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Squarespace for Real Estate Website: Complete Review [2023 Update]

Squarespace for Real Estate Website: Complete Review [2023 Update]

Squarespace for Real Estate Website: Complete Review [2023 Update]

If you are looking for a clean, very efficient, simple, and SEO-friendly design for your real estate website, you should consider Squarespace. Though Squarespace is not a real estate-specific website builder, it offers many designs and templates. You will easily find one that is best suited for your needs and taste.

Squarespace is a good choice if you don’t have the technical expertise needed for developing and maintaining a website on open-source platforms such as WordPress. The platform is also a great choice if you don’t want to burn a hole in your pocket by paying a hefty amount of money to professional designers and developers regularly.

While I will discuss all the pros and cons of building a real estate website on Squarespace, let me explain in brief why it may be the best choice for individual real estate agents and small real estate businesses:

  • Pre-designed real estate-specific templates to choose from
  • You can integrate Squarespace with almost any CRM
  • If you are a US-based real estate agent, you can integrate IDX with Squarespace
  • It is very affordable. The plans start at just $12/month (annual plans). It includes website hosting.

Visit SquareSpace and check out plans

Let’s now review Squarespace in detail:

Squarespace plans & pricing (Why Squarespace’s Business plan is best suited for real estate agents)

The best advantage of using Squarespace is that it’s very cost-effective compared to other website builders.

View all SquareSpace plans

If you are buying an annual plan, you pay only $12/month for a basic website built with Squarespace’s Personal Plan.

squarespace plans and pricing

However, I would recommend that you should subscribe to at least the Business plan which will cost you about $18/month. The other two plans – Basic Commerce and Advanced Commerce – are for eCommerce businesses. If you want to sell coaching or any real estate-related products, you can pick either Basic Commerce or Advanced Commerce.

Though you can upgrade your plan any time, I would suggest you should start with at least Business plan because it gives you design flexibility and comes with many other design tools that can be very useful in building upon the templates that Squarespace provides.

For example, the Personal plan offers all the basic features including:

  • Free design templates,
  • Free domain for the first year,
  • Free SSL for security,
  • Unlimited bandwidth and storage (you can publish as much content as you want),
  • SEO guidance,
  • Responsive (mobile-friendly) designs, and
  • Integration with other CRMs and email marketing tools.

I am recommending the Business, Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced for the following reasons:

  • The Business plan allows you to customize your Squarespace template with custom CSS and JavaScript. You can add more blocks and other elements to any Squarespace template of your choice.
  • Pop-ups and banners promoting your services and lead magnets (such as downloadable eBooks and subscription to property listing alerts) are possible with Business, Basic Commerce, and Advanced Commerce Plans.
  • The Business and other two advanced plans provide you with all the traffic and other website analytics data to help you understand what’s working and what’s not working. You can focus on online marketing efforts that are yielding the best results, while stop wasting time on useless marketing. Using these matrices, you will know the number of people vising your site, which pages are generating the most amount of traffic, the geography of the visitors, and traffic sources.
  • You will have access to premium integrations and design blocks.

Who should use Squarespace?

You can confidently use Squarespace If you are a:

  • Real estate agent
  • Real estate broker
  • Title Inspector
  • Mortgage broker
  • Appraiser
  • Staging expert
  • Escrow company

Real estate-specific features by Squarespace

I already mentioned that Squarespace is not a real estate-specific website builder, but it doesn’t mean that the platform doesn’t provide tools and features which makes it one of the best choices as a website builder for real estate professionals including agents and brokers.

Here are some of the features that Squarespace provides:

SEO-friendly platform

Though it’s not a real estate-specific feature, it’s on top of the list because here at RealtyCrux, we are a big advocate of SEO. If your real estate website ranks higher in Google results, the lead generation will be on autopilot.

squarespace SEO

Not knowing how SEO works is the biggest challenge for the majority of real estate professionals. Squarespace takes care of optimizing your website for search engines to a great extent.

  • You can add meta title tags and description tags for website title as well as post and page titles.
  • You can easily create a sitemap and submit it to Google for indexing
  • The HTML mark-up is easy to add when you are publishing content. You can add H1, H2, P, and other tags easily. Writing a blog post? Read the following guide to learn how to make it SEO-friendly: Step-by-Step Guide to Writing SEO-friendly Real Estate Blog Posts.
  • You can integrate Google tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to keep a tab on various websites and SEO matrices.
  • You can easily add structured data to increase the possibility of your content featuring more prominently in featured snippets, and other search result features.
  • You can create 301 redirects to get rid of useless pages or broken links.
  • You get SSL for free. SSL is an important security feature that has become one of the ranking factors now. A site with SSL certificate loads with HTTPS protocol, instead of HTTP.
  • Squarespace websites are responsible (mobile-friendly). Mobile responsiveness is a big SEO ranking factor these days.

