How to Create a Gallery in Squarespace

Updated September 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

Adding the gallery takes a few minutes. What determines whether it looks good is the preparation before upload and the settings afterwards — consistent crops, properly sized files, a single aspect ratio, and a layout chosen to suit the images rather than the other way round. This covers the steps, the layout choice, speed, alt text, and the structural mistake that leaves image-led sites ranking for nothing.

How do you create a gallery in Squarespace?

Add a gallery section or block to the page, upload the images, choose the layout, and then set the spacing, aspect ratio and behavior — the last part being where most of the visual quality comes from.

The mechanics take a few minutes. What actually determines whether the gallery looks good is the preparation of the images and the settings applied afterwards, and both are usually rushed.

What should you do before uploading anything?

Crop consistently, size the files appropriately, name them descriptively, and decide the order — because fixing any of those afterwards is slower.

A gallery of inconsistently cropped images will look untidy in every layout available, and no setting corrects it.

Crop to a consistent shape

Mixed portrait and landscape images look deliberate in some layouts and accidental in most. Decide which you want.

Size files for the web before uploading

Large files slow the page, and galleries multiply that cost by the number of images.

Name files descriptively

The filename is one of the signals about what an image shows, and ‘IMG_4821’ says nothing.

Decide the order deliberately

The first few images do most of the work. Reordering later is possible and tedious.

Write alt text as you go

It is faster than retrofitting it later and it is required for accessibility.

Check the images look right on a phone

Most viewing is mobile, and detailed images frequently do not survive the reduction.

Which gallery layout should you use?

Grid for consistent shapes and quantity, slideshow for a small curated set, masonry for mixed shapes, and carousel where horizontal browsing suits the content.

The layout should follow the images rather than the other way round. Mixed-shape images in a strict grid produce awkward cropping, and uniform images in a masonry layout waste its only advantage.

The slideshow row is worth taking seriously: images after the first are seen by a small fraction of visitors, so anything essential should not be behind a click.

What settings actually change how it looks?

Aspect ratio, spacing, number of columns, and whether captions and lightbox are enabled — and aspect ratio does the most work.

Setting a single aspect ratio across a gallery is the fastest way to make inconsistently shot images look intentional.

How do you keep a gallery from slowing the page down?

Fewer, smaller, properly sized images — and being honest about how many the page genuinely needs.

Galleries are the most common cause of a slow page on a portfolio or hospitality site, and the cost falls hardest on mobile visitors.

Resize before uploading

A platform can serve smaller versions, but starting from an enormous original still costs storage and processing.

Limit the number on one page

Forty images on one page is a slow page regardless of how well each is optimized.

Split large collections

Several galleries on separate pages perform better and are easier to navigate.

Check the loading behavior

Images below the fold should not all load at once.

Test on a phone connection

Not on office broadband, which hides the problem entirely.

Watch what captions and overlays add

They are text and markup on top of the image cost.

What about alt text and accessibility?

Every meaningful image needs alt text describing what it shows; purely decorative images should have empty alt text rather than a description.

The distinction matters: describing decorative images adds noise for screen reader users, and leaving meaningful images undescribed removes information.

The image-containing-text row is the one most often missed, and it is the most damaging: any information that exists only inside an image is invisible to anybody who cannot see it, and to search engines and answer engines as well.

Do galleries help or hurt search visibility?

They can help when images are named, described and surrounded by relevant text; they hurt when they replace text entirely.

A page that is a gallery and nothing else gives a search engine almost nothing to work with, regardless of how good the photographs are.

What should surround a gallery on the page?

Enough text to explain what is being shown, for whom, and what to do next — because the images cannot do those jobs on their own.

This is the commonest structural mistake on portfolio and venue sites: beautiful images with no text, ranking for nothing.

How do you organize a large collection?

By what the visitor is looking for rather than by when you made it — usually by category, service, or project type.

Chronological ordering serves the owner rather than the visitor, and it buries the strongest work as soon as anything newer is added.

The second-to-last row is the honest advice for most businesses: a small selection of the strongest work outperforms a complete archive, because visitors judge on the weakest thing they see rather than the average.

What are the common mistakes?

Uploading full-size originals, mixing crops without meaning to, no alt text, no surrounding content, and showing everything rather than the best.

All five are avoidable in the preparation stage, which is why the preparation matters more than the gallery settings.

