7 Things To Check Before Launching Your Squarespace Website
Before you launch your Squarespace website, there are some things you will need to check. For example, you wouldn’t want to launch and realise a month later that your lack of enquiries is because your contact form isn’t working!
It can be easy to miss certain things when building your own website, so this post will help you check everything is ready before hitting publish on your new website.
This website launch checklist is written specifically for Squarespace, but a lot of the things to look out for are relevant on other website platforms too.
1. Check Your Form Blocks
It would be a huge shame if you forgot to connect your forms properly and ended up missing out on a bunch of clients from your website. That’s why this tip is probably the most important of them all - the whole point of launching your website is to attract and convert new customers and clients.
In Squarespace, you can check your contact form by following these steps:
Navigate to the website page your contact form appears on, and click Edit
Double click the contact form
Under the Storage tab, make sure that the option selected is the correct one. You can choose from Email, Mailchimp, Zapier and Google Drive.
I recommend Email for your contact form, because this will mean you’ll receive enquiries through your inbox and it will be easier to see them.
Make sure your email is spelt correctly. Squarespace is not able to know if your email address is the right one so make sure you check this!
Related: How to Customize Your Squarespace Forms with CSS
Likewise, if you’re using Squarespace’s form block to get people to sign up to your email list, make sure the block is connected properly. Squarespace allows you to connect these email marketing providers:
Mailchimp
Squarespace Email Campaigns
Other providers via Zapier connection
This is great for beginners, but it can be difficult to set up segments or other more complex systems through this Form Block. That’s why I recommend using the form embeds from your email marketing provider. This usually looks like a piece of code which turns into a form when added to your website through a Code Block.
I use and love Flodesk for my email marketing needs. It’s super affordable and works beautifully within Squarespace. It’s usually $38 per month, but you can get 50% for life with this link!
2. Make Sure Your Cookie Banner is Enabled
Cookies are small pieces of data that are collected when someone visits your website. This is what allows you to see analytics like page views and audience geographics for your website.
Notifying your audience that cookies are being used is a legal requirement in many countries. The last thing you want is for your website to be breaching these GDPR laws. If you’re not sure what GDPR (The General Data Protection Regulation) means, it’s simply a privacy law under the European Union that went into effect on May 25, 2018.
If your Squarespace website is attracting visitors or customers in the European Economic Area (EEA), the United Kingdom (UK), or Switzerland, then the chances are that you’ll need to display a cookie banner.
Here is an article from Squarespace that explains more about this and who it affects.
To turn on your cookie banner in Squarespace, there are a couple of steps to follow:
Head into the backend of your website
Go to Settings > Cookies & Visitor Data
You’ll see a panel that looks like this.
Make sure that you enable the switch, and select the Opt-In & Out setting. Squarespace recently released this setting in response to many users who felt the existing “Opt-In” setting was not GDPR compliant. Allowing people to Opt-Out of your cookies conforms to legal requirements better.
Your cookie banner may look something like this:
Although you can adjust many of the style options by clicking Customize below.
3. Enable a Custom 404 Page
If you’ve neglected creating a custom 404 error page (or didn’t realise you could!) then you’re missing out on a trick here. If someone visits your website through a broken link, then they’ll be redirected to this page.
Broken links can come from:
Missing or deleted pages
Incorrectly spelt links placed somewhere else on the internet
Pages where you’ve changed the URL
These can be pretty common, especially as your website grows, so making sure your users land somewhere they can navigate is very important.
This is the standard 404 page for Squarespace:
Not much to look at, right. Honestly, most people who land here will immediately click off your website. But we don’t want this! We want them to stay on your website and continue navigating around. A custom 404 page with different navigation options is the best way to achieve this.
You can create your own 404 error page by following these steps:
Create a new page just like you would for any other page.
Include personality and some calls-to-action. This could be links to your blog, shop or other pages that visitors may be interested in.
Go to Design > 404 Page and select your new page from the dropdown.
If you want a more in depth tutorial about creating a Custom 404 Page, read the blog post all about it!
Related: How to Create a Custom 404 Page in Squarespace
Here’s an example of what yours could look like:
And that’s it! Now when you launch your Squarespace website, you can expect anyone who accidentally lands on your 404 page to stay on your website and continue browsing.
