Everything you wanted to ask

When you want to commit to a website platform, you do your research. After all you want to be sure you will have all the functionalities you need before paying a hefty annual subscription fee. In this blog post, we list all the current Squarespace features to help you fast-forward your search for the website builder.

Website builder

Let’s start with the most important and, dare we say, obvious - the website builder. Other features would make little sense if they were not tied to the core idea behind Squarespace - a tool for building and maintaining professional-looking websites with ease.

Throughout the years (the first versions of Squarespace were developed as far back as 2003!) the platform has gone through many major releases and updates. The latest major one was the rollout of its version 7.1, featuring Fluid Engine, which finally introduced a more freeing drag-and-drop interface which relied much more on the grid system rather than on properly placing spacers (remember those times?).

Nowadays the Squarespace website builder has pretty much everything one would need to build a professional website in a matter of days - you can start with one of their free templates, a premium Squarespace template, or completely from scratch and customize every aspect of your future website. From fonts and colors, to buttons, illustrations, and photo galleries. Fluid Engine supports many powerful blocks, including those that rely on other features Squarespace has to offer, like scheduling, events, courses, and much more.

It’s easy to pick up and get started too - there are plenty of official and unofficial tutorials out there to get you started and we at Applet Studio even offer a signature Squarespace Mastery class that teaches you everything there is to know about building websites, for yourself or for your clients, using Squarespace.

Blogging tools

Squarespace is a solid choice for publishing your blog online. Creatives and business owners can use its simple setup to share stories, advice, and tutorials with their audience.

It has many monetization possibilities, making creating a blog with Squarespace a good income opportunity. Your blog can make you money with sponsored posts, ads, affiliate marketing, or even a paywall. You can also use it as a steady flow of traffic and sales for your online shop. There is built-in analytics to track your results, giving you feedback on what works and what doesn’t – more on that later. We have had our Squarespace blog for more than five years as a part of our content marketing strategy, and we are thrilled with how many sales and customers it is bringing our way.

You don’t really need to do any extra setup to start blogging on Squarespace – you can choose any pre-made template when you create a new website, get a premium Squarespace template, or simply add a blog to an existing website in a couple of clicks.

You can choose how your blog landing page looks by applying different grids for your blog posts and adding sections and blocks with a search bar, newsletter subscription, etc. above or below the grid. Adding new blog posts and editing them is very easy too. Squarespace also provides you with all the tools needed for good SEO practices and formatting. In addition, you can insert all kinds of blocks inside posts like photos, videos, galleries, accordion faq, forms, quotes, buttons, and more.

Check our collection of inspirational examples of blogs built with Squarespace and browse our top templates that are a great fit for starting a blog.

SEO tools

Search Engine Optimization is a complex subject with many moving parts and ever-evolving strategies aimed at boosting your website’s search performance. You can spend countless hours trying to polish every page of your website to be as SEO-friendly as possible. We won’t cover all the techniques and approaches here - instead, let’s look at what Squarespace offers out of the box. We also have a complete SEO strategy for your Squarespace website on our blog for you to check out later.

Some SEO settings which Squarespace makes available to you are quite straightforward. Like website name and description, business details, and address. Don’t forget to fill them all, especially if you have a physical location and want that to show up in search results on Google, in particular.

The good news is that Squarespace automatically creates your website map for you and this is one SEO task off your list.

Each page on your website in Squarespace has its own SEO options – just click the gear icon which appears next to a page name when you hover your mouse pointer over it, and select SEO. Similarly, you can access SEO settings for each blog post or product listing, if you are running an online store.

Forms (CRM)

We can’t really Squarespace a CRM platform, but it does have some basic client and lead management features available out of the box. Create a contact form, place it on a page of your website, start getting new submits, and they will show up directly in the Contacts section of your website. You can filter by form name and search submits too. Want to allow anyone who submits a contact or some other form on your website to automatically become a subscriber to your email list? You can do that with just several clicks too.

And if you feel like you are about to outgrow built-in Squarespace tools, you can always connect your form submits to an external tool via Zapier – and with that, your options are almost limitless.

Email Marketing

Sure, you can start with Mailchimp, CovertKit or Flodesk, or any other email marketing tool out there (and believe us, there are plenty). But what if you just need a simple email list, need to send custom email campaigns from time to time, but want something flexible enough to support bigger lists and automations when the time comes. Squarespace has you covered here as well.

