Should Therapists Leave Squarespace After the 2026 Price Increase?

Squarespace is raising its prices again, and honestly, the increase barely matters. It’s a few dollars a month at your next renewal. But it’s a useful reminder: that monthly fee is rent, and you pay it for as long as your site is live, on top of whatever it cost to build the site in the first place. For plenty of practices, that’s a fair deal. For others, it’s the moment they realize they’ve been renting a website they could never quite control. This post is about which of those two you are, and about an option most therapists have never been shown: a custom site, built on a framework called Astro, that you own outright.

I’ve built therapy practice websites on Squarespace, on WordPress, and from scratch. If yours works and you’re happy in it, this price bump is no reason to move. But if you’ve felt the platform starting to hold you back, it’s worth understanding what you’re actually paying for, and what the alternative looks like.

What actually changed, and why it will keep happening

First, the facts. In mid-July 2026, Squarespace raised prices across its most popular plans: Core went up 26% and Basic 19% on annual billing.

This isn’t the first increase. Squarespace kept Personal and Business at $12 and $18 a month for years, raised them to $16 and $23 in 2022, and held there until this year. Here’s the recent history on the two plans most practices use. The figures below are the monthly price on annual billing; month-to-month runs higher. (Squarespace renamed Personal to Basic and Business to Core in 2025; the plans are otherwise the same tier a therapist would pick.)

And it probably won’t be the last. Squarespace was taken private by a private-equity firm in 2024, and steady, quiet price increases are how that model tends to work.

The real question: are you renting or do you own?

When your site lives on Squarespace, you’re renting it. That isn’t an insult; it’s a legitimate choice with real conveniences. But it’s worth being clear about what that means.

Your content lives in their system, and your design stops where their tools stop. The price is theirs to raise whenever they want. You can pull your writing out if you leave, since Squarespace will export your pages and posts into a WordPress-ready file, but it won’t hand over your design, your layout, or your images, which stay tied to Squarespace and go dark once you cancel. So leaving still means rebuilding the site itself: the words come with you, but the site doesn’t.

Most therapists never chose this on purpose. You needed a website, Squarespace was the obvious option, and you’ve been paying for it every month since. Some of you paid a designer $3,000 or more to build that Squarespace site, which is real money, and you still don’t own the platform it runs on. That’s the part worth sitting with, because you paid for the build but not the ground it stands on.

Where Squarespace’s ceiling actually is

For a lot of practices, Squarespace is fine right up until the day you want something the template won’t give you. That’s when you meet the ceiling. Here’s where I run into it most:

It builds pages, not a system. There’s no reusable building block you can design once and have update everywhere. So keeping a custom look consistent across the site means redoing the same work page by page. On five pages that never change, you won’t notice. The day you want to grow or restyle the site, you feel it.

Every screen size is its own manual job. Get the desktop layout looking right, switch to the mobile view, and you’ll often find Squarespace has rearranged things on your behalf, so you’re editing the same page twice. There’s no tablet view at all: the editor gives you desktop and mobile with nothing in between, which is why so many Squarespace sites quietly look off on an iPad. Real control across screen sizes takes custom code and manual testing, and it breaks easily.

The blog is treated as an afterthought. If you blog to get found, Squarespace leaves out the parts that help a long post get read and rank: no built-in table of contents, no footnotes, no sidebar, and only basic next-and-previous pagination.

I design custom websites on Squarespace for practices that want more than a template, so I know exactly where the platform stops cooperating. I designed one client’s site, and after it launched she started reusing sections from it to build new pages and update existing ones. Squarespace lets you save a section and drop it onto another page, so this should have been simple. But the custom design didn’t travel with the saved sections. They came out looking plain and generic, nothing like the rest of her site.

The fix was simple, but she had no way to know that, or how to do it herself, and diagnosing it takes Squarespace know-how most practice owners don’t have. Squarespace is genuinely good at what it’s built for: a dead-simple drag-and-drop editor and an easy-to-use content dashboard. But it isn’t well suited to sites that need custom styling for a more tailored look. For those sites, Astro is the clear winner.

What owning your site looks like

A site you own is the other side of every one of those ceilings, and for most therapists weighing alternatives to Squarespace, it’s the option worth understanding. The therapy sites I build now run on Astro, an open-source framework made for fast, content-driven sites, which is exactly what a therapy practice needs: a handful of pages, a bio, your services, and a blog. Here’s what changes when the site is yours:

Design has no ceiling. You get real control at every screen size, tablet included. The design is yours, so it won’t quietly break because a vendor changed something behind the scenes. If you can picture it, it can be built, down to the pixel.

Reusable sections are actually reusable. That call-to-action on six pages becomes a single component. Change it once, and it updates everywhere.

Speed is built in, and speed helps SEO. Astro sends almost no JavaScript to the browser by default, so pages load fast. Google has treated page speed and Core Web Vitals as ranking signals for years, and for a local practice competing to rank for “therapist near me”, being the fast site is a quiet advantage over the ones that aren’t.

You own the content and the code. Your site’s code lives in a version-control repository (GitHub or GitLab), and a good agreement puts that account in your name from the start, not something you have to ask a developer to hand over later. That distinction matters, because some developers keep the code and charge a monthly fee to maintain it. There’s nothing wrong with that if it’s what you signed up for, but it’s a form of renting too, just from a developer instead of a platform. When the code is genuinely yours, you have real options: maintain it yourself, or pay a professional for upkeep the way you’d hire a contractor for a house you own. Over the years that tends to cost less than a subscription that only climbs, though it puts a little more responsibility on you and asks for some comfort with the technical side. Hosting can be free either way, on Cloudflare Pages or Netlify.

