Should I Hire A Squarespace Web Designer? 7 Signs It’s Time

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Originally Published: May 2019
Last Updated: July 2026

Squarespace is known as a DIY-friendly website platform and for good reason. With an intuitive editor, a large range of built-in features and thousands of tutorials at your fingertips, it’s entirely possible to build your own website without hiring a professional. For a new business with a limited budget, a straightforward offer and plenty of time to spare, doing it yourself can be a perfectly sensible place to start.

But there’s a big difference between being able to build a website and creating one that looks professional, communicates the value of your work and successfully encourages potential clients towards taking action. As your business grows - or your supposedly simple website project stretches from a weekend into several frustrating months - you may begin to wonder whether hiring a Squarespace web designer would be worth it.

The answer depends on your business, budget, requirements and how you want to spend your time. You may benefit most from a professionally designed template, some focused help improving an existing site or a completely custom website built around your goals. So, should you hire a Squarespace web designer? Here are seven signs that it might be time!

1. Your DIY website is taking much longer than expected and still doesn’t look right

Perhaps you opened a Squarespace account believing you could put together a website over the weekend. Three months later, you’re still changing fonts, moving sections around and trying to decide what belongs on your homepage. This is incredibly common and I hear this story from a large number of my custom Squarespace website and design day clients.

Squarespace and other DIY-friendlyplatforms make website building accessible, but they don’t remove all the decisions involved.

You still need to work out:

• Which pages does your website need?

• How should visitors move through the site?

• What information belongs on each page?

• How should you present your services?

• What calls to action should you use? Hey, what even is a call to action anyway?

• How can you make the design look professional and consistent?

• If you’ve had success with your desktop design, how can you translate this effectively to mobile?

• What else needs to be done behind the scenes in terms of technical work before launch?

Individually, none of these decisions may feel particularly enormous. Together, they can turn a supposedly simple project into an absolutely endless item on your to-do list…. like a trek to a destination that never seems to arrive and to be honest, you’re not even sure if what you’re doing – or where you are heading – is right anyway.

Ask yourself how many hours you have already spent switching layouts, adjusting spacing, testing colours, searching for tutorials and wondering whether the website looks ‘right’, then ask yourself what else you could have done with those hours. If your website has been nearly finished for months or you keep avoiding it because you don’t know what to do next, the time you recover by hiring a designer may be almost as valuable as the website itself.

2. Your website no longer reflects (or never reflected) the quality of your work

A basic DIY website may have been completely appropriate when your business was new but businesses evolve and grow (yay, well done you!), your skills improve, your services become more refined and your prices increase. Your website should evolve with you.

If you now provide a more premium service but your website still looks like something you hurriedly assembled during your first month in business, it can create a real disconnect. Potential clients may not realise how experienced, established or capable you are. Of course, this doesn’t mean every website needs to be elaborate or expensive but the design, content and overall experience should feel appropriate for the level at which your business now operates.

A professional designer can help translate the quality of your work into a visual experience. That might involve improving your layout, refining your typography, presenting your portfolio more effectively or creating a clearer journey from first impression to enquiry. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed to send someone to your website. It should reinforce the confidence you have in your work, not undermine it.

I often ask my potential clients during their website project consultation call, what they personally look for in a website when they browse Google trying to hire someone or find a service. They all describe similar experiences: Google search, open a few tabs from the first page or two, and then flip through them, narrowing down the search and closing tabs fairly quickly until they find 1-3 websites they consider in more detail. But, what makes a website make it to the shortlist rather than getting closed quickly … first impressions of professionalism. You could be the absolute best at the service you offer, you could have a unique process, awesome pricing, a fantastic sales pitch!… but if no one stays on your site long enough, they’ll never see it. Presenting as a business that is professional, organised and successful enough to have a pleasing, usable and useful website can take you halfway from potential to booked client before they’ve even read anything.

3. People visit your website but don’t take the next step

Despite what I said above, a website’s job is not simply to look attractive.

It should help the right people understand:

1. Who you are

2. What you do

3. Who you do it for

4. Lastly, why you are the right person to pick or what makes you different

If visitors are reaching your website but rarely enquiring, booking, buying or joining your mailing list, the problem may not be your business. It may be the way the website communicates it.

Common issues include:

• An unclear headline on the homepage to communicate the who you are and what you do as soon as someone lands on your website.

• Too many competing calls to action, so visitors don’t know what to do or look at next.

• Services that are difficult to understand… remember they are coming in with zero knowledge of your business, make it simple for them to figure out what they want.

• Important information buried within large blocks of copy… a balance of detailed and skimmable content gets the best results.

• Navigation that makes visitors work too hard to find what they are looking for. Less is often more. When you truly need more, a custom mega menu might be in order.

• A portfolio that isn’t showcasing your work effectively.

