Is Squarespace bad for SEO?

Squarespace’s help centre makes one claim about the platform itself: all Squarespace sites are built for clean indexing by search engines. It serves images in a smaller format automatically, and it provides the settings a site owner needs.

Squarespace publishes an SEO checklist, and almost every item on it is the owner’s to do.

• Add a site title and a site description.
• Add a separate SEO description to each page.
• Structure each page with headings.
• Add descriptive text to every image.
• Confirm that the secure connection is switched on.
• Connect a custom domain.
• Verify the site in Google Search Console and ask Google to index it.

A site launched from a template with none of these done looks finished and says very little to a search engine.

Three things account for most Squarespace sites that are outranked.

• The settings were never filled in. Every page shares the site’s name as its title, and has no description of its own.
• The pages are heavy. Squarespace recommends pages of 5 MB or less and images of 500 KB or less, and template designs built on large photographs often exceed both. Our guide to why a Squarespace site is slow covers the fixes.
• The content is thin. A template encourages a few elegant pages, and search rewards a page for each thing customers look for.

The owner of a Squarespace site chooses a template and fills it. How the pages are built and delivered is the platform’s business. That is the trade a website builder offers: less to manage, and less to adjust when a competitor’s site is faster.

Three checks show where your own site stands.

1. Check which of your pages Google holds: search for site: followed by your domain. If pages are missing, start with why a Squarespace site is not showing on Google.
2. Put your home page, and the home page of a competitor who is not on Squarespace, through PageSpeed Insights on mobile.
3. Open one of your pages and the page that outranks it, and compare titles, headings and how fully each answers the search.

If the settings are complete, the pages are as fast as the competition and the content is as full, the platform is doing its job. If the gap is in speed and will not close, a rebuild is the remaining answer.