Picking the wrong platform for your course is expensive. You might spend weeks building it out, only to discover the checkout is clunky, the video limits are tight, or the whole thing costs three times what you budgeted. If you're already on Squarespace, or seriously considering it, you deserve a straight answer about whether it can actually handle a paid online course, not a list of features copied from the marketing page.
We built a test course on Squarespace to find out what works, what doesn't, and who it's genuinely the right fit for. Try Squarespace free for 14 days and follow along, or read through first and decide if it's worth your time.
The short version: Squarespace Courses is a solid option if you want a beautiful, simple course on a site you already control. It starts to strain if you need advanced student management, drip content, or a lot of video storage. We'll cover all of that below.
It depends what you mean by "good." For a first or second course, especially if you're a coach, designer, or creative who already has a Squarespace website, it's genuinely convenient. Your course lives on your domain, looks like the rest of your brand, and doesn't require you to learn a separate platform.
The built-in Courses feature (part of Squarespace's Digital Products suite) lets you organise content into chapters and lessons, upload videos and PDFs, track student progress, and sell access with a one-time payment or subscription. That covers the basics for most solo creators.
Where it gets tricky is scale. The Business plan includes only 30 minutes of video storage and charges a 9% transaction fee. If your course has more than a few video lessons, you'll need the Digital Products add-on, which starts at an extra £9 per month. Factor that in before comparing prices with dedicated platforms.
The setup process is more straightforward than most people expect. Here's the sequence we followed:
Go to Pages and add a new Course page. You'll pick a layout, which sets the visual structure for your course overview.Create chapters, then add lessons inside each chapter. Each lesson is its own page, where you can drop in video, text, images, or downloadable files.Build a sales page separately. Squarespace doesn't auto-generate one. You'll need a regular page with a Digital Product block pointing to your course, plus enough copy to convince someone to buy.Set your pricing. You can offer one-time access, a subscription, or both. We'd recommend starting with a single one-time price whilst you gather your first round of student feedback.Connect Stripe or PayPal for payments. Squarespace Commerce handles the checkout, so there's nothing extra to configure once your payment processor is linked.
The whole process, from blank slate to a live course with three chapters, took us about four hours. That includes writing the sales page and setting up a test payment. For a simple course, that's a reasonable investment.
This is where you need to read carefully, because the headline plans don't tell the full story.
The Business plan costs around £17 per month (billed annually) and lets you add course pages, but it includes a 9% transaction fee and only 30 minutes of video. Most real courses blow past that almost immediately.
To remove the transaction fee and get more video storage, you need to add the Digital Products subscription on top of your website plan. The Starter tier adds £9 per month for 3 hours of video and drops the transaction fee to 0%. That brings your actual monthly cost to roughly £26 before any payment processor fees.
For comparison, Teachable's free plan takes 10% per transaction, and their paid plans start at around £30 per month. Squarespace is competitive, especially if you're already paying for a website plan. The maths looks less good if you're starting from scratch purely to sell courses.
If you're still weighing up which website builder to use as your base, Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress.com all support selling digital products and courses to varying degrees.
Squarespace gives you a reasonable set of built-in tools. You can send email campaigns directly from the platform, embed newsletter sign-up blocks on your course sales page, and connect your site to social media for basic promotion.
What it doesn't give you is automation. There's no way to set up a drip email sequence that triggers when someone signs up, or a conditional discount code that fires after a student completes their first lesson. For that kind of logic, you'll need to connect a third-party email tool like Mailchimp or Flodesk via Zapier.
Our recommended approach for a new course: build a simple waitlist page before the course is finished. Use Squarespace's form block to collect emails, then send a plain launch email when you're ready. It's low-tech, but it works, and it lets you test whether there's real demand before you've spent weeks on lesson videos.
If you already have a Squarespace website and want to add one or two straightforward courses without learning a new tool, Squarespace makes sense. It keeps everything in one place, looks professional without much effort, and the transaction fees are manageable at the right plan tier.
If you're building a course business (multiple courses, bundles, affiliate programmes, detailed analytics, or complex student pathways), a dedicated platform like Teachable or Thinkific will serve you better. They're built for exactly that use case, with features Squarespace hasn't caught up to yet, particularly around student management and drip scheduling.
The middle ground is doing what some creators do: use Squarespace for the website and sales pages, then host the course content itself on a platform like Teachable. You get the brand control of Squarespace and the course infrastructure of a specialist tool. It's a bit more to manage, but it scales.
Squarespace Courses is a good fit if you're a small business owner or solo creator who wants to sell a simple course without leaving your existing website. The design is clean, the setup is logical, and if you're already on a paid plan, the extra cost is reasonable.
It's not the right tool if you're serious about building a course-led business. The video limits, lack of drip content, and thin automation will frustrate you within six months.
If you're just getting started and want to test whether people will pay for your knowledge, start a free Squarespace trial and build your first course there. If it gains traction, you can always migrate to a dedicated platform with real student data to inform the move.