A designer shouldn’t simply ask which colours you like and then make everything look prettier. She should consider how a potential client experiences the website and what might prevent that person from taking action. Good website design guides visitors: it places the right information in the right order and makes the next step feel natural.

4. You’re overwhelmed by your website’s structure and content

One of the hardest parts of building a website has very little to do with Squarespace itself: it’s deciding what the website needs to say.

You may know your business inside out but still struggle to organise that knowledge for someone discovering you for the first time. Should your packages appear on the homepage? Do you need a separate page for each service? How much should you say about your process? Should you publish your prices? What belongs on your About page? Where should testimonials appear? When you’re too close to your own business, every detail can feel equally important.

An experienced web designer can bring an outside perspective. He or she can help you identify what your ideal client needs to know, remove information that creates unnecessary distraction and organise the rest into a logical structure. Depending on the service you choose, your designer may not write your copy for you. However, she should be able to guide you through the content-planning process and explain what each page needs to accomplish. All of my custom Squarespace website clients receive, in addition to Zoom-based planning discussion with me, a Website Content Planning PDF, a 40-page document filled with information and advice to help you plan and collate your website content. There are even specific guides for each of the main page types: Home, About, Services, Testimonials, Portfolio, to help spark ideas of what to include when you’re facing a blank page.

This is often one of the most valuable parts of working with a professional. You aren’t just paying someone to operate Squarespace. You’re paying for clarity, direction and the experience of someone who has solved similar problems many, many times before.

5. You need more than a basic website

Squarespace includes an impressive range of features, but knowing that a feature exists and knowing how best to use it are two different things. Many designers can also use custom code to break free from the limitations Squarespace sets on a regular user and achieve a higher level of functionality and a more refined or customised design.

You might need to:

Display several services without confusing visitors.
When you offer multiple services, packages or ways to work together, simply listing everything on one page can leave potential clients unsure where to begin and having a separate page for each service can mean that your visitors can’t find the information they are looking for, or each page doesn’t have enough content to rank adequately for SEO. A designer can help you organise your offers, clarify the differences between them and create natural pathways for different types of visitors depending on your specific situation. I hold in-depth consultations and planning calls with each of my custom Squarespace website clients, one of my primary goals going into these calls is to discuss their website’s structure and to ensure their services and offerings are being presented in the best way.

Sell digital or physical products.
You’ll need to consider categories, product variants, delivery or digital fulfilment, payment settings, policies and the journey from browsing to checkout. A designer can help you create a shop that feels consistent with the rest of your brand and is straightforward to use. They can also recommend whether to use the built-in Squarespace eCommerce tools or in some cases connect with a third-party like Shopify, just as I did for this sunscreen brand.

Organise an expansive portfolio.
A large body of work can become overwhelming if every project is presented on a single page. Using custom-coded filters, your work can be organised to help visitors quickly find the examples most relevant to them without hiding the breadth of your experience.

Create a blog or resource library.
Your designer should be able to advise on how you can use a blog to improve your SEO and if you feel your business doesn’t lend itself to your idea of blogging, you might be surprised how the concept can be adapted: latest news, industry articles, a journal, announcements, case studies, profiles and more. If this content will play an important role in your marketing, your blog needs to be easy to explore, not merely a chronological collection of posts. Categories, featured articles, related content and clear calls to action can turn it into a useful resource that supports both your visitors and your wider SEO strategy.

Add scheduling or booking functionality.
Online booking can save considerable admin, but only when the process is set up around the way you actually work. Your designer should be able to advise you on the best platforms to use and whether there are ways you can streamline your process.

Build landing pages for particular offers.
A landing page has a more focused purpose than a general service page. Whether you’re launching a course, promoting an event or advertising a particular package, the page should remove unnecessary distractions and guide visitors towards one clear sales pitch. These are usually longer, more detailed and more focused on reinforcing a single message than regular pages on your website. It can help to work with a designer to make these as effective as possible – they are often the only page on your website that the potential customer sees. They can, in my opinion, lean a little sleazy and give snake-oil vibes if you overdo them. It’s a careful balance…

Incorporate third-party forms or integrations.
You may need your website to connect with an email-marketing platform, customer-management system, payment provider, course platform or a more advanced form tool. A designer can help recommend and integrate these services neatly and make the experience feel like a cohesive part of your website rather than a collection of disconnected tools. Explore all the service you can connect to help manage your business… Mindbody, Momence, SimplePractice, FundraiseUp, Shopify, Weglot and more.

Use custom code to achieve a specific design or function.
Squarespace’s built-in editor offers plenty of flexibility, but it cannot achieve every possible design or interaction. Custom CSS or JavaScipt code can extend what the platform can do while maintaining a website that remains manageable and reliable. With every project I work on, from template-based builds to fully custom websites, I code everything to be as easy and reliable as possible for the client to take over once I am done. It’s incredible what a little custom coding can do to take your site’s functionality and design from good enough to “wow!!”

