Do you have a simple portfolio-style website on Squarespace and you’re looking to leave for another hosting company? You may very well be thinking about just that if you got the recent email about what looked to be a rather significant price increase. I got the same email the other day, and it was a bit of a sticker shock since I’ve got a couple of different sites I manage on Squarespace. When I see my website hosting bill move north of $400 for simple sites that are nothing more than a business card, I start looking for other options.

Now, to be fair to Squarespace, they did pull back on some of that price increase. That’s both the internet social media echo chamber and an email from Squarespace themselves let me know. Since Squarespace was recently taken over by private equity, I have no loyalty to a platform that initially built up goodwill by being an early podcast advertiser as podcasts were coming into their own. I also have no qualms with the product itself, as it was really a pretty easy way to host a website. While Permira might not have the reputation that some other private equity firms have, I think they were the ones who significantly raised the price on TeamViewer and killed the perpetual TeamViewer license back in the day before exiting with a big profit.

What I learned in my research about where to move after Squarespace was that Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers have access to Adobe Portfolio.

Portfolio is a simple, template-based platform that might be all a video editor or post-production professional needs in a website. Often websites for post pros are like a business card. They can showcase work, have an about page, links and a contact form. That’s what Adobe Portfolio can do as well.

First you choose a theme and like Squarespace you add different types of pages depending on what you might need. There are full site-wide controls for styling and page-specific controls as well. I’m guessing the original intention for Portfolio was photographers, as there are integrations with Behance and Adobe Lightroom (as well as Adobe Stock) and little else. So overall functionality and extendability is much less than Squarespace, but hey … you don’t have to pay extra for it if you have an Adobe subscription.

Once on a page, you add different elements like text, images, audio and video, a photo grid, contact form, social icons, or an embed block. So any web content you can embed, you can, in theory, put it on a Portfolio page, though I’ve had mixed success with embeds. Each element has individual controls for things like alignment, margins and other basic web page settings.

As I mentioned, it’s not overly customizable. There are many fewer things available, and the control isn’t anywhere near as deep as some other template-based website building platforms. Given that you get five sites with your subscription, it may be worth a quick page build to see if it will work for your needs.

And you can connect your own custom domain. I got it all up and running with my website and redirected it from Squarespace with minimal fuss.