Squarespace vs Self-Hosting Wordpress on GCP
If you’ve been here since the beginning you’ll have read that I started this Wordpress based blog on GCP.
Recently (as in last night) that changed - and I migrated everything to Squarespace.
Keep reading to find out why I did it, and how easy it ended up being.
Reflecting back on where we started is important so as a recap as to why I went with Google Cloud originally was three main factors:
Priority number #1 - cloud hosting
Priority number #2 - low cost
Priority number #3 - quick and easyish
For almost a year the blog hit those three priorities without issue - once the time was put in to set up the website originally it required fairly low maintenance and upkeep. Sure, occasionally I would need to SSH into the web server and update PHP (and others) to its latest version when required but for the most part everything was done through the web based UI.
Two issues became apparent as time went on however.
Firstly, I was never able to fix a bug where I could only create posts in the Wordpress Classic Editor and lose out on a lot of new features. Small, but annoying.
Secondly (and more frustratingly) with some of my lengthier posts the server would hit its CPU limit, become unresponsive, and would both lose my data and cause downtime.
This was most likely a combination of the photos being uploaded and converted to webp files in the background, and the fact I was using the cheapest server to keep costs low.
Eventually as my site started to pick up in traffic I also found during peak periods the website would become much slower in loading - leading to a poorer user experience.
As a combination of all of these things I decided to upgrade my computing engine and one month later received a AUD$40 bill between the compute engine and the domain.
I played around with some compute/HDD settings and was able to get this price down to around AUD$30 per month, inclusive. This price would fluctuate slightly depending on a few factors.
I’d written off services like Squarespace when first creating my website as the price disparity was massive ($0/m vs $22/m) however had forgotten about it as time had gone on.
I ended up hearing a promotion on a podcast about Squarespace and decided to see just how much money it was - you can only imagine my surprise when I found out I could save money migrating to it.
Still, the thought of migrating across a Wordpress instance was terrifying. I thought of the countless hours I’d spent writing and formatting on Wordpress that would have to be done again. Thankfully though that isn’t the case. Squarespace provides a support article walking through the steps of migrating Wordpress to Squarespace and I was able to move my entire website (and transfer my domain for a single billing point) within 4 or so hours while completing other tasks. The only thing that didn’t migrate? Internal website links - a time consuming but easy process.
If you are considering creating a website for your own purposes and don’t need a blog I highly recommend carrd.co, for USD$19/year you can create a sleek and functional one page website that for the price point cannot be beat.
If you want a multi-paged website like this one Zapier provides a great comparison of Wordpress to Squarespace. Wordpress is infinitely customizable, and deeply powerful. Squarespace is simpler, and more intuitive. If you self host Wordpress it can be ridiculously cheap, but if you pay for hosting and support it can be more expensive.
For me the transition made sense. I was able to save money, have a website that is maintained for me, is secure, and is always online. The transition was easy and it hit all of my priorities that I sought when starting this blog.
Times change, and as it turns out hosting platforms can too.