Squarespace is cutting about 19% of its global workforce, roughly 300 jobs, in a restructuring the website-building company says will simplify how it operates and sharpen its priorities. The cuts, first reported by The Verge and confirmed to TechCrunch on November 2, leave the company with about 1,500 employees from a headcount of roughly 1,800.
Most of the reductions fall on product and engineering teams, according to a companywide memo from founder and chief executive Anthony Casalena that was seen by Business Insider. In the memo, Casalena called the decision one of the hardest in the company's history and said the way Squarespace needs to work "is changing faster than at any point in our history," with smaller teams and a simpler organisation ahead.
A company spokesperson, Jeff Seedman, confirmed the scale of the cuts and framed them as positioning for growth. "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," Seedman said.
What departing staff receive
Affected employees will receive at least 16 weeks of base salary, with additional weeks based on tenure, according to the memo. Benefits continue through May 2027, staff may keep their company laptops, and eligible workers receive payment for the November 20, 2026 vesting of a legacy stock award paid in cash. The package also includes career coaching, job placement tools and immigration support for employees on US work visas.
Vibe-coding rewrites the industry
The cuts land as generative AI redraws the market Squarespace helped build. So-called vibe-coding builders let users spin up functional websites from a few lines of plain-language prompts, cutting the effort once needed to design and launch a site. That shift has pulled users and investor money toward a new generation of tools: Wix bought Base44 for $80 million last year, Lovable raised a $400 million Series C in August at a $13.3 billion valuation, and Google launched Stitch, a tool for generating user-interface designs from prompts.
Squarespace has been building its own AI answer. It launched Blueprint, an AI-assisted site builder, in 2024, and is now taking signups for Forma, an upcoming AI-native platform still on a waitlist. The company has pushed back on the idea that the restructuring funds a bigger AI spend: asked by Investing.com whether the cuts were linked to increased AI infrastructure investment, Squarespace said it would not characterise the restructuring that way.
From public markets back to private hands
Squarespace was founded in 2004 and went public in 2021 at a $10 billion valuation, but struggled to sustain enthusiastic public-market interest in the years that followed. Private equity firm Permira took the company private again in a deal valued at around $7 billion that closed in October 2024.
The timing is notable: the same day Squarespace confirmed its cuts, Linux company SUSE told staff that about 10% of its roughly 1,900 employees would go, citing automation and AI — a sign that workforce resets tied to AI tooling are spreading well beyond the website builders most directly in the firing line. For Squarespace, the test now is whether a leaner product and engineering organisation can ship its AI-native platform fast enough to compete with the vibe-coding upstarts that forced the rethink.
