Showit vs Squarespace SEO

Update 19.08.2026: Showit has updated a previous con I featured on ‘layer order’. With their recent upgrade on August 13, 2026, their Publish Engine has resolved the reverse layer order before to match the exact order.

Showit or Squarespace? Which is better for SEO?

Working with clients in the wedding and creative industries – I’ve come across a varying amount of Showit and Squarespace sites. Both these platforms come with an attractive drawcard for those in the creative space, being that designing their sites is less restricted in a drag drop, ease of use website  design environment. 

Fundamentally, search engine optimisation (SEO) can be done for any website builder or platform. However, some have more limitations than others.

In this article, I’ll go into the specifics of choosing either option, and what their pros and cons are in relation to SEO considerations.

Pros of Showit with SEO

Showit is more than capable of getting your site ranking and on the first page of Google. Search for any wedding photographer in a local area, and you’re likely on a Showit site. Don’t believe it? I’ve helped get them there myself.

Integrations

As part of its pricing, Showit has non-blog and blog subscriptions. To help your wedding SEO, you should be blogging regularly, which is why its headless WordPress integration for blog capabilities is a must.

This means you get access to WordPress’s plugins directory (only available on plans that have Blog subscription), including helpful SEO plugins like Yoast, Rank Math, or SlimSEO (my preferred plugin of choice). 

For e-commerce stores like jewellers, florists, or those wanting payment functionality, WooCommerce and Showit can also be integrated.  Shopify and Showit can also be connected for those selling items, but it’s limited to embedding individual products, product collections, or a buy button.

It’s incredibly helpful to have these blogging and ecommerce capabilities, but its dependency is also why I’m listing this as both a Showit Pro & Con.

Technical SEO Automation

Whilst this is common for most website platforms, Showit can handle part of the technical SEO essentials for you. A robots.txt, XML sitemap, and self-referencing canonical tags are all automated. Not groundbreaking by any means, but some platforms neglect these basic essentials. 

I would say that this is both a Showit Pro and Con, especially for those needing more technical SEO support, which requires custom configurations of these automated setups, and like above, the dependency of integrations causes double-ups of these configurations.

Mobile Friendly Design

In Showit, there is both desktop and mobile design in the website builder. You can design and build the mobile layout completely separately from your desktop layout. It’s easy to fix any issues with the mobile view for a responsive design, especially with its side-by-side view — for example, hiding long, chunky copy sections behind a ‘Keep Reading’ expandable link or adding mobile-only elements. 

A word of caution: I’d advise against overusing the Visible On option to remove Design Elements or Canvases from certain devices, as this can clutter your source code with unnecessary weight and confuse Google’s mobile-first indexing.

Design is not a ranking factor for Google. However, Google’s mobile-first indexing means that even if your site looks great on desktop, the mobile view can still let you down if there are any issues. Not to mention, a good user experience (UX) also contributes to ranking signals, such as Core Web Vitals.

Most website builders force you to choose between a pretty design and a proper SEO structure. Usually, if you want a text block to be an H2 tag (an important subheading), the builder forces it to be a specific, massive font size. With Showit, you can assign any HTML tag to any piece of text without changing its style, giving you full creative control over how your copy looks and feels. 

Cons of Showit with SEO

For all the ways I love Showit for its creative freedom, it’s definitely not a set-and-forget platform for wedding SEO or SEO for creatives. There are some technical quirks under the hood that can trip you up if you don’t know what to look for. 

Double Handling and Technical Debt

Because it’s modular (Showit + WordPress + Plugins), there’s added maintenance. Plugin updates in WordPress can occasionally break the visual link to Showit if you aren’t careful.

Also, you now have different SEO places to manage, including your Showit site, WordPress SEO plugins for blog and/or your e-commerce integration (WooCommerce).

Risk of Thin Content 

If you don’t understand the difference between a Canvas and a Page, you can accidentally ruin your rankings. Often, creatives create separate pages for small bits of info that could’ve just been canvases.

Pros of Squarespace with SEO

Squarespace has long been the all-in-one for creatives, and in 2026, it’s still a powerhouse. While Showit offers bespoke freedom, Squarespace provides a stable, vertically integrated environment where everything is designed to just work.

If you’re a creative who wants a high-performing site without the manual upkeep of a modular stack, Squarespace is still an excellent choice, with heaps of professionals from solo illustrators to major creative agencies using it because it balances aesthetics with technical reliability.

Predictable, Crawler Friendly Code

Generally, Squarespace outputs cleaner code than Showit. Because it uses a grid-based system in Squarespace 7.1 called Fluid Engine, the underlying HTML is more predictable and standard.

