Adding videos to Squarespace - the best solutions
TL;DR - If you don’t have time to read this article in full, here’s the summary. The Squarespace video hosting is free for up to 30 minutes of high-definition (HD) video on a standard website or 50.5 hours of video on site with a Member Sites (previously known as Member Areas) Core plan. If you need to host ultra-clear 4K videos, you may be better off with a Vimeo plan. If you need a video portfolio, Wistia is better. Read on to understand why.
Background
Your business is making more videos now than ever before. Videos to show off your product. Webinars to educate your customers. Perhaps you’re even creating training videos or podcasts?
In the last few years, I’ve seen a huge increase in the number of clients who want to host videos on their Squarespace website, and demand continues to grow each year. Squarespace acknowledged this trend and, in June 2022, they added free video hosting to the Squarespace platform. Great right? Well yes, their offering is very basic, with many limitations
If you’re a Squarespace user who only wants to add a few videos to their site, like a background video to your homepage or a couple of reasonable quality promotional videos, it will suit you well. But what if you want to show a library of instructional, fitness or product videos that increases every month? Or you want to show Ultra High Definition (4K) videos?
Is Squarespace video hosting good enough?
With Squarespace video hosting, every website, regardless of plan, comes with 30 minutes of free high-definition (HD) on-platform video storage. It’s a massive improvement on other free options like YouTube and Vimeo because your videos (and the video player) won’t contain branding, adverts or video suggestions. It’s a no-brainer for websites that need a few minutes of video to supplement the other content.
If you want to sell subscriptions to video content, Squarespace Member Sites (previously known as Member Areas) is a paid add-on that allows you to turn your content and expertise into income by selling membership access to gated content, such as videos, online courses or classes. Anyone using Member Sites also benefits from additional video storage (between 10.5 hours and unlimited), depending on the Member Sites plan that you choose - from £7 to £95 per month (on an annual plan).
However, there are currently three limitations with Squarespace video hosting that may cause you problems as your business expands:
Storage Limits - The Member Sites Pro plan provides up to 50.5 hours of video hosting - that’s enough for 101, half-hour videos - but once you hit this limit, you cannot add any more videos. I believe this will change in the future but Squarespace haven’t provided timelines yet for when this may happen, and this makes it difficult for clients to plan. Personally, I don't want to upload a client’s video library to Squarespace on launch day only for them to discover they cannot add any new videos in a month's time!
Cost - If you only need the features that are available on the Member Sites Starter plan but need more than 10.5 hours of video, it will cost you another US$26 per month (£21/€23) to upgrade to the Core plan for the additional video storage. That’s a lot of money to increase your video storage by 40 hours. A third party video hosting service (read on!) will give you 60 new hours of video hosting every year for only $9 per month (£9).
Video quality - Squarespace video hosting only supports HD resolution videos with low bit-rates, which ultimately reduces the quality of your videos on fast connections. The maximum resolution is HD (1080p) which is one quarter of the resolution of Ultra High Definition (UHD), commonly known as 4K.
What is the best video hosting solution for Squarespace?
It will depend on your requirements but to summarise, the answer will be Vimeo or Wistia.
If you need more than 30 minutes of video storage, my preferred solution is a paid Vimeo plan. To be clear, I’m not affiliated with Vimeo but I’ve used their services without issue for many years. They offer reliable, high-resolution, high bit-rate video hosting that is easy to configure - and it grows with your business.
Their Starter plan is US$9 per month (£9) - at the time of writing. For this:
You can add up to 60 videos every year, allowing the business to grow, year on year.
There is no maximum file size.
The player supports 4K video and higher bit-rates.
You can all remove branding and controls from the player.
There are no ads.
If you need more storage, the Vimeo Standard plan gives you up to 120 videos a year for US$25 per month (£27).
Blurred Vimeo thumbnails?
There’s one small bug that can affect the quality of Vimeo video thumbnails on Squarespace but I’ve published a workaround to allow you to replace the awful default thumbnails (295 x 166 pixels) with your own larger versions! You’ll find details in my post How to avoid blurry Vimeo thumbnails on Squarespace.
Vimeo alternative for sites that are video-heavy
If you have a site that needs to display many videos on a page or have lots of video autoplay, for example, a portfolio of videos, then Wistia can be a better alternative. It’s more expensive, starting at $19 per month but typically $79 per month, but it has many features to recommend it, and it plays nice with Squarespace - with the exception of Videos Pages.
For example, if you update a video on Wistia it will automatically update your Squarespace website, without editing the embed code. It also has built in autoplay features and you can add calls to action directly into the video.
This guide was written in January 2023 and updated in July 2024. Prices were correct at the time of writing.