How do you know the gallery is working?

Whether people scroll through it, whether the page is fast on a phone, and whether visits to it lead anywhere.

A gallery that is admired and leads nowhere is the same as a well-received failure elsewhere: it needs a next step attached to it.

How should a gallery behave on a phone?

Fewer columns, larger touch targets, and no reliance on hover — because hover does not exist on a touch screen and anything hidden behind it is simply unavailable.

Captions or overlays that appear on hover are the commonest example: on a phone they either never appear or appear on tap, which competes with the tap that opens the image.

The row about text inside images matters twice over: it is unreadable when reduced, and it is invisible to search engines, screen readers and answer engines regardless of screen size.

Favicons, phishing emails and URL mapping

Three smaller Squarespace issues that generate a surprising volume of searches.

Favicon size Squarespace accepts is a square image, and the Squarespace browser icon — also searched as Squarespace symbol and favicon in Squarespace — is set in design settings rather than per page. It renders small, so detail is wasted; a single letter or mark reads better than a full logo.

Squarespace scam, Squarespace spam email, Squarespace scams email and Squarespace phishing email searches spike whenever a campaign circulates. The pattern is consistent: an email claiming your domain is expiring or your site is suspended, with a login link. A no reply Squarespace info address does not ask you to log in via a link. Verify by typing the domain yourself rather than clicking, and treat any domain-renewal email as suspect until checked in your own account.

URL mapping Squarespace supports is how you preserve search visibility when page addresses change — a redirect table in settings. It is the single most-skipped step in a rebuild, and skipping it is how a redesign loses traffic that had nothing to do with the design.

Wix, Webflow, mobile view and the Squarespace partner program

The adjacent-platform questions that arrive alongside Squarespace ones.

Wix agencies, a Wix website design agency, Wix web design services, a Wix website design service and searches for a Wix website designer near me all describe the same market as the Squarespace equivalent: builders configuring a hosted platform rather than writing code. The selection criteria are identical — who does the work, what the revision count is, and whether you get admin access at the end.

Webflow sits a step further toward development: Webflow ecommerce is more configurable than the hosted builders and correspondingly less forgiving. Webflow payment and Webflow payment gateways support the usual processors, and the practical constraint is that somebody has to maintain what gets built — Webflow rewards a team and punishes an owner who inherits it.

Mobile view

Squarespace on mobile renders from the same content with different breakpoints, which is why a Squarespace mobile view looks bad complaint is nearly always a content problem rather than a platform one: images cropped for desktop, headings too long, tables that cannot shrink. Check every page on a phone before launch rather than after.

Partner and referral programs

The Squarespace partner program and Squarespace referral program are for agencies and freelancers building on the platform, offering revenue share and client billing management. Squarespace schema markup is generated automatically for some page types and cannot be edited as freely as on WordPress, which is a real constraint for anyone who needs custom structured data.

One adjacent question worth answering here: what is value propositions in business model canvas — the box describing the specific benefit delivered to a specific segment. It belongs in a site build because it is what the homepage has to say in one sentence, and a site designed before that sentence exists is designed around a gap.

Anchors, tables, Calendly, site names and SEO plugins

Five practical Squarespace tasks people look up constantly.

What is an anchor link in Squarespace: a link that jumps to a section of the same page. Squarespace anchors, a Squarespace link to section and how to add an anchor link in Squarespace all use a section ID plus a hash link. They matter more than they sound for long pages, because they let a table of contents work.

Tables in Squarespace are the platform’s weakest content type. Squarespace insert table and add table to Squarespace options are limited to a markdown block or an embed, and neither is responsive by default — a wide table will break the layout on a phone unless it is wrapped in a scrolling container.

How to add Calendly to Squarespace, and Calendly Squarespace integration generally, is an embed block using the inline embed code. Place it on its own page rather than in a footer: booking widgets convert far better with nothing else competing on the screen.

Squarespace change website name and how to change site name on Squarespace are settings-level changes and separate from the domain. Changing the site title does not change the URL, and changing the domain does not change the title — the two are edited in different places, which is the source of most of the confusion.

Yoast SEO Squarespace and Yoast for Squarespace searches have a short answer: Yoast is a WordPress plugin and does not run on Squarespace. The equivalent controls — titles, descriptions, and clean URLs — are built into Squarespace natively, which is adequate for most sites. A Squarespace calculator, similarly, means an embedded third-party tool rather than a native feature.

