The time of COVID-19 has given a lot of us time to catch up on our to-do lists. For me, one of those things was to move my portfolio website from Squarespace to WordPress.
I have nothing against Squarespace as a company. They offer an excellent service at a decent cost. For $16.72 a month (cheaper with an annual plan), you get a beautiful website that you can set and forget. There’s no learning curve to Squarespace, and no dealing with technical backend stuff. It’s pretty much the best option for those who don’t want to spend a lot of time making tweaks to their website to get it to look right.
One of my problems with Squarespace is the lack of customization with their website builder. The blog layouts on my favorite themes were never user-friendly, and there is nothing that you can do about it besides picking another theme or injecting custom CSS code. The thought of switching had crossed my mind before, but Squarespace makes it so easy to make a good-looking website.
The thing is that, with some time and patience, you can have a great-looking website with WordPress too. And it’s all yours.
I have been using the self-hosted WordPress for over a decade now and am very familiar with it. For $10.95 a month (even less with an annual plan), I can get an Unlimited shared hosting plan with Dreamhost. One of their features is a one-click WordPress install so that you can have a working site up in no time.
One of my favorite features with Dreamhost is its integration with Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) that protects your website from cyber-attacks, speeds up page load times, and provides end-to-end encryption for people visiting your site. Best of all, you can get all of this on their free plan. Cloudflare is peace of mind for your self-hosted website on the internet.
Trading convenience for time
The one thing that will cost me in this move is logging into my site frequently to do updates. I don’t see this as a huge problem since I can check out website analytics and make more frequent content updates at the same time. Also, I enjoy doing stuff like this. And I certainly have the time to do this while the world is in quarantine. Although this move will cost me time, the flexibility that comes with WordPress, and the feeling of having full control of my website, more than make up for it.
This move was a long time coming for me, and I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. It’s already so much easier to manage and more comfortable for visitors to navigate. If you’re considering doing what I did, WPBeginner has a tutorial on migrating your Squarespace website to WordPress. If you want to check out Dreamhost’s Unlimited shared hosting plan and get $50 off, click here.
Thanks for reading.