Their built-in email marketing toolset has everything you would expect from a service like that – email designer, email scheduling, segmenting, and even automations (although on more advanced pricing plans). Speaking of pricing, you can start on a small scale (with a relatively small price tag), and grow as you need and as your email list and your email marketing needs grow.

E-commerce

Speaking of money, Squarespace is a great platform for running an online business too! Its e-commerce features are indispensable and integrated on every step of the backend and frontend. With Squarespace you can now basically sell everything: physical and digital products, memberships, and courses, you name it.

The ability to build an online store page on Squarespace, you can add products, create stylish product pages, manage your orders, and sell without much hustle. Plus, many marketing tools can be seamlessly integrated into your website to help you sell – like an announcement bar, pop-ups, SEO optimization, and social media marketing tools.

To receive your income you will need to connect a payment processor. You can either use the built-in Squarespace Payments, or a third-party one like Stripe, PayPal, or Square. 

If you need additional features or functionality that Squarespace itself does not provide you can always turn to plugins for help. Check out our 25 favorite Squarespace plugins for E-Commerce.

Digital downloads

This feature allows you to sell digital products like e-books, documents, workbooks, guides, recipes, audio files, art, images – pretty much anything that can be a file on a computer. Files are delivered to customers via email once they pay - Squarespace sends them a link to download it, which works for 24 hours and then expires. If a customer clicks an expired link, they will get another email that contains a new valid link.

The only requirement for digital downloads is that your file should be under 300 MB. To compress a bigger file, or to “ship” several files, you can zip them.

Scheduling

Service-based businesses rely on bookings a lot. Whether you need your clients to book appointments or classes, a scheduling tool on your website can be a vital part of any such business. It will help you keep track of and manage your appointments – no more confusing dates or times and over-booking. To make the otherwise messy booking process smoother, Squarespace integrated a scheduling tool they own, called Acuity Scheduling. 

Squarespace Scheduling (Acuity) allows you to set specific availability dates and times, meaning you can specify weekdays (or weekends if that’s your thing) and time slots where you are available for booking. Plus you can have multiple different event types - think one-to-one consultations vs group events vs scheduled lectures, or something different completely. That way you can always avoid overbooking and stay up to date with your schedule – Acuity can natively sync with most popular calendars, like Apple Calendar (iCal), Google Calendar, or Outlook (Office 365).

If you provide video calls, meetings, or consultations you can integrate Acuity with Zoom, GoTo Meeting, or JoinMe, to name a few. And you can easily display appointment types that are public and available to book with the help of scheduling blocks pretty much anywhere on your website.

In this guide, we explain how to add a booking calendar to your Squarespace website either with Acuity or third-party tools.

Courses

Nowadays many successful professionals are sharing their knowledge and skills online, earning passive income along the way. If that’s something that’s up your alley, there is an easy way to turn your expertise into additional dollars by creating an online course and leaving all the course management to Squarespace. 

The possibility to host courses within the platform was a long-awaited feature for the course creators and was just recently released to all Squarespace users – with it, you don't need to create complicated integrations with other platforms like Teachable or Thinkific. With Squarespace courses anyone from online coaches recording their workouts to filmmakers delving into details of their craft can easily create, publish, and market their courses.

The Courses pages have beautiful layouts that can further be easily customizable. Content can be organized in lessons and chapters and accompanied by additional resources such as text, images, audios, and downloads.

In terms of monetization, you can either sell lifetime access to your content or offer monthly subscriptions.

Client Invoicing + project management

If you are a freelancer, a small business, or simply an entrepreneur who needs a simple yet effective way to bill their clients for products or services rendered, Squarespace has just the tool built in out of the box – client invoicing paired with basic project management.

You easily create professional-looking invoices directly within the Squarespace platform by navigating to Invoices -> Invoices from the main menu. There, you will need to create a project and then you can make as many invoices associated with that project as you want.

The system has the basics you would expect from any straightforward invoicing solution - ability to specify tasks performed and milestones passed, pricing per item (or per time spent), description, your business information and, arguably the most useful function – a direct payment button.

Squarespace already supports managing and selling digital and physical products and services online – invoices utilizes the same payment processing options. This means that once you send your Squarespace-made invoice to your client, they will be able to make their payment right away and that money will be processed by the same system that would (or already does) process payments for products on your website.

Squarespace integrates with various payment processors, including Stripe and PayPal, enabling businesses to accept payments securely and efficiently. Squarespace also helps users keep track of invoice status and payment history – you can easily monitor which invoices have been paid, which are outstanding, and which may be overdue. Squarespace can even send automated reminders to clients for overdue invoices.

