Squarespace vs Coding Your Own Blog

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2021-07-04 16:00:10

TLDR: Services like Squarespace, Wix, and GoDaddy are great if you aren't interested in coding or if you want something like e-commerce but if you can code I recommend coding and hosting your own simple blogs. It was easier I thought.

Recently I decided to manually code and host this site instead of using Squarespace. I am super happy with how it went and my new setup so I wanted to give a quick rundown of my experiences and some of the pros and cons. Hopefully this may be helpful if you're deciding between coding and hosting something yourself or a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) solution like Squarespace, Wix, or GoDaddy.

Originally my personal site was an Angular app hosted on Github Pages. It was partially a personal site and partially a demo project to help me learn and to land my first job. Once I got said job the blog slowly became out of date and Angular 1 was as well so I wanted to make a change. I didn't have a ton of time anymore so I wanted something easy to update. I have to admit, my original site was pretty terrible. Everything was manually coded so updating it took a while. I wasn't aware of any tools for easily making static sites with content so I thought of maintaining my own site as harder than it actually was. I was also listening to a ton of podcasts and watching a lot of YouTube at the time, so I bet you can see where this is going... Squarespace.

Squarespace was great compared to my angular site. They handled a lot of stuff automatically that I was just learning was important but didn't know how to do myself like SEO, RSS, and some performance optimizations. My Squarespace site was easy to update, showed up on google, and was faster and prettier than before.

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