A freelance web designer posts in a Facebook group: "How do you compete with Squarespace? My prospects keep saying they can just build it themselves for $16 a month." Forty designers pile in with variations of the same anxiety. The market is shrinking. Clients do not value custom work anymore. AI is coming for the rest.
This fear is understandable. It is also wrong.
The numbers tell a different story
Wix has roughly 250 million registered users. Squarespace powers about 3.8 million live websites. Shopify hosts 4.4 million stores. Together, the major DIY platforms account for tens of millions of websites worldwide. That sounds like a saturated market with no room for professionals.
But here is the number that matters: 71% of small businesses in the United States have a website. That means 29% still do not have one at all. Among those who do, roughly half have not updated their site in over two years.
The addressable market for professional web design is not the businesses choosing between you and Squarespace. It is the businesses sitting on broken, outdated, or nonexistent websites who have not taken action at all. There are millions of them, and they are not using Squarespace. They are using nothing.
The prospect who chooses Squarespace was never your client
A business owner who signs up for Squarespace, picks a template, writes their own copy, and launches a site in a weekend is a DIY person. They were always going to do it themselves. They were never going to pay $5,000 for a custom site. Not because they cannot afford it, but because they do not see the value.
These are $0 prospects. You cannot lose a client you were never going to win.
Your actual prospects are the business owners who know their website is bad and have done nothing about it for years. Not because they prefer DIY, but because they are busy running a business and the website is never urgent enough to deal with. They need someone to show them the problem, quantify the cost, and handle the solution.
That person is not choosing between you and Squarespace. They are choosing between you and continued inaction.
DIY builders expand your market
Here is the counterintuitive part: Squarespace and Wix are growing the pie, not shrinking it.
DIY builders have done two things for the web design market:
1. They normalized the expectation that every business needs a website. Twenty years ago, a local plumber could argue that a website was optional. In 2026, a business without a website looks illegitimate. DIY builders helped create that expectation. That expectation drives demand for professional work.
2. They created a pipeline of future clients. A business owner who builds a Squarespace site in 2023 and watches it generate zero leads for three years is more ready to hire a professional than someone who never had a site at all. They have already invested time and emotion. They know the template is not working. They just need someone to explain why and offer a better path.
The DIY-to-professional upgrade cycle is real. Designers who specialize in "graduating" businesses off templates into custom sites report that these clients convert faster, pay more willingly, and refer more often. They have already experienced the pain of a site that does not perform. They do not need to be convinced that web design matters. They need to be convinced that you are the right person to fix it.
Your real competition is inertia
If Squarespace is not the threat, what is?
Inaction. Status quo bias. The gravitational pull of "it is fine for now." A business owner with a terrible website who has been meaning to fix it for two years is not comparing you to Squarespace. They are comparing the effort of hiring you to the comfort of doing nothing.
This is a different sales problem than competing on features or price. You do not win by arguing that custom design is better than a template. You win by making the cost of inaction visible and specific.
"Your website loads in 7 seconds on mobile. Your top competitor loads in 2. You are running $2,000 per month in Google Ads to a site that converts at half the industry average. That is roughly $12,000 per year in wasted ad spend."
That math beats inertia. Squarespace never enters the conversation.
How to stop competing with platforms and start competing with inaction
1. Target businesses with existing bad websites, not businesses with no website. A business with no website might build one on Squarespace. A business with a slow, outdated, non-converting website already tried (or paid someone) and needs a real solution.
2. Lead with their data, not your portfolio. Squarespace has beautiful templates. You will not win a visual comparison against a fresh template. You will win a performance comparison against their current site. Load times, conversion rates, mobile usability, competitor gaps. These are metrics a template cannot fix.
3. Sell outcomes, not design. "I will build you a modern website" competes with Squarespace. "I will increase your monthly leads by 40% based on what I have done for similar businesses" does not compete with anything. It is a different category.
4. Pick niches where DIY fails. Squarespace works well enough for a coffee shop or a photographer. It fails for a multi-service HVAC company that needs location pages, service area targeting, and conversion tracking. The more complex the business needs, the less viable the DIY option.
The market is bigger than you think
There are roughly 33 million small businesses in the United States. Even among the 71% with websites, the majority are underperforming. Slow load times, missing CTAs, no mobile optimization, outdated content, zero SEO.
You do not need Squarespace to fail for your business to succeed. You need to stop looking at DIY builders as competitors and start looking at the millions of businesses sitting on terrible websites doing nothing about it. That market is enormous, growing, and almost entirely uncontested.
The business owner who was always going to build it on Squarespace was never going to hire you. Let them go. Focus on the ones who need a professional but have not found one yet. There are more of them than you can serve.