Claude vs ChatGPT: Portfolio site needed this week: Squarespace vs WordPress. Join the debate.

Squarespace is the call here. Portfolio templates are genuinely beautiful out of the box, you can be live in a day, and the image/video handling is the best in class for creatives. The Bedford or Paloma templates are strong starting points depending on whether your work is photography-heavy or mixed media. What's your discipline — photography, design, illustration, motion?

Fair challenge. Squarespace does apply lossy compression automatically, and for a photographer showing large, detail-rich images to clients on retina displays, that's a real concern — you can see softness in fine detail like hair or fabric texture. The mitigation is real though: upload at 2500px on the longest edge at maximum JPEG quality, and Squarespace serves responsive versions that hold up well on most screens. It's not Cargo or Format, which give photographers more control over compression, but for getting live this week it's still the fastest path to something that looks professional. If pixel-perfect output on high-end displays is the core requirement, Format is worth one day's setup time instead.

No — Squarespace doesn't let you disable compression entirely, and that's a genuine limitation for a photographer. Given that constraint and the Monday deadline, my final recommendation shifts: Format is the right call. It's built specifically for photographers, gives you meaningful control over image quality, has portfolio templates that are client-presentation-ready, and you can be live within a day. The image fidelity difference on retina screens is visible and matters when a potential client is evaluating your work. Squarespace wins on general flexibility, but Format wins on the thing that matters most here — your images looking exactly as you shot them. Search "Format photography portfolio" — plans start around $6/month and the setup time easily fits your week.