As most of you already know, Squarespace is a fantastic tool for business owners and bloggers who need an easy, attractive platform for building a website.
Learning how to use it is not complicated and best of all, it’s affordable for small businesses and even entrepreneurs just starting out on a new venture.
However, the fact that Squarespace templates are beautiful, simple, and easy to setup is also why many users have a hard time customizing their site and making it look different, unique and personalized all while remaining efficient from a marketing perspective.
I’ve prepared some helpful tips that I’ve found for switching up the look and feel of your Squarespace site as well as helping gain more traffic and an increased conversion rate. Some of these might be new to you and some you might already know or use on your Squarespace site, but I hope you’re able to dig deeper by implementing the following Squarespace tips.
Labelling Images- Alt Tags
Alt tags is text associated with an image that mostly search engines will see instead of the image. Search engines use them to identify the content of a image. Adding alt-text to images is a fantastic way to give your site a quick and easy SEO boost to climb higher in search engine rankings. This tip can require a lot of time according to the amount of images your site has but it’s certainly good practice for all websites as it’s excellent for SEO if done properly. Try using targeted keywords in your image alt-tags as a bonus tip!
Set Image Focal Points
With focal points (the small grey circles that appear over images you’re editing), you can control the focus area in your images.
In many cases, the system will crop an image so it fits efficiently in your template. When you move a focal point in an image, you reposition the image within its container and adjust what displays in the cropped area. For example, you may want it to focus on someone’s face, or another specific part of an image.
Simply go to the image you want to edit, and drag the small circle to the area you’d like to highlight to ensure it doesn’t get cropped in the wrong place.
Upload a Browser Favicon
Customization is all in the details, from the color of your navigation menu to that little image that appears beside your website’s name in a web browser tab, also known as branding. Get rid of that black box and add a touch of your brand to the browser by uploading a custom favicon. In the main menu, click Design > Logo & Title and under the Browser Icon (Favicon) section, upload a .png file with a transparent background (a white box around your image doesn’t look quite as professional). Not sure how to make your own Favicon? Just upload an image here for free to get yours.
Don’t forget that favicons don’t appear very big on the tab, so try to find something simple, something that doesn’t show many details like a letter or an icon. By adding even a small detail like a favicon, your site will appear more professional, exclusive and customized.
404 Error / Page Not Found Custom Page
This isn’t essential, but it is something that can make an important difference to your website. You can personalise your 404 Error page to make it friendly and approachable rather than a mistake when someone types in an old or incorrect URL relating to your site. Just add a new unlinked page with your chosen graphics and text, then go to Settings/Website/Advanced/404 Error / Page Not Found. Here you can select the dropdown and choose the page you’d like people see. Bonus tip, try collecting an email from it by offering a coupon, a free ebook or anything of value.
Multiple Languages in the Same Squarespace Site
Localization is a huge topic in terms of Squarespace, unfortunately there’s no easy way to have a multilingual Squarespace site by just using Squarepace, you’ll have to build several versions which turns into a mess. Thankfully, we (Bablic) offer an extremely easy way to translate Squarespace (Bablic X Squarespace tutorial) using just one line of code. Try it now, for free, just visit our homepage and enter your URL to get started.
Squarespace Cover Page Autoplay Video Backgrounds
Are you asking if asking if is it possible to create cover pages with automatically looping background videos? The answer is yes!
Get this FREE addon that allows you to install looping video backgrounds on Squarespace Cover Pages. This solution uses a locally hosted video rather than a video from YouTube, Vimeo or other streaming video services.
To learn more about how to do this, read here.
Using Google Analytics to Measure Visitor Engagement
“78% of you will start reading this article but only 31% of you will read all of the way to the end. Find out how I know.”
A Scroll Hint that Fades out When the Page is Scrolled Down
Facebook Object Debugger for sharing pages
Sometimes you realise that Facebook is either picking up the wrong image, or no image at all.
The Facebook Open Graph Object Debugger is a free tool that allows you to preview and understand how your page will look when shared on Facebook. It also allows you to change its cache and force the changes you would like to make.
Enter the page URL you’d like to check and select ‘Show existing scrape information’. At the bottom of the results you’ll find a preview of what Facebook has recorded and how your post will be shared.
From there you can go back to your website to edit your image accordingly if it’s cropped oddly and alter your page title and description if required.
Connected Account for Social Media
One obvious but important thing you should make sure of is if your Squarespace website is connected and consistent with all of your social media accounts.
Go to Settings/Website/Connected Accounts and you’ll find the option there. You can then click on “Connect Account” and choose the ones you’d like Squarespace to link up. Make sure you have your usernames and passwords accessible.
Create Custom Buttons, Borders, and Graphics
The best way to customize your Squarespace site and make it your own is to fill your brand into it, and one of the best ways to do that is through photos and graphics; they’re a great way to bring in colors, fonts, and other visual elements of your brand.
There are unlimited things you can do to change and customize your Squarespace website. What you need is to try to use some of the tips mentioned above, a little of coding experience and some creativity!
I hope this post will help you! If you have anything to add or ask, just keep in touch or leave a comment below and we’ll be happy to answer you.