Squarespace Courses Review 2024: Is It Any Good?

Squarespace is a popular website builder that also provides features for creating and selling online courses.

But is Squarespace Courses the right choice for you? What features does it offer, and how do they compare to other course platforms?

To answer these questions, we’ve created an in-depth Squarespace Courses review. Here, we’ll cover all the platform’s features and discuss their pros and cons.

Let’s get started.

What Is Squarespace Courses?

Squarespace Courses is a feature within Squarespace that allows you to create and sell online courses.

It features a drag-and-drop builder for creating your curriculum and adding content like video lessons. Plus, it has built-in payment processing, so you can quickly monetize your courses.

While this option is a good addition to Squarespace’s suite of tools, it’s pretty basic compared to other online course platforms.

It doesn’t offer any learning and engagement tools such as quizzes and content dripping, nor does it provide any features for facilitating course discussions.

With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at what Squarespace Courses offers.

A Closer Look at Squarespace Courses

In this section, we’ll explore Squarespace’s course creation features in detail. Let’s begin with the course builder.

Course Builder

Squarespace’s course builder has a gentle learning curve, and it’s easy to get the hang of after some playing around. It works the same as the website builder, so it should be familiar to existing Squarespace users.

When you create a course, Squarespace automatically generates an overview page. You can then create a structure and add your course content.

Squarespace lets you add chapters and lessons to your course. While lessons are where you add the actual content, chapters act more like folders that group them together.

Plus, the drag-and-drop feature helps you quickly build Squarespace websites by moving your chapters and lessons around.

Regarding content, you can add text, videos, PDFs, and other downloadable resources. Squarespace even handles video hosting, so you don’t have to worry about finding a separate video host.

Now, the process of adding content to your lessons is quite different from traditional course builders. While you can attach a video under the lesson settings, you need to go into the edit mode to add text and other resources.

The editor feels more like a page builder. So, while you get more flexibility in designing the lesson pages, it can be cumbersome to create them.

One big drawback is that Squarespace’s course builder doesn’t have a bulk uploader, so you have to create lessons individually.

Learning and Engagement

Squarespace completely misses out in this regard. Apart from students being able to track their progress, it doesn’t have any learning and engagement features.

• It doesn’t support native quizzes or assignments.
• You can’t drip content or set prerequisites for the course. You can, however, release lessons on specific dates.
• It doesn’t support a community builder or lesson comments.
• You can’t create and send certificates of completion.
• You can’t track student progress as a creator.

Overall, there’s no real engagement between the instructor and the students; you can’t create an interactive learning experience using Squarespace Courses.

Content Delivery

Another essential aspect of a course platform is the learning experience and how your content appears to students.

While Squarespace’s lesson pages look elegant, the course player isn’t well designed for the student experience. The content area takes up the whole screen width and has no visible sidebar navigation.

Students must click on the small menu icon to open the sidebar navigation, which isn’t intuitive.

The course player also doesn’t have a search bar. Usually, this can help students find lessons more quickly, especially in courses with a lot of content.

Regarding the mobile experience, the course player works well on mobile screens. However, there’s no mobile app for students, so they need to access the course from a mobile browser.

Overall, Squarespace’s course creation tools are rudimentary, and the lack of any learning and engagement tools is the most significant downside.

Pricing Plans

Squarespace Courses is included in all Squarespace plans, starting at $25 per month. However, it includes just 30 mins of video storage and charges a 9% transaction fee.

You need to buy the Digital Products Add-on to get additional storage and lower the transaction fee. There are three plans available:

• Starter plan (+$12/mo + 7% fee) – 10 hours of video storage
• Core plan (+$37/mo + 3% fee) – 50 hours of video storage
• Professional plan (+$111/mo + 0% fee) – Unlimited video storage

So, you can effectively start at $37/month + a 7% fee, while it can go up to $136/month.

When you compare the pricing to standalone course platforms, Squarespace is on the more expensive end.

However, if you already have a Squarespace website and want to add courses, it can be an affordable option for entry-level users.

What We Like About Squarespace Courses

Now that we’ve explored Squarespace Courses up close, we’ll review the areas where Squarespace does well when it comes to creating and selling online courses.

Flexible Lesson Editor

Squarespace’s lesson editor is quite flexible, allowing you to add content to your lessons and design them in any way you like.

The lesson editor uses Squarespace’s page builder so that you can add content blocks with text, images, videos, and other media elements. You can also add pre-designed sections to your page, making it easy to build lessons quickly.

Moreover, you can easily customize the design and layout of your lesson pages, providing you with a great deal of creative freedom.

Membership Site Features

Squarespace also lets you create membership sites around your online courses.

Its Member Areas feature enables you to bundle your courses and other content into a private members-only website; you can then charge a subscription fee to give users exclusive access.

Squarespace lets you charge weekly, monthly, or yearly for subscriptions, and it has built-in subscription management tools.

