Considering Squarespace As Your Website Builder?
One of the primary considerations when building a website is its ability to perform well in organic search. Squarespace, a popular website builder known for its design-forward templates and user-friendly interface, often comes into question regarding its SEO capabilities. It’s common for us to hear, “Will my Squarespace site actually rank?” and “How can I customize my Squarespace site for SEO?”
This post aims to thoroughly analyze Squarespace’s SEO features and effectiveness, examining its strengths and the limitations we see as a professional SEO agency.
Understanding SEO Basics
Search engine optimization improves a website’s visibility on Google and Bing. Good SEO practices help websites rank higher in search results, driving more organic traffic and sometimes acting as the lifeblood of the business. Effective SEO involves a combination of on-page factors (like content and internal linking), technical elements (such as site speed and mobile-friendliness), and off-page factors (including backlinks and brand signals).
Squarespace’s SEO Features
Squarespace provides various built-in SEO tools designed to help users optimize their websites. These features include customizable meta titles and descriptions, clean URL structures, automatic XML sitemaps, pre-configured robots.txt files and mobile-responsive templates. Squarespace also integrates seamlessly with Google Search Console, allowing users to monitor their site’s performance and submit sitemaps directly to Google.
Customizable Meta Tags
Squarespace allows users to customize meta titles and descriptions for each page, which is fundamental step for on-page SEO. Meta tags provide search engines with information about a page’s content, influencing how it appears in search results. By enabling users to create unique and descriptive meta tags, Squarespace helps improve click-through rates from search engine results pages (SERPs). Additionally, users can create proper heading tag structure within their pages by choosing H1, H2, H3 tags, so on and so forth.
Clean URL Structures
Squarespace generates clean, user-friendly URLs by default. A well-structured URL is important for SEO as it helps search engines understand a page’s content and improves the user’s experience. For example, a URL like www.example.com/service/residential-roofing/ is more descriptive and beneficial for SEO than a URL with random characters or hierarchies. Messy URL structures are largely a thing of the past and thankfully, Squarespace offers easy-to-read URLs.
XML Sitemaps & Indexing
Squarespace automatically generates an XML sitemap for your website. An XML sitemap lists all the pages on your site, making it easier for search engines to find and index your content. This feature ensures that new content is quickly discovered and indexed by search engines, further improving visibility in search results. Squarespace also autogenerates the robots.txt file, an HTML file on your web server that acts as the front door to your website for search engines.
Mobile Responsiveness
Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. Squarespace templates are fully responsive, ensuring your site looks and performs well on all devices, which can positively impact your search engine rankings. This is another given that most content management systems have been able to master for the benefit of both users and SEO.
Integration with Google Search Console
Squarespace’s integration with Google Search Console allows users to track their site’s performance and identify any SEO issues. If you’re not familiar with Google Search Console, this tool from Google provides valuable insights into how your site is performing in search results, helping you make data-driven decisions to improve your SEO strategy.
Site Speed & Performance
Website speed is a critical factor for both user experience and SEO. Slow-loading sites can lead to higher bounce rates, negatively affecting search rankings. Squarespace sites generally perform well in terms of speed, but performance can vary depending on the chosen template and the amount of multimedia content used. Users should optimize images and minimize the use of heavy scripts to maintain fast loading times.
Content Management
Lastly, effective SEO relies heavily on high-quality content. Squarespace offers a robust content management system (CMS) that allows users to create and manage content with ease. The platform supports various content types, including blogs, galleries, and product pages for e-commerce stores, making it versatile for different types of websites. Additionally, Squarespace’s blogging features are particularly strong, with built-in tools for tagging, categorizing, and scheduling posts, which are all beneficial for SEO.
The Hard Truth: SEO Limitations of Squarespace
While Squarespace offers many basic SEO-friendly features as we’ve described, there are limitations to be mindful of.
