Why I Recommend Squarespace for Wellness Practitioners
After talking about website designer red flags in the last episode, the natural next question is: what should you be looking for instead? In this episode of Elevate Your Practice, I’m sharing why why Squarespace is the website platform I most often recommend for holistic health practitioners and local service-based businesses. I’m breaking down the real reasons Squarespace works well for most service providers: control over your content, built-in SEO tools, strong mobile design, accessibility features, and lower long-term maintenance. You’ll also hear when Squarespace isn’t the right fit, what features actually matter when choosing a platform, and how to think about your website as a support system for your practice, not another thing to manage.
Key Takeaways
Your website platform should give you ownership and control, not lock you out.
Squarespace works well for most service-based practices because it grows with your business.
SEO on Squarespace is effective when you can control titles, descriptions, URLs, and redirects.
Mobile design matters, and Squarespace makes it easier to manage without custom code.
Built-in accessibility features support inclusivity, trust, and professionalism.
A lower-maintenance platform frees up energy for client care instead of tech troubleshooting.
Resources
Transcript
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: I am Samantha Mabe, website designer and founder of Lemon and the Sea, and this is Elevate your practice. If you're a holistic health practitioner ready to grow your practice without wasting time on things that don't work, you're in the right place. Each week I share a website, SEO, and marketing advice along with guest experts so you can bring in the right clients and feel confident about how you are showing up and serving the people that you help. Let's get started.
Why Squarespace Is My Most Recommended Website Platform for Health and Wellness Businesses
[00:00:39] In the last episode, we talked about some of the biggest red flags to watch out for when hiring a website designer, especially situations where you end up feeling locked in, overcharged, or totally dependent on someone else just to keep your website running. And after that conversation, there's usually a follow up question that comes up pretty quickly, which is, okay, what should I be looking for instead? And that's what I want to dig into today specifically why Squarespace is the platform I recommend most often for holistic health practitioners and local service-based businesses who are either building a new website or thinking about moving away from their current website designer and platform.
[00:01:23] Now, not all of my clients use Squarespace, and it's not the right fit for every situation, but when it comes to ownership, ease of use, and having a website that can grow with your practice instead of holding you back, it's usually my top recommendation. I'm gonna walk you through why that is in plain English, with no techie jargon, and help you decide whether Squarespace might be the right next step for your business.
1. You’re in Control and Own Your Website
[00:01:49] The first thing I love about Squarespace is that it puts you back in control. You own your website. You have your own login, you control your content, and you are not dependent on a middleman. In fact, when I design a new website, even if I have started the Squarespace site, I always hand ownership of that over to my clients once we're done with their initial project.
[00:02:16] This matters when you are choosing a website platform and a designer because your offerings are going to change, your schedule is going to change, your language and your messaging are going to change, and you shouldn't need permission from somebody in order to make edits to your website in order to make your website reflect the growth your practice is going through. This is the exact opposite of the held hostage situation that we talked about in last week's episode.
2. It’s a Website Platform That Can Grow With Your Practice
[00:02:52] The second reason I really love Squarespace is because it can grow with your practice. This doesn't mean you have to use all of the features. It just means that you are not outgrowing your platform so quickly that the investment you made isn't worth it. Squarespace has built in options for blogging, email marketing, digital products, memberships, and courses. And it lets you integrate scheduling software and other pieces that you might need on your website.
[00:03:32] Not everyone needs all of those things, and in fact, sometimes I recommend using something else for email marketing, scheduling, et cetera, but it's reassuring to know that if you do need those pieces, you don't have to migrate your website again in a year because it's not an option. You don't have to build the future version of your business right now, but your website platform should be able to handle that when you are ready for it to grow.
3. There are Built-In SEO Features to Get More Traffic
[00:04:07] The third thing I love about Squarespace is that you can do SEO without a huge spiral. I still hear that people have been told that WordPress is the best platform for SEO, and that if you are on anything else, your SEO efforts are going to suffer. And this just isn't true. It might've been true 15 years ago, but in 2026, if your website platform allows you to have control over all of the SEO pieces on your site, it is going to do just as good a job as anything else.
