Paid for a Website, Left With a Broken Experience
I gave Squarespace 2 stars because this experience was extremely frustrating, especially after paying $348 for an annual subscription. I initially believed I was building my paid website, only to later discover that I had been working on a trial site and that my paid site was a separate site. The support representative explained that my design work could not simply be transferred to the paid site, which meant I would have to start over. To make matters worse, when I tried to work on the paid site, the editor was completely blank and repeatedly displayed system errors. The second representative was able to reproduce the problem and confirmed that there were related bugs, so the issue was escalated to Product Support. However, I was not given a timeframe for resolution, even after explaining that we had a book signing event coming up that weekend and needed the website live. The biggest issue was the lack of clarity throughout the process. I was given conflicting or confusing information about which site I had paid for, what could be transferred, and what would need to be refunded. I understand that technical problems happen, but customers who are paying for an annual service should not have to spend hours trying to determine which website they actually paid for or potentially lose hours of design work because of how the platform handles trial and paid sites. Squarespace needs to make the process of purchasing a plan and connecting that plan to the correct website much clearer. There should also be a better way to transfer a website/design from a trial site to a paid site without forcing customers to start over. Most importantly, when a confirmed bug prevents a customer from editing a paid website, there should be clearer communication and escalation with meaningful updates on the status of the issue.