What Are The Limitations Of Squarespace?

Squarespace has some raving reviews for its customization and classy templates.

This one-step website building tool lets you create your own functional website from scratch. It is beginner friendly, easy to use and does not require any technical maintenance.

You needn’t buy separate hosting or domain somewhere else. Squarespace comes with everything that is required to launch a fully operational website.

Despite all these advantages, we found that Squarespace lacked some essential features and functionalities. In our blog, we are going to talk about the limitations we faced with Squarespace for some of our clients.

1. Adding a calendar

One of our clients whose website was built on Squarespace wanted to add a calendar in their contact form. In that calendar, people should be able to choose a date and that chosen date along with other details the user provides must be sent to the admin via email. We also required an option to block specific days in the calendar.

We contacted the support team for help and they said that there was no way of adding a calendar to a form block. It is possible only with third-party tools like Wufoo or JotForm. For blocking of dates, the respective form providers must be contacted to find out if the feature is available.

2. Trailing slash on the end of the URL

For another SEO client whose website was built on Squarespace, we had some trouble with a trailing slash (‘/’) at the end of the URL.

We tried to save a blog post URL with a trailing slash at the end, but it got saved without one. On the other hand for pages, the URL had a trailing slash.

Pages had proper canonical and trailing slash on the end of the URL. But for blog posts, even when we tried to add a trailing slash manually, it was published without one and even the canonical did not have a trailing slash.

We got in touch with Squarespace support team to resolve this. They said that, if the website is accessed from the main navigation, pages will have a trailing slash on the end.

But the blog posts are present on the blog page which is not accessed from the main navigation. This is why there was no trailing slash at the end of blog posts.

Also, we were able to access the pages irrespective of the presence or absence of the slashes. Example, the same page opened when we entered https://www.example.com/about-us/ and https://www.example.com/about-us

It should be noted that pages with or without a trailing slash on the end are read as two individual pages by search engines and could lead to content duplication and needless redirects. If a website has these problems it will decrease the speed of a website, search engines won’t know which pages to crawl, and may lead to a drop in search engine ranking.

Finally, they informed us that there was no way of adding or removing the slashes in the URL.

The team has made a note of this issue and forwarded to their engineering team for further scrutiny. There is no definitive timeline as to when the issue will be fixed.

3. Adding a slider

In one of the pages below the header, we wanted to replace the banner with a slider along with some overlayed text.

But in Squarespace, you can only add images on the slider and it is not possible to add text along with it. There is also no third-party code modification or addition for this feature.

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4. XML sitemaps

There are many tricks to optimize a website for SEO, and one of those is sitemaps. It literally shows the map of a website on a single page. Squarespace comes with an in-built XML sitemap, but it is unorganized and messy. Here are some of its limitations.

• Style information is absent in the XML file
• Sitemap cannot be edited
• Separate URLs of the pages within the index page will not appear in the sitemap, but the content of those pages will
• Standard priorities for pages and blog posts are set by Squarespace, you cannot alter them

5. Page limit

Below are some of the page and content limits of Squarespace. You can add up to,

• 200 products on each product page
• 250 images or videos in gallery and project pages
• 60 album track in ‘Album page’
• 100 page limit for ‘Index pages’
• Folders don’t have a limit, but a maximum of 10 is recommended. Also, you need to create a dummy URL for drop down as Squarespace will not allow an empty link
• 60 blocks to a page

If you want to give link to the parent dropdown folder, you have to use the ahref tag in the title field. Plus, the website can have a maximum of 1000 pages, but Squarespace recommends adding no more than 400 as it may slow down page load speed.

6. Preview mode

All the changes you make on the website are visible to the public immediately. This is a huge inconvenience when you are doing large updates.

7. SEO

‘Alt’ name cannot be changed for images. The name you set for the image will be taken as the ‘Alt’ name.

Only 404 pages can be redirected to the existing URLs. You cannot freshly redirect an existing page to another.

Also, their templates have a low rating score by Google’s Page Speed Tool. This could lead to poor user experience on mobile phones and may harm your search engine ranking.

8. Parallax effect

For example, if you want to have a different banner image for desktop and mobile view, parallax scrolling will be effected for mobile view. However, parallax scrolling won’t be affected if you use the same image for desktop and mobile view. You can also set a common focal point to display a particular part of the banner in both the views.

A different banner image for the mobile view can also be used if you’re okay with losing the parallax scrolling.

9. Backup

You cannot entirely backup your website with Squarespace, which is a major red signal. People make mistakes, and if someone accidentally clicks the wrong button and deletes some integral files, your website will be broken and you’ll face a nightmare scenario.

So there you have it!

For many, the above limitations may be a deal-breaker. But most likely they will not be an issue for you. It’s just good to know that these limitations are present in Squarespace.

Have you faced any limitations with Squarespace? Do share them in the comments section below.