Migrate an established website without losing important links.
Moving an existing website involves more than copying the text onto new pages. Old URLs may already appear in search results, blog posts or links from other websites. Planning the new structure and setting up 301 redirects correctly helps visitors reach the right pages and protects the authority your website has already built. A Squarespace specialist can tell you what is possible, what is practical and when a simpler solution would serve you better. I take care of all the behind-the-scenes tasks that my clients wouldn’t know need to be done if they were building their own website. A fully custom Squarespace website build means you know that the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed.

A good designer should also be honest about the platform’s limitations. Squarespace is an excellent choice for many service providers, creative businesses and small online shops, but no platform is right for every conceivable project.

6. Mobile design, accessibility and SEO keep getting overlooked

It is very easy to concentrate on what your homepage looks like on your own laptop and forget everything happening behind the scenes. Your website also needs to work across different screen sizes, load efficiently, use a logical heading structure to get picked up by search engines and make content reasonably easy for real people, search engines and AI to understand.

That can involve details such as:

• Clear page titles and descriptions.

• Descriptive URL slugs.

• Properly sized and named images.

• Readable font sizes.

• Sufficient colour contrast.

• Meaningful link text.

• Logical heading levels.

• Helpful alternative text for relevant images.

• Redirects when old URLs change.

• Straightforward navigation structure.

• Carefully considered mobile layouts.

Hiring a designer does not guarantee that your website will immediately appear at the top of Google. Be cautious of anyone who promises that. However, an experienced designer can give your website solid foundations and help you avoid common mistakes that could make it more difficult for visitors or search engines to use.

7. Your time is more valuable elsewhere

As small-business owners, it can be tempting to believe we should be capable of doing everything ourselves. We manage the client work, marketing, admin, social media, accounts, photography, branding and anything else that happens to appear on Tuesday morning, but being capable of doing something doesn’t automatically mean it deserves your time.

Your clients aren’t hiring you because you can adjust website padding or spend two hours finding the correct CSS selector. They’re hiring you for the skill at the centre of your business.

Think about what you could be doing instead of building your website. Could you be serving clients? Creating a new offer? Following up on enquiries? Producing valuable content? Or simply finishing work at a reasonable hour? Picking the kids up from school? Spending more evenings with your spouse or friends?

When I started my own business, I knew I would need photography of myself and my work environment. I also knew that photography was not my area of expertise. Hiring a professional photographer allowed me to concentrate on what I did well while trusting someone else to produce a much better result than I could have created alone and hiring a web designer works in much the same way.

I started outsourcing in my business right from the start and it was a game changer for both my cash flow and my mindset. I am lucky enough to know myself really well and to know my strengths and be proud of them and able to utilise them to my advantage. When it came to taking the first steps in my business, I was confident I could build my own website (obviously), create content guides, do some basic graphic design and branding, take care of my own admin and do my own accounts. As a web design pro, I knew that visual content was going to need to be a big part of my brand identity but I also knew that I am in no way gifted with a camera, nor am I a natural in front of one. Within a couple of weeks of saying a stonking big YES to starting my own business, I had found and booked a session with a photographer to take care of this part of my business journey for me. And I can tell you, it was worth every single penny even though I had to borrow the money to pay for it.  

As new or growing business owners, it can be so tempting to feel we have to take care of all the things and do it standing on one leg while spinning plates too. Our pesky egos trip us up and convince us that if we want to build an online business we have to do it all by ourselves. Ask yourself though, does my ideal client need or want me to be good at web design? Probably not. Does my ideal client need or want me to have a solid, well designed, attractive and informative online presence? Yes. Certainly. Do they care if I built it myself? Um, no! Unless you’re a web designer, like me that is!. Of course, I built my own site. It is my biggest portfolio piece and my clients want to see a website with gorgeous images, but do my clients need me to be an insta-worthy photographer? Nope. 

I want my potential new yoga teacher to know her stuff when it comes to yoga and I want to be able to find out class times, location info and a bit of her personality on her website while having an easy and memorable user experience. Do I care if she built that site herself? NO. I want my yoga teacher to be sat zenned to the 100th degree while someone like me puts together that site for her so she can focus on what she does best… untangling me and calling an ambulance, probably. 

Outsourcing isn’t an admission that you aren’t clever or capable enough to build a website. It’s a decision to spend more of your time doing the work only you can do. Outsourcing is a huge reason to pass your web design and build over to a professional. It takes a huge job off your plate when you likely have 101 other business tasks to put your mind to instead and you can relax knowing that an expert is taking care of it for you. Outsourcing is really just a way of saying yes to doing more of what you’re good at. These days, I have outsourced photography, my branding, some bits and pieces of social media and the occasional bit of coding when I have too much on my plate. Build your team and say yes to doing more of what makes you an expert.