These are some of the SEO features that Squarespace offers.

Though Squarespace offers good SEO compatibility, you may still need some professional help. You want to SEO help your Squarespace website, get in touch with us today!

IDX integration

If you are a real estate agent or broker based in the U.S., you will want to leverage the IDX functionality. Squarespace can be integrated with major IDX providers such as IDXBroker, Ultimate IDX, Displet, and Diverse Solutions.

There are just two tiny steps involved in adding an MLS search and displaying listings on your website.

  • You need to add a code block (provided by Squarespace) where you want to display the MLS search or property listings.
  • Paste the code provided by your IDX providers in the code block.

And boom! MLS search and listings will be displayed on your Squarespace real estate website immediately. You can hire a professional if you are not sure how to use Squarespace code blocks. However, you can learn it with a few Google searches as it’s very easy to implement.

Design flexibility

This is one of the best Squarespace features. You will have access to 100+ free templates after subscribing to a Squarespace plan. With Business plan, you’ve complete freedom to customize your template any way you want. You can delete the pre-populated content blocks and rebuild your template from scratch.

It is a nice feature for not-so-tech-savvy real estate professionals because building a Squarespace real estate template doesn’t require much technical knowledge and expertise. If you have an idea of what your real estate website should look like and are comfortable with dragging and dropping different elements such as photo carousels, videos, and contact forms, you are good to go!

If you are busy chasing leads, you can hire virtual assistants to do the job for you. Squarespace design professionals at RealtyCrux can help you with designing your Squarespace website. Contact us by clicking here.

Real estate lead generation with Squarespace

What is the most important criterion when choosing a website builder? Well, the answer is quite evident. The website builder should help you capture real estate leads. Squarespace is a great platform as far as lead generation is concerned.

Here is how:

  • Lead capture forms are one of the must-have elements for online real estate lead generation. With Squarespace, you don’t need to subscribe to any third-party service to display lead capture forms (which is the case with WordPress and some other website builders). You can display beautifully designed lead capture forms on any page of your Squarespace real estate website with just a few clicks.
  • You can leverage the power of pop-ups and sticky announcement bars.
  • Designing landing pages for your lead magnets (such as downloadable home buying or real estate investing guides, listing alerts, free home value estimation, etc.) can be very time-consuming. However, you can design beautiful landing pages within minutes on the Squarespace platform.
  • You can integrate these lead capture forms and pop-ups with email marketing services including Mailchimp.
  • You don’t get CRM included in your subscription but can easily integrate a third-party CRM such as Zapier with your Squarespace real estate website. For most real estate agents who receive less than three leads a day, Mailchimp – a free email marketing service up to 2000 leads – is good enough.

real estate lead generation with squarespace

Squarespace support

Squarespace support is available via live chat (4:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday) and email. You can easily find help with technical issues on the Squarespace help forum. Instructions on these forums are easy-to-understand and easy-to-follow.

Hosting

Unlike WordPress.org which is a self-hosted platform, you don’t need to purchase hosting separately for your Squarespace website. For a WordPress website, the cost for a good hosting service begins at $3.95/month and can go up to $25/month. Hosting is included in all Squarespace plans.

A few considerations

Depending on which IDX provider you are using, there may be certain technical complications regarding the mobile-responsiveness of your website. Most IDX providers use ‘iframe’ to display listings, so they may not fit the screen when you use the code on your Squarespace real estate website. There are a few ways to resolve this issue, but you may not able to do it on your own.

Another consideration is that integrating a CRM of your choice may be a bit challenging. Squarespace supports a few CRMs including Zapier, Hubspot, Salesmate, and Salesforce, so you may need professional help when it comes to integrating 3rd party CRMs.

How to find the best Squarespace real estate template?

There are not many real estate specific-templates on Squarespace; however, some templates built for other industries such as consultation, small business, or services work well with real estate-related services (offered by agents, brokers, investors, staging experts, title agents, mortgage brokers, real estate lawyers, etc.).

You can easily filter templates on Squarespace. For that, click on the Templates tab in the header and then use the filter to find the best Squarespace template for your real estate website (as shown in the screenshot below).

You can go directly to SquareSpace real estate templates by click here: Real Estate SquareSpace Templates

best squarespace templates for real estate

Some examples of Squarespace real estate websites

Sell with Conard: A Toronto -based real estate sales representative

Laura Lee Sold: A Twin Cities-based real estate agent

Need help with your real estate website built on Squarespace?

If you want professional help with building your Squarespace real estate website from scratch, you can hire a virtual assistant on freelance marketplaces. Alternatively, if you want dedicated support, you can hire a Squarespace design expert at RealtyCrux.

We are a full-scale real estate digital marketing agency. Our real estate knowledge combined with our expertise in digital marketing makes us the best digital marketing agency to work with.