Analytics, templates, trials, security, blogs and testimonials

The second wave of Squarespace questions, and the Canva ones that arrive with them.

Adding Google Analytics and Search Console

How to add Google Analytics to Squarespace: settings, then the analytics area, then paste the measurement ID. Add Google Analytics Squarespace flows changed with GA4, which is why older instructions mislead. Adding Google Analytics to Squarespace is separate from Google Search Console Squarespace verification — Squarespace Google Search Console setup uses a verification code in the same settings area. Squarespace Google console and Squarespace Google webmaster are the same thing under old and new names; Google Webmaster Tools Squarespace instructions still circulating refer to a product renamed years ago. How to check website traffic Squarespace shows natively is fine for a glance and thin for anything else.

Changing templates and themes

Can you change Squarespace template — on current versions, yes, but not the way people expect: Squarespace change theme behavior differs between Squarespace versions, and can you change templates in Squarespace depends on which one you are on. Squarespace can you change templates without losing content is the real question, and the answer is that content survives while layout choices frequently do not. Can you change template on Squarespace late in a build costs more rework than choosing carefully at the start.

Free trials

How long is Squarespace free trial: fourteen days as standard, so a Squarespace 14 day free trial and a Squarespace website free trial are the same thing. How to extend Squarespace trial is possible once by request in most cases. Squarespace free as a permanent tier does not exist — the trial ends and a plan is required, which is the answer people searching for it are usually looking for.

Site not secure warnings

Why is my Squarespace site not secure, and the related Squarespace website not secure warning, is almost always SSL provisioning rather than a real security problem. Squarespace HTTPS is issued automatically but can take up to seventy-two hours after a domain change. Squarespace SSL certificates unavailable usually means DNS has not fully propagated or a conflicting record is present. Squarespace site not secure warnings that persist beyond three days are worth raising with support rather than waiting out.

Blogs, templates and testimonials

Is Squarespace good for a blog: adequate rather than excellent — Squarespace blog layout options are limited compared with WordPress, and Squarespace blog layouts and Squarespace blog page layout choices are template-bound. Squarespace best blog templates are the ones with genuine index pages rather than a single scrolling feed. Squarespace church template and Squarespace church templates are a well-served niche; Squarespace for church and a Squarespace church website work well because the content model is simple. Squarespace templates for churches and Squarespace sales page templates are both widely available. A testimonial slider Squarespace supports natively is limited — testimonials on Squarespace, Squarespace testimonial blocks and testimonials Squarespace users build usually end up as a gallery or a custom block.

Newsletter blocks

The Squarespace newsletter block is how email capture is added, and a newsletter block Squarespace renders will connect to the built-in list or to an external provider. Newsletter signup Squarespace and newsletter sign up Squarespace flows are the same block configured differently. Placement matters far more than styling: a newsletter block Squarespace users bury in the footer collects almost nothing.

Fonts, assets and the Instagram feed

What font does Squarespace use by default varies by template; what fonts does Squarespace use in total is a large library including Google and Adobe faces. Squarespace font and Squarespace website font settings live in site styles, and Squarespace font pairings supplied with templates are usually a better starting point than choosing from scratch. How to download assets from Squarespace — Squarespace download assets and download assets from Squarespace — runs through the Squarespace asset library, which is also where uploaded files accumulate invisibly. How to add Instagram feed to Squarespace, add Instagram feed to Squarespace and adding Instagram feed to Squarespace all use the same block; Squarespace Instagram feed and Squarespace Instagram connections break whenever the token expires, which is the usual cause of a blank feed. Squarespace robots txt is generated rather than edited.

Custom design and how customizable it really is

How customizable is Squarespace: substantially, within the template’s structure, and very little outside it. Custom Squarespace design, Squarespace custom design and custom Squarespace website design work sits mostly in CSS and blocks rather than in templates. Custom Squarespace templates in the sense WordPress users mean do not exist. Squarespace features and Squarespace new features arrive on the platform’s schedule, and Squarespace options for a given need are either present or require a workaround.