The honest tradeoff is that you give up Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor, the live page you rearrange block by block. You still update your own content, just through a CMS, or content management system: a clean dashboard with labeled fields instead of a live page. Here’s your bio, here’s your fees, here’s a box to write a new blog post. You update the words and the images, and the design stays put. It’s less “nudge this block three pixels to the left” and more “fill in the blank.” For most therapists, whose actual goal is to update a bio or publish a post, that’s the part they wanted in the first place.

If you’re wondering whether it’s safe to build on an open-source framework instead of a big-name platform, here’s the reassuring part. In January 2026, the team that builds Astro joined Cloudflare, one of the largest internet-infrastructure companies in the world, which committed to keeping Astro free and open source. That’s about as stable a foundation as an open-source tool gets.

When Squarespace is still the right call

I’d be doing you a disservice if I pretended that owning a custom site is always the answer. Stay on Squarespace if:

• You’re bootstrapping and building it yourself. Squarespace gets you online this week and lets you run your own site for the monthly fee alone, with no build cost. That’s hard to beat when you’re starting out and watching every dollar. Over five years a custom site tends to land in a similar range, as the five-year cost comparison shows, but that math doesn’t help if you can’t cover a build today.
• You want to change the layout yourself. Squarespace’s visual editor lets you drag sections around and restructure pages without a developer. A custom site works the other way around: you get a dashboard for your content, but layout and design changes come back to me. If hands-on control of your own design matters more than the ceilings above, that’s a real reason to stay.
• You want one vendor for everything. Squarespace bundles hosting, email campaigns, scheduling, and support into a single bill. Owning your site means assembling a few of those pieces yourself.

The price increase doesn’t change any of that. If one of those describes you, the right move is to do nothing and delete the email. And if you’re staying, you can still get more out of the platform without a rebuild: a handful of Squarespace blog plugins can add a table of contents and other features the native blog leaves out.

When it’s worth moving

The flip side is just as clear. It’s probably time to move off Squarespace if:

• You’re already fighting it. You battle the editor more than you use it, or you break the mobile layout every time you touch the desktop version.
• You paid for a design you can’t grow. You bought a polished template from an agency, and now you can’t add a page without it coming out wrong.
• You want a fresh site and won’t be redesigning it yourself. If you’re planning a new website and don’t expect to be rearranging your own layout month to month, a custom site is a cleaner foundation. You update the content, and a developer handles the occasional design change.
• You’ve outgrown the template. It did its job, and now the practice needs more than it can give.

If two or three of those sound like you, the price increase isn’t the reason to move, but it’s a good nudge to finally do it.

What moving actually looks like

If you are past the ceiling, the migration is more ordinary than it sounds. In practice it’s four steps: pull your existing content out of Squarespace, rebuild the site on a modern stack, set up redirects so the pages you already rank for keep their rankings, and launch. Done properly, you don’t lose your SEO, because the redirects hand your existing authority to the new pages. It’s a project measured in weeks, not a disaster to brace for.

The one thing I won’t do here is re-run the money math, because I already wrote that up in full. If what you really want to know is whether a site you own actually costs less than Squarespace over five years, read the five-year cost breakdown. The short version is that it’s closer than almost anyone expects, and this year’s price increase narrows the gap further. And if you’re earlier than that and still weighing platforms in general, here’s how I’d pick a website builder from scratch.

Frequently asked questions

Will I lose my Google rankings if I move off Squarespace?

There’s no guarantee, because any move means Google re-crawls and re-evaluates your pages, and your rankings can move in either direction as a result. But you can stack the odds. If your URLs stay the same, you may not need redirects at all; if they change, 301 redirects hand each old URL’s authority to its new one. Keep the content and page structure intact, submit an updated sitemap, and rankings usually hold, or wobble for a week or two before settling. The sites that get hurt are the ones that move without redirects, or rebuild with thinner content.

Can I export my content from Squarespace?

Partly. Squarespace exports your pages and blog posts to a WordPress-format file, but not your design, your layout, or your images, which stay linked to Squarespace and break once you cancel. Your writing comes with you; the built site doesn’t. Moving means keeping the words and rebuilding the presentation.

Do I need to know how to code to leave Squarespace?

No. A developer builds the site, and you get a content dashboard for the day-to-day: updating your bio, publishing a post, changing your hours, all without touching code. The trade-off is that structural design changes go through your developer rather than a drag-and-drop editor.

What happens to my website if I stop paying Squarespace?

It goes offline. On Squarespace the site is hosted on their servers, so when the subscription lapses, the live pages and their images come down with it. A site you own is hosted under your own account, often for free, so your website doesn’t vanish the moment a payment is missed.

The 2026 price increase isn’t a reason to panic, and it isn’t a reason to rebuild your site tomorrow. It’s a good prompt to ask whether you own the most important marketing asset your practice has, or whether you’ve just been paying rent on it. If you’ve hit the ceiling, or you’d simply like an honest read on whether moving is worth it for your practice, I help therapists move off Squarespace to sites they own. Book a free consultation and we’ll figure out whether it makes sense for you.