For 2026, this is a win for discoverability. AI bots and search crawlers love structure. Squarespace’s code makes it very easy for them to map out your contextual anchors and understand the hierarchy of your content without getting lost in a mess of freeform layers.

Hands-Off Technical Essentials

I reckon one of the best things about Squarespace is that it handles the ‘boring’ technical stuff for you. Your XML sitemaps and SSL certificates are completely automated.

You don’t need to install a plugin just to tell Google your site is secure. It’s all baked in. 

The All-In-One Ecosystem

Since it’s a closed ecosystem, Squarespace can manage your domain, hosting, and image delivery (CDN) globally. It’s incredibly easy to manage because there’s only one login.

A word of caution on the hosting front. Experts like Bill Hartzer suggest that keeping your domain registrar and web host separate is safer for security and recovery. Plus, because Squarespace hosting is US-based, it can sometimes be a fraction slower for us here in Australia compared to a local dedicated host. However, for most creatives, the convenience usually outweighs the millisecond difference in speed.

Investment in SEO

With over 7 million websites and counting, as of December 2025, Squarespace isn’t going anywhere. Because so many professionals use the platform, Squarespace has heavily invested in its SEO tools, resources, and education recently, similar to how Wix did a few years back.

Mobile Responsiveness

It’s almost impossible to break your mobile view on Squarespace. Because it’s built on a responsive framework, your site automatically adjusts to fit any screen size. It’s a much safer bet for maintaining a solid level of mobile UX, which is important with mobile-first indexing.

Cons of Squarespace with SEO

When you choose an all-in-one system, you’re trading total control for convenience. For many growing creative businesses, those trade-offs eventually turn into technical ceilings that can be frustrating to hit.

Product Subcategories For eCommerce 

If you’re a maker or jeweller, this is a big one. Squarespace chooses to canonicalise product subcategories back to its main category.

What does this mean in plain English? If you have a specific page for ‘Gold Wedding Bands’ inside a larger ‘Wedding Jewellery’ category. Guess what? Squarespace tells search engines that the subpage isn’t important enough and to only rank the main category. 

This makes it incredibly hard to get found for those specific, high-intent niche terms because you can’t rank the subcategory level effectively. Very frustrating.

Manual Canonical Limits

Managing duplicate content is a part of any growing SEO strategy. However, Squarespace doesn’t let you easily set manual canonical tags for individual pages. 

Not to mention the above limitation of the product subcategories. This could be an easy fix if a manual option was provided to change the canonical tag.

However, without manual control, you’re relying on Squarespace’s automation, which makes managing similar content across your site much harder.

Blocks and Heading Tags

Squarespace has some great built-in widgets, but they can be stubborn. Some blocks don’t allow you to change your heading tags or if they do, the styling changes with it.

You might end up with say two H1 tags in a row that you simply can’t edit without taking a chance on some CSS styling. 

Instead of a clear map for Google to follow, your code looks like a jumbled list of headings with no clear structure. Here’s an example of the scrolling widget, and changing the Heading type to a paragraph (<p>) tag changes the font considerably.

Fluid Engine Code Quirk

Squarespace’s Fluid Engine is great for moving blocks around, but it too has a similar issue to Showit. The order of your code is often determined by when you added the element to the page, not where it actually sits visually.

When you add a block to a Fluid Engine section, Squarespace places that element at the end of the HTML, known as the Document Object Model (DOM). Even if you drag it to the top of the page visually on your desktop view, its position in the backend code stays exactly where it was born.

If you add your footer text first and then drag your H1 heading to the top later, the bot might actually ‘read’ the footer before the heading. This can confuse crawlers and AI bots trying to understand the core meaning and contextual anchors of your page.

So Which Website Platform Is Better?

Firstly, it’s important to note that SEO is only one consideration when choosing a website platform or Content Management System (CMS). Think and research how the system will align with your internal workflows, its ability to integrate with your existing tech stack (like CRM or email marketing tools), and whether your site can be updated without requiring a website designer or developer.

I’m going to give this one to Squarespace. The reason being its native SEO functionality and grid based Fluid Engine format with crawler-ready code would give the most benefit to any SEO campaign.

Showit is a great website platform, however its dependency on third party integrations for both blogging and ecommerce, and layer order means that it slightly lets it down.

To be clear, here are some caveats:

• A well designed layout with SEO considerations means one platform could outrank the other.
• Squarespace Ecommerce is okay if you’re only selling products in one particular vertical (e.g. leather bags)
• I wouldn’t advise having everything ‘all-in-one’ due to risk and security issues. There are plenty of good domain registrars and web hosting solutions out there, for a fraction of the price of Squarespace or Showit.
• I use WordPress, but that doesn’t mean it’s my recommendation to each and every client.