Squarespace versus WordPress

Squarespace vs WordPress comes down to control against maintenance. WordPress vs Squarespace on cost is closer than it looks: Squarespace vs WordPress price comparisons usually omit hosting, plugins and maintenance, and Squarespace vs WordPress pricing including those is often line-ball. WordPress and Squarespace websites suit different owners rather than different budgets — if nobody will maintain it, Squarespace wins on that basis alone.

Canva: resizing, transparency and stock

How to resize in Canva, how to resize on Canva and how to resize a design in Canva all use the Resize control, which is a Pro feature; how to change dimensions on Canva for a free account means recreating the design. How to resize a template in Canva behaves the same way. How to make logo transparent in Canva and how to make logo transparent on Canva require a PNG export with background removed — how to create a PNG in Canva and how to create a PNG on Canva is the download step, and Canva logo no background is the same request phrased as an outcome. Does Canva have stock photos — yes; does Canva have stock images, Canva free stock photos, Canva free pictures and stock photos Canva offers vary by plan, with a limited free library and a much larger Pro one.

Squarespace beyond galleries: hosting, domains, SEO, video, buttons and support

The questions that follow a gallery build are almost always the same six, and they are answered here rather than left to the help center.

What Squarespace is, and what Squarespace web hosting includes

What is Squarespace com, in one sentence: an all-in-one website builder where hosting, the editor and the templates are the same product. What is Squarespace website building actually buying you is that you do not manage hosting separately — Squarespace web hosting is included rather than purchased. What is Squarespace for, in practice, is sites where design control matters more than extensibility. As a Squarespace content management system it trades flexibility for the fact that nothing breaks when the platform updates.

Squarespace domain names

A Squarespace domain name can be bought inside the platform or pointed at it from elsewhere. Buy domain name Squarespace flows are simpler but usually cost more at renewal than a dedicated registrar. Is Squarespace a domain registrar — yes, it sells and manages domains, which is why Squarespace manage domains exists as its own settings area. A Squarespace reseller arrangement is a different thing again and mostly relevant to agencies managing many client sites.

Squarespace for photography

Squarespace for photography is the strongest single use case for this platform, because the gallery handling and the image rendering are genuinely good. Squarespace photography sites benefit from the same thing that constrains other users: opinionated templates. Squarespace photography templates and any Squarespace template photography selection should be chosen for how it handles a full-bleed image on a phone, not for how the demo looks on a desktop. A Squarespace website for photographers lives or dies on image loading speed.

Favicons

A favicon Squarespace displays is set in design settings rather than in the page editor. Squarespace favicon uploads want a square image; how to change the favicon on Squarespace is a two-minute job that is frequently skipped. A favicon in Squarespace is one of the few settings that affects how your tab is recognized among twenty others, and a favicon on Squarespace left at the default is a small but visible signal of an unfinished site.

Squarespace SEO

Squarespace website SEO is capable but constrained. How to do SEO on Squarespace means working within the structure the templates impose: page titles, descriptions, heading order, alt text and clean URLs. How to increase SEO on Squarespace beyond that is mostly a content question rather than a settings one. Squarespace add keywords fields do not exist in the way people expect — there is no meta keywords box worth filling, because search engines ignore it. Squarespace SEO Reddit threads are useful for platform quirks and unreliable on ranking theory.

Adding video

How to add a video to Squarespace is normally an embed rather than an upload. How to add a video on Squarespace from YouTube or Vimeo is a block; embed YouTube video in Squarespace this way and the platform handles the responsive sizing. How to upload videos to Squarespace directly requires a plan that includes Squarespace video hosting, and for most sites embedding is both cheaper and faster to load.

Buttons

Squarespace buttons are a block type rather than a text style. To add a button Squarespace renders properly, use the button block instead of styling a link; a Squarespace button placed as a block inherits the site styles and stays tappable on a phone. How to add button on Squarespace pages is straightforward, and Squarespace add button placement matters more than its color — above the fold on mobile is where it earns anything.

Squarespace customer service

Squarespace customer service is email-first with Squarespace live chat availability that varies by hours and plan. Squarespace chat is generally faster than email when it is open. Squarespace customer support handles platform issues; it does not do site building or design work, which is the most common reason a Squarespace customer comes away disappointed by an otherwise competent support interaction.

Gallery, gallery block, image block — which one you need depends on your Squarespace version

On 7.1 galleries are sections; on 7.0 they are blocks. Single images use an Image Block on both, and choosing the wrong one is why people find the interface does not match the tutorial they are reading.

