Free Squarespace Templates

This post is currently under reconstruction. Some sections and images may be missing.

Does Squarespace have free templates?

Yes, your Squarespace template is included in your site plan. There are over 200 free templates to choose from.

When you start a site, it defaults to one of the Squarespace 7.1 templates but you can also start with a template from Squarespace 7.0.

Here’s a shortcut to those 7.0 templates.

On 7.0, you choose a basic template family (like Brine, Bedford, Galapagos, or Tremont), and then customize your site within the bounds of that template. Each template family has its own set of unique features, which are only available within that template family. You can see how they compare here. 

On 7.1, all templates have access to the same features. The different templates you can choose as starting points are exactly that: starting points. They have different configurations, but you can change between elements at any time. 

Of course, at any time, you can change between template families on 7.0, and change elements on 7.1, but changing templates from a 7.0 to a 7.1 site, requires starting from scratch.

Can you design on Squarespace for free?

Free One Page Squarespace Templates

Free Squarespace Blog Templates

Free Squarespace Templates for Photographers

The Pros and Cons of Free Squarespace Templates

First, let's talk about the benefits and drawbacks of free templates. Again, I'm not specifically talking about the default templates that Squarespace offers, though some of these pros and cons apply to those as well. 

Pro: They're free.

Nothing beats the price of free. When you're just getting started as a small business or an individual blogger, the budget can be a huge concern. There's no reason to spend money if you don't have to, and there are plenty of free options for Squarespace.

Pro: They make your site look more unique.

As I mentioned up above, one of the main drawbacks of default templates is that a lot of people use them. Free templates have an inherently smaller user base, and thus make your site look more unique than the default templates do.

Unfortunately, that's just about all I have to say in favor of free templates. Now, strap in, and let's dig through the cons.

Con: They typically lack support and documentation.

If you're not a developer, and you don't know your way around custom code, a lot of free templates are going to leave you out in the cold. They might have basic installation instructions, but other than that, you're on your own. If you want to tweak it, if you need help installing it, or if you get errors along the way, well, hope you know someone who can help you figure it out.

Con: You have to DIY the installation.

One thing I like that many paid templates and plugins do is offer an automated installation. Essentially, it's a script that starts you on a specific page, and then runs through various menus and inputs the custom code you need for the template. Unfortunately, this has a somewhat high barrier to entry, so free template designers rarely make such a script. Of course, not all paid scripts offer this either.

Con: They might not be comprehensive with styling all elements.

When you use a blockquote on your site, is it styled? When you use a bulleted list, what are the bullet points? There are hundreds of little decisions like this to make when you customize a template, and a lot of free templates don't cover all of the bases. You'd be surprised; I've even seen some that don't uniquely style headings and links! 

Should You Go Free, or Paid?

Now, given the name of my site and the fact that paid Squarespace templates, you might think I'm biased. Well, I am, a little, but I genuinely don't think free templates are worthwhile for most people.

If you're thinking about using a default template, that's great! Plenty of small businesses use them, and many successful sites get their start with a default template. I have nothing against them, really, other than the lack of uniqueness inherent in using a default template.

Free templates, meanwhile, tend to be worse in my opinion. They often have gaps in coverage and are generally less well-designed. Some are great! Most of them aren't worth using. Stick with defaults instead, if you aren't willing to pay for a design.

Paid templates cost money, which means many individuals and small businesses aren't going to want to use them. That's fine too! They serve a role for businesses and people with budgets, to set their sites apart from the rest.

The other option, of course, is to hire a developer to create a custom design for you. That's a whole other post, though, so I'll save that topic for another time.

What do you think? Do you agree with me about free and paid templates, or do you have a different perspective? Let me know in the comments. If you have any additional comments, questions, or concerns, feel free to reach out at any time!

How to show off your Squarespace Portfolio

Hey Squarespace designers: when you build websites for others, what’s the best way to show them off?

We talk with many Squarespace designers, both freelancers and small agencies that are relatively new in their business and just want to be able to attract steady clients. Your portfolio plays a big role in doing this, so it’s important to get that right.

What sorts of things should you consider? Let’s take a look:

Download our tips for web design portfolios here

Curate your portfolio

Hey we get it, sometimes you feel that you have to show all of your past work in your portfolio, but that can actually work against you. It’s not that you’ve probably got poor examples in your portfolio, but that you’re bound to have projects that you’ve done just to have the work. In other words, those projects weren’t the ideal jobs you want to be doing.