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What does a Squarespace web designer actually do?

As mentioned above, there is an absolute trove of tutorials, blog posts, YouTube videos and courses out there to teach you how to use Squarespace effectively. But nothing compares to a professional who works with the platform day in, day out when it comes to knowing what is possible for your website. What’s the best template? How can I display my products in categories? Is there a way to do X, Y and Z? Any and all of your questions should be able to be answered easily by an experienced and competent Squarespace designer. At the very least, they should be able to get back to you in a day or two if they need to research something a little out there or propose a suitable alternative.

The extra resources available to Squarespace Circle members and Squarespace Partners can also help you achieve a better web presence than you could build on your own. Professional designers share advice and knowledge amongst themselves and have access to Squarespace Support & HQ in a way the average user doesn’t – with a professional designer, you’ve got an inside man!

Squarespace aside, web design isn’t as easy as it looks. Every heard that teachers claim many parents think they know everything about the classroom just because they went to school? I don’t know about you, but just because you live in a house doesn’t mean you should build one. Just because you drive a car, you likely wouldn’t trust yourself to repair it. And just because you use the internet, it doesn’t mean you can necessarily build a perfect website.

Hiring a professional will ensure that web-design best practices are followed. That includes SEO, 301 redirects, footer links, optimised URL slugs. It might sound like Greek to some, but these are the bread and butter of a web designer who knows their stuff and it will pay off when it comes to your website, without you having to lift a finger.

The exact process will vary between designers, but a professional Squarespace website project may include:

• Discussing your business, goals and ideal clients.

• Planning the pages and navigation.

• Helping you organise your content.

• Establishing the visual direction.

• Designing layouts for your key pages.

• Building the website in Squarespace.

• Styling forms, buttons, blogs and other elements.

• Adapting the design for mobile devices.

• Setting up basic SEO information.

• Connecting your domain and relevant third-party tools.

• Testing the website before launch.

• Showing you how to update it yourself.

This is why comparing web designers solely by the number of pages they provide can be misleading.

Two designers might both promise a five-page Squarespace website while offering very different levels of research, strategy, customisation and support.

You aren’t only paying for the hours spent dragging blocks into place. You’re also paying for all the previous years of experience that allow the designer to make better decisions and to make them far more quickly.

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Is hiring a Squarespace Web Designer worth the cost?

Hiring a Squarespace designer isn’t necessarily the right investment for every business. If you’re just starting out, need only a simple online presence and have more time than money, building your own website with a professional template may make more sense. The investment becomes easier to justify when your website is actively holding your business back or when creating it yourself would take time away from paid client work. Consider how many hours you would realistically spend planning pages, learning Squarespace, adjusting the design and troubleshooting problems. What are those hours worth within your business, and how much longer might the project remain unfinished? It’s also worth considering what the website could do for your business and how long it will take to pay for itself. How many clients does the website need to bring in or to convert to cover its own costs?

How to choose the right Squarespace Web Designer

Squarespace designers vary considerably in their style, experience, process and level of support. An attractive portfolio is important, but it shouldn’t be the only factor you consider. Look closely at whether their websites are visually appealing, though not necessarily in your desired style. Have they created websites for businesses with needs and functionality similar to yours? Do their projects feel individually designed, or does every client’s website look almost identical? Have they worked with a wide range of businesses? This shows they are more than a one-trick pony and can give an individual business the design that is right for them.

Before committing, ask what the service includes, what you will need to provide and how much guidance you’ll receive. Check whether mobile optimisation, basic SEO setup, domain connection, testing and post-launch training are included. You should also understand is anything will cost extra. Pay attention to the designer’s style and level of communication too. A good designer should explain the process clearly, ask thoughtful questions about your business from the outset and help you understand the reasoning behind their recommendations. Be cautious of vague proposals, unclear deliverables and guaranteed Google rankings. Ultimately, choose someone whose work you admire, whose process suits the support you need and whom you feel comfortable trusting with your business.

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So, should you hire a Squarespace Web Designer?

If you have the time, confidence and desire to build your own website then Squarespace gives you the tools to do it. If you’re a little nervous, a professionally designed Squarespace template can make the process much easier and help you avoid starting with an intimidating blank page. However, if your website has become a source of frustration, no longer represents your work or remains permanently stuck on your to-do list, hiring a Squarespace web designer may be one of the most useful things you can outsource.

Get in touch and tell me a little about your business, your current website and what you’re hoping to achieve. I’ll help you identify the most suitable next step, even if that means recommending that you start with a template and save the custom website for later. The best choice isn’t the most expensive one; it’s the one that aligns with your goals, needs, business trajectory and budget. If you’re fairly certain you need some professional help but aren’t sure the right path for you, feel free to book a consultation call and we can chat a little about your project.

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