Nearly every confusion in this area traces to that version split, plus a second one: adding one picture and adding a set of them are different tools with different settings.

If a tutorial tells you to insert a gallery block and you cannot find one, you are on 7.1 and the feature moved rather than disappeared. The capability is the same; the place it lives is not.

Page-level controls: hiding pages, permissions, and passwords

Most of the settings people hunt for in Squarespace are one level deeper than the editor, in the pages panel and the account area rather than on the page itself.

How to hide a page on Squarespace depends on what hiding means. Dragging a page into the Not Linked section removes it from navigation while leaving the URL reachable, which is what you want for a thank-you page or a landing page fed by ads. Setting the page to private removes it from the live site entirely and returns a 404 to visitors. Adding a page password leaves it reachable but gated. Anyone asking how to hide pages on Squarespace in bulk should know the pages panel allows multi-select drag, which is faster than moving them one at a time.

Squarespace permissions govern who can do what inside the site. Contributor roles range from Administrator, which can do everything including billing, down to narrower roles such as Content Editor, Store Manager and Comment Moderator. The role worth understanding is Administrator versus Owner: there is exactly one owner, transferring ownership is a deliberate separate action, and an administrator cannot remove the owner. Agencies should be added as contributors rather than handed the owner login.

Knowing how to change Squarespace password — typed just as often as how to change password on Squarespace — is an account-level task rather than a site one: it lives in the account security settings, not in the site’s own configuration. The distinction matters because a request to change Squarespace password, or to change Squarespace password settings, often turns out to be a request to change a page password or a site-wide lock screen instead, which are three different settings.

Design controls people look for by name

A handful of Squarespace features come up constantly by name because the interface does not label them the way people describe them.

Fluid Engine is the drag-and-drop editor introduced with version 7.1, which replaced the older row-and-column layout with a grid you position blocks onto directly. Fluid Engine Squarespace sections behave differently on mobile, where the layout is edited separately rather than derived automatically, and that separate mobile layout is the most common reason a page looks right on a laptop and wrong on a phone.

A gradient background Squarespace section is set at section level rather than through custom CSS in current versions: open the section’s background options and choose a gradient, then set the stops. Older templates need CSS, which is why so much of the advice found online is more complicated than the current interface requires. Squarespace gradient background questions almost always resolve to checking which editor version the site is on first.

How to add a button on Squarespace is a two-part answer: a button block can be inserted anywhere a block goes, and most sections also carry a built-in button in their content settings. Knowing how to add a button in Squarespace matters less than knowing which of the two you are editing, because the built-in one is styled by the section and the block one is styled globally. To handle a Squarespace change button color request, edit the site styles rather than the individual button; the question of how to change the color of a button in Squarespace has a per-button answer only through custom CSS targeting a block identifier.

That block identifier is the other name people search. Every block on a Squarespace page carries a unique Squarespace block ID in the page source, in the form of a data attribute or a generated class. Finding the Squarespace block identifier and using it as a CSS selector is how single-element styling is done without affecting anything else on the site.

Content you have to work around: PDFs, markdown, and fonts

Three recurring limitations shape how content gets onto a Squarespace site.

A Squarespace PDF upload is handled as a file attachment rather than as a page. The file is added through a link or button, stored on Squarespace’s own file storage, and served at a Squarespace-generated URL. Because a PDF in Squarespace is a linked file rather than a page, its text is indexed independently of your site structure and cannot be styled; anything you want to rank should be a real page, with the PDF offered alongside it. The most frequent complaint about PDF Squarespace handling is that replacing a file changes the URL, which breaks existing links.

Markdown is available as a block type for people who would rather write than click. Understanding what is Squarespace markdown clears up a common confusion: the block accepts standard markdown syntax and renders it, which is useful for structured text and for pasting from a writing app, but it does not accept the site’s own shortcodes. What is markdown Squarespace questions usually come from writers who want headings and lists without formatting each one by hand.

Typography is set globally in site styles, and the best fonts for Squarespace are chosen the same way they are anywhere: one face for headings, one for body, tested at the sizes the site actually uses. The platform ships Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts libraries, so the question of best fonts on Squarespace is a licensing-free choice among a large catalog. Advice about best Squarespace fonts is worth discounting when it names faces without naming the pairing, because the pairing is the decision.

