The Squarespace Near-Miss

I Almost Traded my Custom Rig for a Hatchback

I’ll admit it. I had the tab open. I had the credit card out. I was fourteen minutes into a Squarespace trial and I was actually starting to believe that a drag-and-drop “Lifestyle” template was the answer to my WordPress fatigue.

I was parked up, the rain was doing that rhythmic drum solo on the van roof that usually signals a productive afternoon, but instead, I was staring at a WordPress update notification that just wouldn’t clear. I was bored. My ADHD was looking for a new shiny project to build, and a YouTube influencer—bless his sponsored heart—made Squarespace look like a holiday in a Fermanagh forest.

I wanted the easy life. I wanted to stop worrying about plugin compatibility and just look at pretty pictures of coastal roads with slick parallax scrolling. But then the reality hit me like a cold breeze through that faulty door seal (that I’ll address one day).

The Interstellar Moment

As I started “dootling” with the Squarespace interface, my technical setups started screaming at me from across the digital void. It was like that scene in Interstellar where Coop is trying to signal through the bookcase. My AI agents, my n8n workflows, and my custom data structures were all shouting the same thing: “What are you doing, Murph?”

You see, Digital Nomad NI isn’t just a blog. It’s a machine.

Over the last year, I’ve invested in Starlink to ensure I’m not stuck with “Edge vibes” when I’m trying to promote a digitally nomadic life. I’ve built n8n triggers that cross-pollinate my YouTube content and blog posts automatically. I’ve built Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) to track specific motorhome tech specs that a standard “travel template” wouldn’t know what to do with.

I haven’t just been writing posts; I’ve been building a technical archive. In my ‘Motorhome Tech‘ category, I’m using Advanced Custom Fields to store specific, queryable data points—things like Starlink power draw, LTE signal gain in the Sperrins, and real-world battery cycle performance. This isn’t just text on a page; it’s structured data. In WordPress, I can tell the site to ‘show me every location where the Starlink hit 100Mbps while parked in a forest.’ On Squarespace, that data becomes a ‘text block’, dead, unsearchable, and trapped in a pretty box. My site knows the difference between a 12V lithium setup and a portable power station because I’ve programmed it that way. Moving to a drag-and-drop builder would have meant lobotomizing that intelligence just for the sake of a nicer font.

The Walled Garden Trap

Squarespace offers the novice user all the delights of hosting a website with none of the hard-coded control I’ve spent a year mastering. It’s a walled garden. It looks beautiful from the outside, but as soon as you want to touch the engine, you realise the bonnet is welded shut.

Want to use an API to trigger a custom workflow? Better start manufacturing some “subscription gold coins” because that’s locked behind a premium tier. Want to keep your granular SEO control that Rank Math provides? Good luck with their “SEO for Dummies” dashboard.

I realized I was about to trade a custom-built, automated 4×4 rig for a shiny hatchback because I liked the color of the seats and the “simple” entry price.

Bothering My Hole

The 24 hours I spent in the Squarespace backend were a wake-up call. The “subscription creep” in WordPress is real, I’m the first to complain when a cool feature requires a few extra pennies to unlock, but at least the potential is infinite.

I don’t need a new platform. I need to “bother my hole” and actually use the tools I have.

Instead of moving house, I’m renovating the one I own. We are staying on WordPress. We are sticking with Astra and Elementor as the foundations. But we are ditching the “dull.” I’m moving toward the Elementor Loop Builder to create custom “Tech Cards” for my gear reviews and building a dashboard that actually reflects the rugged, lived-experience reality of working from the road in Northern Ireland.

The pressure of the 14-day trial is off. The Starlink is locked on. It’s time to stop window-shopping and start building.