I started migrating all of my domains away from Squarespace this week. And as I started to write a blog post about why I chose Cloudflare it occurred to me that I was going on a tangent about how much I disliked Squarespace. So here’s a post about that instead!
Read on to find out why!
Why I was using Squarespace
I used to use Google Domains for my domain name registrations, as they were competitively priced and offered DNS and free email forwarding. Sadly, Google sold the domains business to Squarespace in 2023, and all of my domains got transferred over in 2024.
What I don’t like about Squarespace for domains
The control panel
Firstly, during the transfer from Google Domains some custom DNS entries got messed up. No problem, I know what the entries should be, I’ll update the DNS via the Squarespace control panel. On first sight it seemed broken. It just gave me an error whenever I tried to update the DNS for any of my domains. That eventually got fixed when support advised me (after waiting days for a reply) to use incognito mode. Wow… incognito mode was the fix!
Invoices
Squarespace billing for domains is hard to navigate. I got billed for a domain renewal and had no idea which one it was; it wasn’t confirmed in an email nor notification in the control panel. I took a guess based on renewal date, clicked on Billing and then Invoices. Nothing. Another email to support and they confirmed that it was a different domain. It appears that there’s no central “Billing” area to view all of your invoices. To find an invoice you have to first select the correct domain and navigate from there.
Renewals
Automatic renewals are turned on by default. If you turn off automatic renewals there is no way to manually renew your domain name or extend it’s renewal beyond one year! Absolutely ridiculous!
I’ve no idea what would happen if automatic renewals was off and you went past your renewal deadline. I can only presume that you’d need to turn it on again and that would trigger the system to attempt a one-year renewal.
Taxes aren’t clear
Pricing and renewals states that UK domains are charged at £10. That’s what Google Domains charged, too. So when I was billed £12 I wondered what was going on. After some digging I found some smallprint that adds “plus applicable taxes”, which for us in the UK is VAT currently charged at 20%. This should really be the headline price.
Clarity around Google/Squarespace
It’s still not entirely clear who is providing what services after the move from Google Domains to Squarespace. The name servers still use Google. The MX records both point to mailgun.org (two entries both set with a priority of 10!). The Squarespace email admin page says that forwarders cannot be updated unless the MX records are deleted, with no further explanation of what they should be updated to.
I’m transferring away
None of these things would be a deal breaker on its own, but the combination is just too much, I don’t have confidence in using Squarespace for domains. I did some research and decided to use Cloudflare, which will be the subject of my next blog post.