Integrations, translation, and marketing connections

The integrations people ask about most are email, translation and advertising.

Connecting Mailchimp to Squarespace is done through the form block or the newsletter block, both of which offer Mailchimp as a storage destination and ask for the audience to write to. How to connect Mailchimp to Squarespace in the current interface is an OAuth flow rather than an API key, which is why older guides asking for a key are out of date. Anyone working out how to link Mailchimp to Squarespace for an existing list should confirm which audience receives the subscribers before launching, because moving them afterward loses the signup dates.

A multilingual site Squarespace build has no native translation layer, which is why third-party services fill the gap. Weglot Squarespace installs as a script, detects the site’s text, serves translated versions on language-specific URLs and handles the hreflang annotations that search engines require. Weglot for Squarespace is priced by translated word count and page views, so the cost scales with the size of the site rather than with the number of languages alone.

Squarespace Facebook ads integration covers the pixel and the catalog rather than campaign management. The pixel is added in the marketing settings rather than through code injection, which matters because a pixel added twice double-counts every event.

Templates, verticals, and version migration

Template choice and platform version are the two decisions that are expensive to reverse.

Squarespace wedding website examples and Squarespace wedding examples are among the most searched template categories, because the format has a fixed set of jobs: a date, a location, an RSVP, a registry link and a schedule. Squarespace nonprofit website builds share that quality of a known content set — mission, programs, board, financial transparency and a donation path — which is why Squarespace nonprofit templates are worth starting from rather than designing blind. Squarespace real estate templates carry the same logic with listings and agent bios.

A Squarespace course builder question usually means one of two things: the platform’s own Courses feature, which sells lesson-based content with progress tracking, or a membership area used to gate content without lesson structure. They are priced differently and the choice depends on whether learners need to complete things in order.

Version migration is the awkward one. Squarespace Brine was the most widely used 7.0 template family, and a great many sites still run on it. Brine Squarespace sites do not convert automatically: updating Squarespace to 7 1 means rebuilding the site on the new version, because 7.1 uses a single template with per-section styling rather than a family of templates. Anyone planning to update Squarespace to 7 1 should treat it as a redesign with a redirect map, not as an upgrade button.

Squarespace AI SEO features and the platform’s built-in SEO panel handle titles, descriptions and basic structured data. The Squarespace sitemap URL is generated automatically at /sitemap.xml and cannot be edited, which is worth knowing before submitting it to a search console: pages excluded from the sitemap are excluded by their own settings, not by a sitemap file you can change.

Hiring for Squarespace, and comparing it with Webflow

The two questions that follow a platform decision are who builds it and whether a different platform would have been better.

A Squarespace agency or Squarespace web design agency is a studio that has standardized on the platform, which means faster builds and a smaller custom-code surface. A Squarespace website design agency is worth its fee when the constraint is time to launch and ongoing self-service editing; it is the wrong choice when the site needs behavior the platform does not have.

Webflow features that Squarespace does not match are mostly about control: a real CSS box model exposed in the interface, structured CMS collections with reference fields, and exportable code. Webflow benefits accrue to teams with a designer who thinks in layout systems. The tradeoff is that Webflow expects that person to exist, while Squarespace does not.

Design assets are usually produced outside both platforms. Learning how to search for images in Canva means using the Elements and Photos panels with keyword and color filters; how to find images on Canva and how to find images in Canva are the same question, and the useful detail is that filtering by orientation and by free-versus-pro saves most of the time. Knowing how to save Canva as PDF matters for anything print-bound: the share menu offers PDF Standard and PDF Print, and how to save a Canva design as a PDF for print means choosing PDF Print with crop marks and bleed. People asking how to save Canva as a PDF for the web should choose Standard, which produces a much smaller file.

Blocks and features people look for by name

Another set of Squarespace features that come up constantly because the interface does not label them the way people describe them.

A Squarespace calendar block displays events from an events collection in a month view, which is different from embedding an external calendar; the events have to live in the site. A Squarespace countdown block counts down to a date and is most often used for launches and sales. Squarespace cards, in the block sense, are the layout blocks that pair an image with text and a link, and they are the fastest way to build a three-across feature row without touching CSS.

Squarespace hide section on mobile is done through the section’s own visibility settings in current versions, and through a display rule in custom CSS in older ones. It is worth using sparingly: a section worth hiding on a phone is usually a section worth reconsidering, since most traffic is mobile.