No Third-Party Tools (Plugins)
Advanced SEO customization can be more challenging than platforms like WordPress, which offers extensive plugins and more granular control over SEO settings. For example, while Squarespace allows for basic meta tag customization, it lacks the advanced SEO plugins available for WordPress that can provide detailed insights and recommendations.
Restricted Code Access
Squarespace’s closed environment is a major limit to its flexibility. Users who require extensive customization and advanced SEO techniques might find Squarespace restrictive and frustrating. For example, certain schema markups and custom scripts may be more difficult (even impossible) to implement on Squarespace than on more open platforms.
Heading Tags Are Messy
While you are able to edit headings in the Squarespace page builder, it’s not intuitive at all. Squarespace makes its H1 tag enormous, causing most designers to skip right into an H2 tag. Further, there’s no clear way to manage the hierarchy of heading tags. For average users and small business owners getting started on Squarespace who might not know much about heading tag structure, this can create content related issues really quick.
Templated Meta Data for Blogs
Squarespace has come a long way with its meta data functionality, but there’s still one major flaw — you are unable to customize meta data (titles, descriptions) for blogs. Instead, Squarespace assumes users will want to use a templated approach for blog posts and makes it impossible to edit the meta data. If you plan to publish a lot of onsite content in the form of blogs, just know you will face roadblocks with one of the most fundamental pieces of on-page SEO.
No Ability to Edit Robots.txt Files
As we previously mentioned, the robots.txt file acts as the front door to your website for search engines. It’s essential function is to tell crawlers what pages or directories they are allowed to read and index. While Squarespace generates this file for you, it’s not possible to make any edits to it. What if you have a set of pages you’re testing but you don’t want indexed in Google? What if your site has duplicate content that you want search engines to ignore? What if your site experiences crawl bloat every time Googlebot visits it? These are just a few potential situations where you would want to be able to edit the robots.txt directives, but can’t in Squarespace.
Should You Abandon Squarespace in the Name of SEO?
This is another question we often receive and the honest answer is (as with most things in SEO)…it depends. It truly depends on where you are in your brand journey, how much you are willing to invest in the SEO of your website and how complex your website needs to be. For businesses just starting out online, DIY site builders like Squarespace can be a budget-friendly way to get started. It will show you how simplistic or how complex a website can be and how Google will rank the website.
So if you’re just getting started, don’t be afraid to start out on a platform like Squarespace. You’ll learn quickly if it’s right for your business goals and then you can make a decision to stick with it or move on. Outside of SEO, it’s important to remember that limited access to code means your website development company won’t be able to make many customizations. You get a website out of the box with a pretty theme, but don’t expect it to be incredibly unique or function how a customized website would.
Squarespace Alternatives: WordPress and Shopify
If you’ve reached the point of wanting to leave Squarespace due to SEO issues or otherwise, we of course recommend WordPress for most websites and Shopify for e-commerce applications. Both of these content management systems have more flexibility in terms of customizations and code access, and they offer superior SEO configurations compared to a DIY site builder like Squarespace.
Make An Informed Decision
Squarespace is a solid choice for users who are just getting started and need the basics of SEO covered. Its features, such as customizable meta tags, clean URLs, XML sitemaps, and mobile responsiveness, provide a strong foundation for SEO . Additionally, the platform’s user-friendly CMS makes managing and optimizing content easy. All in all, if your business niche isn’t overly competitive, you can be successful with Squarespace.
However, the foundational elements of on-page SEO will only take you so far. When you need to use third-party SEO plugins, make edits to the site’s code including the robots.txt file or make any customizations in favor of SEO, you’re going to get stuck on Squarespace.
Ultimately, the decision depends on your specific needs and the control you require over your website’s SEO. By understanding each platform’s strengths and limitations, you can make an informed decision about which is the best fit for your website and SEO strategy.
We would be happy to dig into the details if you’re considering Squarespace for your business website and have questions about its SEO capabilities. Schedule a consultation and let’s chat.