SEO Elements You Should Be Able to Edit on Any Website Platform
[00:04:49] So what does being able to update your SEO actually mean for you as a business owner who is not interested in all of the backend techie stuff? There are a couple of pieces that you want to make sure you are to edit on your website.
[00:05:11] The first is going to be your page and site title. This is what shows up on Google when you search for your business and you pop up in the search results. It's that blue text that tells you the name of the business or whatever that title is.
[00:05:34] Your meta descriptions, again for your site as a whole and for each page of your site, are the reason someone's going to click. When you go to that Google search, is the couple of lines of text under the title that gives more detail about what your page is about. I will note that no matter what platform you are on and how many times you type those things in, sometimes Google will just write its own and there's nothing we can do about it, but we still want to be able to control as much of that as possible.
[00:06:13] Another thing you want to be able to have control over for SEO is your URLs, which is how your pages are organized. So you type in the uRL of your business and then you say slash home, slash about, slash services. You want to be able to control what comes after that slash and is the address of the page somebody is going to, because that can also include keywords and help with SEO.
Why Redirects Are Essential for SEO and User Experience
[00:06:48] The last big thing you want to have control over when you think about SEO is URL redirects. This is how you avoid breaking links if you rename a page or you remove a page, something is out of date. What you are doing is you are telling your browser: if somebody type in lemonandthesea.com/services and that page no longer exists, I want you to instead send them to lemonandthesea.com/website-design. These redirects are absolutely key to a good SEO strategy and a good user experience because it means that when somebody goes to an old page of your website, they don't end up on that 404 page where it says, 'we can't find this content.' They're actually sent to the updated link so that they can still get the information that they need.
[00:07:53] And all of those pieces- the page titles, the meta descriptions, the URL control, and the redirects are built into Squarespace without anything extra. That means there are no plugins to manage. Every page, every blog post, and every product has easy to find SEO fields that you are able to completely control and it has a couple other really important pieces, like a built in sitemap that is generated for you and your SSL or security certificate that tells your browser that your website is safe. There's nothing extra that you have to do in order to get access to any of those pieces.
[00:08:44] Being able to control these things doesn't mean your SEO is done. It just means that your website platform isn't working against you from the very start by not letting you have access to that information or forcing you to install, pay for, and maintain a plugin in order to control those things.
4. Mobile Design is Simple for Busy Practitioners
[00:09:07] Reason number four that I recommend Squarespace is their mobile design capability. This is where I find Squarespace easier to use than a lot of other platforms because for most businesses, especially local businesses, at least 60% of your website traffic is going to come through a mobile device. Which means that your mobile design is just as important as what your website looks like on a computer, if not more.
[00:09:43] What's nice about Squarespace is that it automatically adjusts your layouts and puts all of your content into a, it automatically tries to lay out your website for mobile, but you can still fine tune all of those things without impacting what you're seeing on a desktop version and without having to use custom code. This was actually a more recent update that they did when they moved to Fluid Engine a couple of years ago. Before if we wanted to reorder anything on the mobile layout of a site, we had to do it with CSS, which meant a designer had to go in there and type it all in, and it broke much easier.
[00:10:34] Now when you preview your website, you can switch from the desktop view to the mobile view, and reorder your blocks to look the way you want it to and that's not going to change things over on the desktop version, which makes things a whole lot easier. This means that you can make sure your buttons are at a good size for fingers to click, that you're not worried about having too much or not enough padding on the sides of your devices, and that you are in control of the order in which people are seeing things.
5. Website Accessibility Features Are Built Into Squarespace
[00:11:09] The number five reason I like Squarespace is because accessibility is built in, whether you realize it or not. This does not need to be intimidating for you, and accessibility isn't about being perfect. Your goal is to make sure your website is not excluding people unintentionally because of the design that you have.