We’ve talked about the idea of an “ideal customer” previously; those clients who are awesome to work with and have the sorts of project needs that you really enjoy taking care of. How do you get those customers? Well, for one thing, you should curate your portfolio so that it shows them related work and gives them a good idea of what you could do for them.

If you put every last project in your portfolio, you run the risk of your ideal customers skipping on by. Not because your work sucks, but because they totally miss the projects that are relevant to them. You dilute your messaging so people become unsure as to whether you’ll be a good fit for them.

Honestly, potential clients don’t spend a lot of time trawling through multiple examples in your portfolio. They’re more likely to scan over a few that catch their eye, so make the top few items count. If you feel you don’t have enough examples of the work you really want to be doing, you could create a mockup or two to use in your portfolio. 

Before you post any new project to your portfolio ask yourself; does this show off the work I want to do for ideal customers? “Dress for the job you want!”

Take screenshots

Hoo boy, this we know for sure: if you don’t take screenshots the minute you’ve finished a website, you will, at some point, live to regret it. You don’t need to learn this lesson from experience because seriously, many designers have gone before you and can attest to this!

You pour hours and hours of time into crafting a well-designed website, fixating on each detail and making very intentional choices for graphics, fonts, headlines and images. You make sure you’re following best practices with conversions and usability.

Then you hand it over to the client.

Within a day or two, they’ve “made some tweaks” and added content that doesn’t look great or impacts the usability of the website. When you remember to go back and grab a screenshot, it just doesn’t look like the polished website you handed off.

If you’re in early days building your portfolio and that happens to be an “ideal client” website, you’ll be pretty disappointed to miss taking a screenshot. The website probably won’t be the same again (unless you get your hands on it).

Bottom line - take the screenshot as soon as you’re finished, before you hand the website off!

Source: Squarespace

Choose a portfolio style template

We’ve written about some of our favorite Squarespace portfolio templates here. You can also browse the Squarespace directory for portfolio-style templates to start from scratch.

Use a good portfolio setup

You have a few options with Squarespace when it comes to creating your own web design portfolio. If you’re running 7.1, then portfolio pages are a new feature specifically for that version. 

Squarespace describes portfolio pages as “stylized landing pages that link visitors to sub-pages.” It’s as simple as adding a portfolio page from the home menu and selecting your preferred layout. The different layouts available are shown below:

From there, you can style the portfolio section. The basic options include features like spacing, image aspect ratio, hover effects, background and colors. Next, you add sub-pages which is where the content of your portfolio will sit. You can add up to 40 sub-pages (but for a website designer, that’s usually too many!). You can’t move sub-pages to another portfolio page at this stage, so give it careful thought as to how you want it laid out before getting stuck in. One suggestion would be to use one sub-page per project and have a few screenshots on each page. 

If you serve more than one industry, you might want to consider multiple portfolio pages. For example, if you serve real estate agents and architects, you might have one page as a “real estate website portfolio” and another as an “architect website portfolio.”

What if you’re running Squarespace 7.0? You don’t have the option to add portfolio pages to every site, but there are multiple templates that have been created with portfolios in mind. For example, the Avenue template features an adapted, grid-based Index Page that allows you to organize your content into thumbnails and titles which click through to individual gallery pages and descriptions.

Another popular option is to use the blog page as a portfolio, either by using a “portfolio” category that can be sorted with a dropdown menu, or by having a separate blog page that is just for your portfolio. This blogpost from Big Cat Creative gives some great ideas, all supported within 7.0 or 7.1 (if you were to choose not to use portfolio pages).

Squarespace designer portfolio examples

It often helps to see what other web designers have done with their portfolios. Here are a few different examples of Squarespace designers:

Kerstin Martin

Kerstin focuses more on her online courses these days, but it’s still important that she keeps up a portfolio of her work. People can clearly see that she knows what she’s doing! (Also, check out Omari’s interview with Kerstin, recorded just prior to the COVID pandemic taking hold in the USA. How will Squarespace entrepreneurs be affected?)

Soda Creek Digital

This UK-based design agency is one of Squarespace’s “hire an expert” picks. Their portfolio is quite varied in terms of the clients they serve, but their design, consistently showing sites as they appear on different screens is pretty cool.

Flaco Zacarias

Flaco’s portfolio is an example of a scrolling gallery style, keeping his website design to one page. Anyone interested can click on the linked sites to view the full website. If you were to do something like this, again, we’d suggest just having a few examples as most people won’t view a large slide show.

Christy Price

We love the design flare shown in Christy’s portfolio, with the consistency in how she presents the featured images for each project. She also limits her portfolio to 12 examples, so it’s not too overwhelming for a potential client.

