Breaking Up With My Recurring Subscription to Squarespace

I built my first personal site on Squarespace in January 2021, a few weeks after getting accepted into Wharton. At the time it felt like a grown-up step: a clean, polished place on the internet that signaled I was serious and put together.

Five years later, I was paying a recurring subscription for a site I could barely customize. When I started building projects with Bolt and wanted to host them somewhere, Squarespace became the obstacle — not the platform. So I rebuilt it myself: to cut the subscription, learn how the pieces actually fit together, and give myself room to extend it over time.

Before & After

Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park, December 2020 — **January 2021.** Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park. My Squarespace-era homepage.

Mt. Baker, Summer 2024 — **Summer 2024.** Mt. Baker during an all-women climb fundraising for SheJumps.

How I approached the rebuild

I started by scoping the project with ChatGPT — not to make decisions for me, but to map out what I'd need to learn and what I could safely ignore. I sanity-checked the plan with a software engineer friend to avoid adding unnecessary complexity.

The scaffolding took about two hours: setting up VS Code, initializing an Astro project, connecting it to GitHub, and pointing my domain at Netlify. Once the foundation was in place, I shifted to content — and that part was genuinely fun in a way the setup work wasn't.

Tools and setup

Astro for static site generation and layouts
Markdown for writing and organizing content
Vanilla CSS for layout and visual decisions
GitHub for version control
Netlify for hosting and deployment

I used AI as a support tool to help me understand unfamiliar concepts and debug issues. I did not use it to make architectural decisions for me.

The hardest part was not syntax. It was building a clear mental model of how the pieces fit together and deciding what level of structure was enough.

Working in VS Code felt less intimidating than I expected. It reminded me that coding is mostly writing and organizing files. It is not that different from building a Tumblr theme, just with better tools.

What this unlocked

Once the scaffolding existed, continuing felt straightforward. I was no longer blocked by the platform.

Rebuilding the site was not a big leap. It was a small set of decisions that made the site easier to understand and easier to extend.