarespace site in your industry.
Typical range for Australian small business Squarespace sites. Not an edge case — this is standard.
What we target on every build. Core Web Vitals within Google's 'Good' threshold.
King Double Glazing on Next.js. Rebuilt from a 13.1-second LCP. Mobile and desktop.
You can do the basics — meta titles, alt text, clean URLs. But you're hitting a ceiling quickly. You can't add custom LocalBusiness schema, can't do server-side rendering, can't control page weight beyond what Squarespace exposes. For local search in a competitive market, these limitations are real.
If your site generates the enquiries you need and your market isn't competitive on search, don't rebuild it. We're not in the business of selling rebuilds people don't need. The question to ask is: is my site ranking for the searches that matter? If the answer is yes, stay. If no, the platform may be part of the problem.
Squarespace charges an ongoing monthly platform fee — so over three years you're paying in subscription fees alone, before any designer or developer costs. A custom Next.js build has a higher upfront cost but near-zero ongoing platform fees. By year three or four, the custom build is typically cheaper in total.
We've tested a sample of Australian small business Squarespace sites. Mobile Lighthouse scores in the 40–65 range are standard. For comparison, our Next.js builds target 90+, and King Double Glazing scored 99. The gap matters for SEO — Google's Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal, and the mobile score is the one that counts.