Squarespace to cut about 300 jobs, roughly 19% of staff

Squarespace is laying off about 19% of its global workforce, or around 300 employees, the web hosting and site-building company confirmed to TechCrunch.

Jeff Seedman, a public relations specialist representing Squarespace, confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch. The Verge initially reported them.

“Squarespace is restructuring its organization and reducing its global workforce by approximately 19%, representing around 300 employees,” Seedman said. “The changes are intended to simplify how we operate, sharpen our priorities and enable the company to move faster as we position Squarespace for its next phase of growth.”

Website building has changed considerably in recent years amid the generative AI boom. So-called “vibe-coding” site builders, which need only simple prompts from users to produce functional frontend designs, have largely upended the industry by letting people create sites with far less effort. Such tools have become an increasingly central part of the website building business.

Last year, rival web host Wix bought Base44 for $80 million. Similar offerings, such as Lovable, have drawn significant investor interest; Lovable raised a $400 million Series C round in August that valued the company at $13.3 billion. Google also recently launched Stitch, a feature that lets users quickly generate user interface designs.

Squarespace has also begun a major push into AI. In 2024 the company launched an AI tool called Blueprint, and it recently announced Forma, an upcoming AI native platform that users can join a waitlist for.

Squarespace was founded in 2004 and went public in 2021 at a $10 billion valuation. The company struggled in the years that followed to generate enthusiastic public market interest, and ultimately went private again through a $7 billion private equity deal in 2024.

An earlier version of this report incorrectly stated that Squarespace had not yet launched AI tools; the story has been updated.