5 Squarespace Lessons I Wish I Knew Earlier
It’s been almost a year since I started designing websites on Squarespace full-time. Before this, I had built a few sites for myself and friends, but never as a serious business.
When you build a personal website, there’s much less consideration for results (honestly, just having a website was impressive enough for my student resume). But as I dived into the world of professional website design, I started to learn many things about Squarespace that were never on my radar.
Looking back, there were 5 Squarespace lessons I wish I knew earlier. I hope these will help you avoid these Squarespace mistakes and build better websites.
1) Setting up the site properly
Once you’ve finished putting your content up and customizing the site’s styles, is it time to make your site public and celebrate? Sadly, the answer is no.
There is a whole bunch of other tasks to make sure your website runs smoothly. Some of the typical things you may not have paid attention to are:
Social sharing image: the default image displayed when someone shares your site on social media or text messages
Favicon: a small icon that represents your website in web browsers (kinda like a logo for your website)
SSL: if you forget to turn SSL on, your site will not be safe for visitors and they might even get a warning that your site is “not secure”
Cookie banner: for privacy concerns, you need to inform and get visitors’ consent before you can collect data for analytics, newsletter, or product purchase
You can get the full list of tasks from Squarespace’s site launch checklist and SEO checklist.
2) Completing the Squarespace SEO checklist won’t get your site to rank on Google first page
Once I discovered the steps to properly setting up a website, I was all pumped up thinking my site will soon appear on Google and attract leads. The reality was far from it. My site showed up on the first page for branded keywords (like my name), but not for the ones that potential clients would actually search for.
SEO is a lot broader than the technical aspects that you can get from a checklist. To give you some examples of reasons why my Squarespace SEO sucked:
I relied on just the main web pages to rank. Even if you can get a lot of backlinks to your site, content quantity is still a major factor in establishing your site authority in the eyes of Google.
I started blogging randomly without general themes. Though blogging is a great way to get traffic, you need to be strategic about what to write. Keyword research and planning content clusters are key.
I didn’t niche down geographically because I didn’t want to limit my business to just local prospects. But ranking for niches is a lot easier than ranking for high-volume keywords with more competitors. And since I sell high-priced services, the traffic from these niches was enough to get consistent leads.
This isn’t to say all the technical SEO steps aren’t important, but they only provide a foundation from which you need to do research and build content strategically.
Shameless plug! If you need guidance with Squarespace SEO, book a coaching session with me! Check out more details here.
3) Use a blank template
Squarespace has over a hundred templates. Though this number seems tiny compared to WordPress and Wix, there’s enough variation between them to make one feel very indecisive. Personally, I can’t count the number of times I’ve switched templates hoping one will look better.
Regardless of how many templates I tried, I always ended up having to redesign everything. The difference between the templates’ placeholder content and the real content is too drastic to keep the template intact. Templates are built for visual appeal and showcasing, but they rarely fit the content types and length a business website would need.
The best starting point is a blank template.
A blank template allows you to shape the design based on content instead of the other way around. You have more freedom to think outside of the cookie-cutter layouts, thus much more likely to create a recognizable website style.
If you’re new to Squarespace you can certainly start with a template to learn how different elements work. Just don’t spend too much time choosing a template or switching back and forth between those.
4) A bit of CSS goes a long way
Though I had some knowledge about coding, I stubbornly refused to use coding in Squarespace at the beginning. I didn’t see the value of coding in a supposedly non-coding website builder and also was afraid of messing things up.
Over time, I’ve come to appreciate the many ways coding can improve a Squarespace site. Some examples off the top of my mind include:
Ensuring a flawless mobile experience
Increasing and decreasing the spacing between elements freely
Inverting logo colors on different banner backgrounds for readability
Adding nice little touches like custom icons or slowing down site animations
Resizing visual elements without using spacer blocks or recreating them
Luckily, there are many free, beginner-friendly tutorials if you want to learn coding and custom codes for Squarespace.
5) Use Squarespace Analytics more often
I had Google Analytics set up from day one because I knew the importance of measuring. You can't improve what you don't measure. But as a busy business owner, I rarely have time to log into my GA account let alone analyzing the different reports.
This was my excuse for not keeping track of my site performance which led to the site traffic plateau for a while…
Until I realized I could use Squarespace Analytics.
Squarespace Analytics is a built-in reporting tool that gives you essential metrics regarding your Squarespace site. Though it doesn’t have the comprehensiveness of GA, it’s much more convenient as I could complete a blog post then quickly have a look at my site performance.
If you haven’t tried this tool before, this article will give you the details on how to use Squarespace Analytics.
Those are my top mistakes and lesson learned with Squarespace. What about yours? Let me know in the comments!