[00:11:37] Squarespace has a lot of built-in accessibility features that either you never have to touch or that give you control where you need it. You can add alt text to almost every image on your site, and you should, which helps with accessibility and it gives you an SEO boost. It's also set up so that you can create a logical heading structure. Starting with heading one and then moving to headings 2, 3, and four throughout your content. It has built-in keyboard navigation and it's coded pretty cleanly for things like screen readers.
[00:12:24] This may not seem like it matters to you when you have been staring at your website trying to make little tweaks, but it really does have an impact. Accessibility shows that you value inclusivity, professionalism, and you are building trust with the people who come to your site. There are other platforms that have some of these features built in, but not all of them do, and that's not always easy to find out from an initial overview.
[00:13:04] And so the goal is to choose a platform that makes these things as easy as possible for you so that you don't have to continue to worry about whether your website is accessible or if your SEO is working. You wanna make sure that those things are set up from the foundation and can grow with you.
6. Updating and Editing Your Website is Easy (Even If You Aren’t Techy)
[00:13:26] Another reason I love Squarespace is that editing things doesn't have to be a battle. I have heard from quite a few people that they feel like Squarespace is not intuitive when they go into make changes, but I once you get the hang of it, it's actually much easier than a lot of platforms. Squarespace is different because it's a drag and drop platform that you can edit visually, but there are still guardrails in place that are going to make sure you can't go completely off the rails. It is also really easy to do the little changes that most of my clients are handling, like switching out an image, updating copy, adding new pricing, or even duplicating an existing page to create a new service where they're updating images and copy, but they're not having to recreate all of the pieces that we've already done.
[00:14:25] Plus I am able to give lots of support through custom tutorial videos, a tutorial library, and support after you launch because I have been working on this platform for so long that I have lots of resources for you.
7. There is Less Website Maintenance and Fewer Hidden Costs
[00:14:44] And the last reason that I love Squarespace and recommended it over other platforms is that it's a lot lower maintenance. There aren't the hidden costs and to-do list items that some other platforms have, especially WordPress. Squarespace doesn't use plugins for any of the pieces that you're adding on so that means you are not having to keep those plugins up to date or pay for them on a monthly or yearly basis. It also means that you're not having to worry about security concerns when one piece of your site is out of date compared to another, or that things are no longer compatible and they break.
[00:15:30] Squarespace has all of that built in and everything gets updated together. The updates happen automatically, all of the pieces are going to continue to work together, and you know how much things cost because they are consistent based on your hosting plan and any add-ons that you have selected for your website. That means you have fewer things to manage and you have more energy for your actual work instead of checking for alerts every time you log into your website.
Who Squarespace Isn’t the Right Fit For
[00:16:07] Of course, there are times when Squarespace isn't the right choice for a website platform. If you have a lot of courses in your business, or a membership with tiers and lots of different access points, or maybe you have a big e-commerce business, then Squarespace probably isn't going to be your best option. There are other platforms that do those pieces better, but for a mostly service based business, it can be a really good choice that is able to grow with you.
How to Choose a Website Platform That Supports Your Practice Long-Term
[00:16:48] No matter what platform you choose, you want one that supports your business and doesn't lock you out of making changes or keep you dependent on a designer to do anything on your site. The platform you host your website on matters, but how it's set up and the features that you have access to matter more.
[00:17:13] The most important things you can do when thinking about a website platform for your business is make sure that you have ownership of it and that it has the basic features that you need in order to design a website you love, show up in front of the right people, and then convert those people into clients.
[00:17:36] If you're wondering whether your website platform is working for your business or how you can get more conversions from people who actually land on it, I would love to take a look and give you some suggestions with a free website review at lemonandthesea.com/review.
[00:17:55] And remember, your website should support the work that you are doing, not create more work for you in your practice.
[00:18:03] Thanks for listening to Elevate your Practice. If you enjoyed today's episode, follow the show and leave a review. It helps more practitioners find these tips and start growing their practices with confidence. And don't forget to check out the show notes for links and resources from today's episodes. I'll be back next week with more strategies to help you build a thriving practice.