A Squarespace CSS cheat sheet circulating online is almost always version-specific, and applying 7.0 selectors to a 7.1 site is the most common reason a snippet does nothing. The durable approach is to find the block identifier on the live page and target that, rather than to copy a class name from a blog post.

A Squarespace 404 page is configurable: any page on the site can be designated as the not-found page in the advanced settings, which lets you offer navigation and search instead of a dead end. Squarespace blog pages and Squarespace blog examples are worth studying for structure, since the platform’s blog is capable but opinionated about layout, and the sites that use it well lean into that rather than fighting it.

Commerce, business operations, and content on Squarespace

The platform now carries a good deal of business functionality beyond the website itself.

Squarespace products are the ecommerce items: physical, digital, service and subscription types, each with its own fulfillment behavior. Squarespace invoices are issued from the platform’s own invoicing feature, which suits service businesses billing project work without a separate accounting tool. Squarespace taxes are handled through built-in rate configuration and, in the United States, through an integration that calculates by jurisdiction; the platform calculates and collects, and filing remains the merchant’s obligation.

Stock photos Squarespace supplies come through integrations with licensed libraries inside the image picker, which is convenient and produces sites that look like other sites. Squarespace Instagram feed not updating is the most reported integration failure, and the cause is nearly always an expired authorization token rather than a platform fault: reconnecting the account in the connected-accounts panel restores it. Anyone trying to add Instagram to Squarespace for the first time uses the same panel.

How to add Google reviews to Squarespace website pages requires a third-party block or embed, because the platform has no native reviews widget; the usual route is a review-aggregation service that supplies an embed code. The same is true when you add Google reviews to Squarespace through a code block, and the tradeoff is a third-party script on every page it appears on. How to add meta pixel to Squarespace is simpler: the pixel field is in the marketing settings, and adding it there rather than through code injection avoids the double-counting that happens when it ends up in both places.

Templates, showcases, and the Squarespace community

The platform’s own ecosystem is a useful research resource before committing to a template.

Squarespace showcase pages collect sites built on the platform, organized by category, and they are the fastest way to see what a template family looks like with real content in it. Squarespace restaurant templates and a Squarespace bakery website build share a fixed content set — menu, hours, location, ordering — which is why the templates are so prescriptive. A Squarespace consulting website has the opposite problem: nothing about the content set is given, so the structure has to be decided before the template is chosen.

Squarespace Circle is the platform’s program for people who build sites for clients, and Squarespace Circle Day is its annual event for that community. Membership carries practical benefits for agencies — extended trials, transfer credits, priority support — which is worth knowing when comparing quotes, since a Circle member may be passing some of that on.

Does Squarespace have AI: yes, in the form of writing assistance inside the editor and a guided site-building flow that drafts structure and copy from a description of the business. Treat the output as a first draft rather than as content, for the same reason as anywhere else: it produces what everyone else’s prompt produces.

Squarespace and search, and the platforms people compare it with

Two questions close out most platform decisions.

Is Squarespace bad for SEO: no, and the belief persists from an earlier version of the platform that genuinely was limited. Current versions expose titles, descriptions, clean URLs, automatic sitemaps, structured data for products and events, and reasonable page performance. The real constraints are that the sitemap and URL structure cannot be customized and that heavy third-party embeds hurt page speed. Neither prevents a well-written Squarespace site from ranking.

Kajabi vs Squarespace is a comparison between a course and membership platform with a website attached and a website platform with commerce attached. If the product is a course with lessons, drip scheduling, quizzes and a community, Kajabi is built for that and Squarespace is not. If the product is a business that also sells a course, the reverse usually holds.

Webflow responsive design exposes breakpoints and the CSS box model directly, which is the capability Squarespace deliberately hides; that is the whole tradeoff between them. Wix development services occupy a third position, with the largest app ecosystem and the least portable output. Figma to Squarespace is not an export path — there is no conversion — so a Figma design becomes a Squarespace site by being rebuilt in the editor, which is worth knowing before a design is drawn without regard to what the platform can do.

Canva brand kits

How to create a new brand kit in Canva: brand kits live in the Brand section of a paid workspace, and each holds logos, color palettes, fonts and templates so that anything made from them is consistent. It is the single most useful feature for a small team producing its own graphics.