Powerful Website Builder

One of Squarespace’s biggest strengths is its powerful website builder which is among the top ones for the course and coaching industry. With it, creating a beautiful and professional-looking website from scratch is very easy.

The platform has an impressive library with dozens of page templates. Add to that the page builder with complete control over the design, and you have an excellent foundation for creating your brand website and course sales pages.

Access to Squarespace’s Suite of Tools

When you host your courses on Squarespace, you also unlock access to a suite of other tools and features. These include:

• Blogging and Podcast: The platform makes adding a blog or podcast to your Squarespace site easy, allowing you to offer free content to grow your audience.
• Acuity Scheduling: You can use Squarespace’s scheduling tool to easily manage classes, appointments, and other events.
• eCommerce: You can create a full-fledged online store to sell physical products.
• Email Marketing: Squarespace has native tools for collecting leads and sending email newsletters.

Having multiple tools in one place makes it easier to manage your course business.

Affordable Entry-Level Pricing

As discussed, the Digital Products Add-on costs an additional $12 per month (+7% fee) for the Starter plan.

The $12/month price is a great deal compared to other standalone course platforms that typically charge between $30-$50/month for their entry-level plans.

So, it’s an affordable entry-level pricing option for users who want to add courses to their existing Squarespace website.

What We Don’t Like About Squarespace Courses

Unfortunately, Squarespace Courses has many drawbacks, making it a less-than-ideal choice for many course creators. Let’s take a look at some of them.

The Course Builder Isn’t Intuitive

Squarespace Courses is quite different from specialized course builders, as it uses Squarespace’s page builder as its foundation.

As a result, creating lessons isn’t intuitive, and it can take some time for new users to get used to the tool.

For example, to add a downloadable resource to a lesson, you must first add a button block in the frontend editor and then upload the file under button settings, which isn’t obvious.

However, it would be ideal to simply upload the file in the backend and have the platform automatically add a download link to the lesson page.

No Learning and Engagement Tools

The biggest drawback of Squarespace Courses is its lack of features for learning and engagement.

For instance, you can’t add interactive elements to your courses, such as quizzes, live lessons, or discussion areas. Even the most basic course creation features, such as content dripping and prerequisite lessons, aren’t available in Squarespace Courses.

As a result, Squarespace can work only for very basic courses with little interaction or engagement.

Limit on Video Hosting

Unlike specialized course platforms, Squarespace doesn’t offer unlimited video hosting on all plans.

The entry-level plan ($12/month) includes only ten hours of video storage, while the Core plan ($37/month) comes with 50 hours.

Only the Professional plan ($111/month) offers unlimited video hosting. In this case, you’ll be paying $136/month, which is quite high for what you get.

No Course Reporting Tools

While Squarespace has built-in analytics for page views and sales, it doesn’t include any reporting features for tracking your course stats.

This means you won’t be able to generate detailed reports for understanding course progress, completion, or video engagement.

Even the most basic course reporting feature—tracking which lessons and chapters students have completed—is missing.

The Checkout Process Isn’t Optimized

Squarespace’s checkout process for selling digital products isn’t optimized for conversions.

When a visitor purchases a course, they first need to create an account on your Squarespace website before finally being able to make the payment.

This creates unnecessary friction, leading to lower conversions. It would make more sense to move the account creation step after the payment has been finalized.

Additionally, Squarespace’s checkout process doesn’t offer order bumps and 1-click upsells, which are vital sales-boosting features.

Squarespace Courses vs the Competition

Now that we have explored the pros and cons of Squarespace Courses, let’s compare it to some of the leading online course platforms.

Thinkific, our #1 choice in online course platforms, offers a range of features for learning and engagement, including quizzes, live lessons, certificates, a community builder, content dripping, and prerequisite lessons. It also has a better course player design and offers free mobile apps for end users.

Add a free plan with no transaction fees, and you have a clear winner in Thinkific. In fact, many Squarespace creators use Thinkific to host their courses and memberships.

The next competitor is Kajabi, which also has interactive course elements like quizzes, live lessons, and online communities.

However, what sets Kajabi apart are its all-in-one capabilities. You can create sales funnels, set up email automations, run webinars, host a blog, and manage your affiliate program.

While Kajabi is more expensive than Squarespace, it’s an excellent all-in-one option for course creators.

If you would like to compare Squarespace to other course platforms side-by-side, try out our interactive comparison tool.

Squarespace Courses Review: Final Thoughts

We evaluated all aspects of Squarespace Courses, and based on that, it’s a straightforward solution for creating and selling online courses. However, it lacks many essential course creation tools.

So, we recommend it only to existing Squarespace users looking to sell simple video courses or include them in their membership sites.

If you want to try it, click the button below to start a 14-day free trial.

However, Squarespace isn’t suitable for courses that require interaction or engagement. In this case, we recommend checking out other platforms, such as Thinkific or Kajabi.

We hope you found this Squarespace Courses review helpful! If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below.

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