4. Complete SEO for Every Page
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is so important these days - it’s how people are going to find your through Google and other search engines! For the sake of this post, we’ll be sharing the most important steps to take with SEO, but the reality is that there are a lot more ways to optimize your website for Google!
Related: A Complete Guide to Squarespace SEO: How to Rank on Google
There are two main things you can do for SEO on Squarespace - optimise the Page Title and Page Description of each page on your website. These are what displays on Google when someone searches for your website, and looks like this:
You can see here that the search result has a title and a description - usually these will just pull random content from the page, but you can edit them to read however you like.
This is important because a randomly pulled sentence from your blog post is NOT going to engage users in the same way that a carefully worded, keyword filled sentence will.
To edit your SEO titles and descriptions follow these steps:
Head into the backend of your website
Go to Marketing > SEO
This is where you can change the title and description for your homepage.
For the other pages on your website, go to Pages
Hover over the page you want to edit, and click the cog.
Select SEO from the pop up form and make your changes.
For blog posts, go to Pages and select your blog
Hover over the blog post and click the three dots, then choose Settings.
Select SEO from the pop up form and make your changes.
Make sure you’re including the types of keywords people are likely to enter into Google so that your page is more likely to come up.
5. Check Your Loading Speeds
This is a huge mistake I see people making, particularly with Squarespace websites. A really common way to add unique elements to a Squarespace website is by adding backgrounds or graphics - but these can hugely increase the loading time of your website.
Fortunately, there’s a simple way to fix this problem, and it involves following these steps:
First, go to Google Page Speed Insights to check your website speed. If it’s within the orange or red zone, I would recommend taking the next steps.
It’s likely that your images are too large and take too long to load, so you’ll need to compress them. Head to CompressPNG or CompressPNG and upload your images.
Once they’ve compressed, reupload them to your website and watch as your image load time dramatically decreases!
I love this trick because it’s very easy to implement on any Squarespace website and works like a charm. I have built many Squarespace websites over the years and find that image are always the #1 factor in a slow loading website.
Related: 7 Squarespace Website Mistakes You Need to Fix ASAP
6. Check Your Page URLS
Earlier we talked about broken links, and this is a very similar issue. Checking URLs is important because it’s very easy to end up with links like /new-page12 on Squarespace without realising.
Not only do these links look unprofessional, they’ll also reduce the chance of you ranking on Google because there are no keywords in them.
Here’s how you can check your links:
Go to Pages
Hover over the page you want to edit, and click the cog.
Select General from the pop up form and make your changes to the URL Slug
I would also make sure you repeat this for each blog post on your website. Depending on your settings, you may have automatic date/time URLs turned on for these posts which isn’t a good thing.
As we’ve mentioned, you want your URLs to include keywords, and since your blog posts are the most content heavy pages on your website, you don’t want to ruin the SEO juice by having a random date in your URL instead of keywords.
To make sure you’ve got custom URLs for your blog posts switched on, follow these steps:
Head into the backend of your website
Go to Settings > Blogging > Post URL Format
In the post URL field, make sure that it displays %t - this stands for “title”, meaning the title of your post.
Now if you ever forget to format a URL, it will automatically use the title of your post, which is bound to be much more readable than /blog/04/08/2021.
7. Upload a Favicon
My pet hate for new Squarespace websites is the default favicon. In case you’re wondering, a favicon is the little icon you see in the top corner of a browser tab, next to the page title.
Usually this is a simplified version of the logo, or a small coloured shape. Squarespace has a default favicon which is a little grey box - aka the biggest indicator of a fresh-outta-the-box Squarespace website.
If you do one of the things on the post, let it be this.
To change the favicon, follow these steps:
Head into the backend of your website
Go to Design > Browser Icon
Upload an image of your choice and hit save.
When uploading a favicon, it’s recommended you use a PNG.
Unlike JPG files, PNG files allow you to have a transparent background, which means your favicon will look nice across all different types of browsers. It won’t have the ugly white box around it like you may have seen before!
Unfortunately, Internet Explorer does not support PNGs as favicons, but with the exploding use of alternative browsers like Chrome, Safari, and the addition of Microsoft Edge, only 5% of internet surfers are still using this (extremely outdated) browser in 2021. That’s why I still recommend using a PNG for the best design experience!