Sharing Canva work

How to share a Canva template: use the share menu’s template link option rather than an edit link, so recipients get their own copy instead of editing yours. Sending an edit link to a client is the most common way a master file gets overwritten.

Canva video thumbnails

A Canva video thumbnail is made at the platform’s own dimensions for the destination, and the thing that decides whether it works is legibility at the size it will actually be seen, which on mobile is roughly the width of a thumb.

Buttons, favicons, and the small interface details

Three things people search for by name when finishing a site.

CTA button ideas that actually improve conversion are about the words rather than the styling. A button labeled with the outcome — get the quote, book the call, start the trial — outperforms one labeled with the mechanism, and a button CTA that repeats the heading above it wastes the strongest element on the page.

Custom button CSS on a hosted platform is usually a matter of targeting the block rather than the global style, so that one button can differ without changing every button on the site. The properties worth setting deliberately are padding, which determines the tap target on a phone, and the focus state, which is what keyboard users rely on and which most custom styling removes.

Favicon examples worth studying share one property: they are legible at sixteen pixels. That rules out a full logo for almost every business, and the workable approaches are a single letter, a simplified mark, or a solid shape in the brand color. Supplying an SVG plus a 180-pixel PNG covers current browsers and the iOS home screen.

Hiring a Squarespace designer, and responsive breakpoints

Two practical questions at the end of a build.

Hire a Squarespace designer, or hire Squarespace designer as it is equally often typed, usually means the site needs something the templates do not do: a custom layout, a code-block integration, or a design system applied consistently across dozens of pages. For a straightforward build the platform is genuinely self-service, and the honest advice is that the money is better spent on photography and copy than on a designer to arrange the defaults.

Where a designer earns the fee is in the decisions that are expensive to reverse: template family and platform version, the site’s navigation structure, and the type and color system that everything else inherits. Those are worth an hour of someone’s judgment even on a project that is otherwise self-built. Members of the platform’s own partner program frequently pass on transfer credits and extended trials, which is worth asking about when comparing quotes.

Responsive design screen size questions have no fixed answer, because the correct breakpoints are the widths at which your own layout stops working rather than the dimensions of any particular device. The conventional set clusters around 480, 768, 1024 and 1280 pixels, and the discipline that matters more is testing on a real mid-range phone rather than by narrowing a desktop browser, since the two behave differently on touch targets and on font rendering.

Trending content, and enterprise digital marketing

Two phrases that arrive from opposite ends of the market.

Trending content, as a thing to plan for rather than chase, works when a business has decided in advance what it is about. The formats last months while individual trends last days, so the reusable asset is the format and the production habit rather than the specific idea. A business that joins every trend produces a feed about nothing in particular.

Digital marketing enterprise programs sit at the opposite end and have the opposite problem: too much process rather than too little. The characteristic constraints are governance across business units, a martech stack assembled over a decade, legal and brand review, and measurement definitions that differ between teams. The work that produces the most value in that setting is frequently not a campaign but a reconciliation — one definition of a lead, one source of truth for the pipeline, one reporting layer the executive team trusts.

Both ends share a principle worth stating: the constraint is rarely the channel. It is either that nobody decided what the business is about, or that too many people did.

Adding music to a Canva video

One of the most-searched practical questions in the tool, and the licensing point behind it.

How to add music to Canva video projects: open the video in the editor, go to the Audio tab in the side panel, and either choose a track from the built-in library or upload your own. Dragging the track onto the timeline places it; the trim handles set the in and out points, and the volume and fade controls sit in the toolbar above the timeline once the audio is selected.

The practical details that trip people up are all in the timeline. A track added while a single page is selected applies to that page only, not to the whole video, which is why music frequently stops partway through. Extending it across the project means dragging the audio bar the full length. And the platform’s audio ducking, where music drops under voice, has to be enabled deliberately rather than being on by default.

The licensing point is the one worth understanding before publishing. Tracks from the platform’s own library are licensed for use inside designs made there, and the free and paid tiers cover different catalogs; a track available on a paid plan does not stay licensed if the subscription lapses on content already published. Uploading your own music makes the licence your responsibility entirely, and using a commercial recording without a synchronization licence is the most common copyright problem in social video — the platforms’ automated systems detect it and mute or remove the post.

Frequently asked questions