Furthermore, Squarespace integrates seamlessly with popular accounting software such as QuickBooks and Xero. You can use those if you need to simplify your bookkeeping process by automatically syncing invoice data with the accounting system of your choice.

The invoicing platform also enables you to easily manage client information and basic project details, like milestones and related invoices. You can store client details securely within Squarespace, making it easy to access contact information and billing history when needed.

Memberships

Squarespace Memberships empowers website owners to create and manage membership-based communities or subscription services seamlessly. Whether you're an artist looking to offer exclusive content to fans, a fitness instructor building an online workout community, or a blogger wanting to provide premium articles to subscribers, Squarespace Memberships offers a versatile platform.

Squarespace Memberships is a tool within the Squarespace website-building platform that allows website owners to offer gated content or services to subscribers in exchange for a recurring fee.

Our biggest piece of advice for you when dealing with the Membership functionality of Squarespace, is to get several specific terms straight. To enable “memberships”, you need to create what’s called a “membership site”. Think of it as a website within a website – your main website is public and accessible to anyone online. Your internal “membership site” has content only accessible to members – people with accounts that need to log in to view specific content.

Another caveat is understanding that you can have as many internal “membership sites” as you want! For example, you can allow paid access to your music collection via one membership website, and to your NFT-protected poster collection via another. Or maybe you are a coach and you want to have several different membership plans/tiers, depending on how much content you are sharing with your clients. Overall you can offer a range of benefits to members – access to private forums or communities, exclusive discounts on products or services, early access to new content, member-only events, and more.

To get started with Squarespace Memberships, enable one via your Squarespace dashboard by creating a “page” and selecting the “Membership site” option. Once memberships are set up, you can designate certain pages, posts, videos, or other types of content as accessible only to members. Squarespace Memberships handles the entire subscription management process, from handling sign-ups and payment processing to managing subscriber accounts. Users can choose from different payment frequencies (e.g., monthly, yearly) and easily modify their subscription preferences.

Analytics

Although Squarespace supports the popular (and arguably the industry standard) Google Analytics out of the box, its own Analytics is quite powerful and informative and can provide you with insights into your website performance.

Squarespace Analytics has a user-friendly interface and comprehensive data tracking capabilities. Traffic overview gives you access to metrics such as total visits, unique visitors, page views, and bounce rate – quite enough to form a high-level understanding of how many people are visiting the site and how engaged they are with the content.

Traffic Sources will tell you where people are coming from, whether it's from organic search, social media, referral links, or direct visits. While the Geography panel will inform you about the physical location of your visitors, the Search Keywords section will help you much better understand how your website is doing in terms of search engine optimization and what people are searching for when they land on your website. Moreso, you can also access other metrics, such as demographic information about your website visitors, data on which pages and content are the most popular and engaging, etc.

Squarespace Analytics also enables you to track conversions and goals, such as newsletter sign-ups, form submissions, or product purchases. And for online stores, Squarespace Analytics provides detailed insights into sales performance, including revenue, order volume, average order value, and product popularity.

Domains

Squarespace domains has been a part of the Squarespace ecosystem for quite some time now, but recently has gained new prominence due to the purchase of Google Domains by Squarespace almost a year ago. Since Squarespace is primarily a tool for building beautiful and functional websites, it is only natural that it should have a service for purchasing and managing domain names and domain settings.

With Squarespace  you can register a new domain directly through the platform – simply search for available domain names and purchase them for an annual fee. Squarespace offers a variety of top-level domains (TLDs) such as .com, .net, .org, and many others.

If you already own a domain from another registrar, you can easily connect it to your Squarespace website – Squarespace provides step-by-step instructions for updating your domain's DNS settings to point to your Squarespace site. Beyond that, Squarespace offers robust DNS management tools that allow users to configure advanced DNS settings for their domains, like adding custom DNS records.

Want to make sure your website traffic is secure? Squarespace Domains automatically provides SSL certificates for all custom domains connected to Squarespace websites. And in terms of billing – Squarespace handles domain renewals and billing automatically, simplifying the process for users. If you decide to transfer your domain away from Squarespace to another registrar, that is also a fairly straightforward process.

Conclusion

In the decades since its first release, Squarespace has helped millions of users worldwide to build beautiful, functional, effective and selling websites. And lately more and more so it is becoming a one stop shop for all the necessary tools, one might need to run an online business. With everything from a domain name, to the website builder, to website templates, to such niche things as scheduling or course management, Squarespace is aiming to be the market leader for building an efficient online presence.

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