More Squarespace website portfolio examples

Final thoughts

Your portfolio is one of the most important marketing tools for drawing in new clients. Make it a thoughtful, feature piece with a handful of examples of your best work for the clients that you really want to work with.

It’s totally okay to not put every project in your portfolio, even if you actually enjoyed working with the client. They might not represent what you really want to be doing, so it doesn’t make sense to add their project as an example.

Lastly, think about how your portfolio is organized. Does it clearly state who you want to work with? Is it easy for the client to look through? Make your portfolio a showcase to be proud of.

3 ways to Connect Squarespace to ShipStation

Squarespace is a powerful platform for starting up an online business, but it doesn't necessarily handle everything. One of the biggest gaps in coverage for businesses is shipping and fulfillment. As a business owner, you have the option to go with any of a dozen or more different shipping and fulfillment companies, but you have to pick one to run your business through.

One of the best is ShipStation. They're trusted by over 100,000 businesses and with good reason. So, let's take a look at what they offer, and how you can use them with Squarespace.

What Does ShipStation Do?

As I mentioned in the intro, ShipStation is a shipping and order fulfillment company. Their tool offers a wide variety of features to help order fulfillment, well, happen. When a customer orders something from your store, what happens?

Without ShipStation, the order information is delivered to you, and you have to handle it. You have to keep track of the order, you have to pull products, you have to create a shipping label and print it off, you have to package the order and mail it. It's all manual, it all involves a lot of paperwork or working with different spreadsheets and digital systems, and it's generally all a mess.

With ShipStation, all of that is handled for you. When a customer makes an order, that order is referred to your supplier, through one of their 70+ channel integrations. They handle everything that needs to be done between getting an order and shipping a product, with robust controls and reporting available to you. They do:

Order management. You can even set up automated rules to help you with applying actions to certain kinds of orders, based on criteria, performance, and even channel.

Shipping. They gather all of the information necessary to create shipping labels in the fastest and cheapest way, saving you time and money. They can also handle batch processing and printing.

Branding. The ShipStation shipping process can also be branded in various ways, from creating branded shipping labels to offering a custom returns portal to offering a tracking page for items.

Inventory. Anyone who has had to handle inventory manually knows how much of a pain it can be. It's even worse if you're dealing with disparate suppliers or multiple warehouses. ShipStation allows you to manage inventory alerts, view stock levels, and allocate stock easily. 

They also have some unique features to go with their Squarespace integration. ShipStation uses Squarespace features including order syncing, customer shipping preference selection, tracking number updates, and Squarespace-based reports.

All of this is highly valuable, of course, so it's no wonder that so many businesses turn to ShipStation for their fulfillment needs. The question is if you're setting up a store on Squarespace, or you're converting from a manual system to ShipStation, how can you integrate the two?

Use Native Integration

The first and easiest option is to simply use native linking between ShipStation and Squarespace. ShipStation is well aware that a large portion of their userbase is on Squarespace, so they have native integration. It's also quite easy to set up. Here are the instructions.

1. Log into your Squarespace account.

2. Log into your ShipStation account. If you don't already have one, you'll need to register one.

3. In Squarespace, click on Commerce, then on Shipping.

4. Scroll down to the section labeled "Connect ShipStation" and click the Connect button.

5. Click Next, since you're already logged into ShipStation. Click Next again.

6. You will be given two pieces of information; your Squarespace Domain and a generated password. Save these.

7. In ShipStation, click on the Settings gear icon.

8. Click Selling Channels, then click Connect a Store or Marketplace.

9. Choose Squarespace from the list.

10. Paste in the Squarespace domain and password from earlier in the process, and click Test Connection.

11. In Squarespace, click Connect to ensure the ShipStation connection goes through.

12. In ShipStation, click Finish to finish adding your Squarespace store to your dashboard.

Once you've done all of this, you're ready to go. You can set up whatever rules, fulfillment options, and labels you need to configure. This is all part of using ShipStation; customizing shipping labels, choosing preferential communications channels, and so forth. 

You can read more about this process, including watching a video of the connection process, on this page.

Use an eCommerce Plugin

If ShipStation has a default integration with Squarespace, why would you want to use anything else? Well, the truth is, there are several reasons.

First of all, ShipStation might not do everything you want it to do. While they do have a robust set of automation rules and customization options, they are still somewhat limited. Squarespace also only sends so much data to ShipStation via their API, so there's not necessarily an option to use some of your Squarespace information in order fulfillment.

For most small stores, this is fine. You don't need the world's most robust shipping and fulfillment platform when you're selling from one supplier, through one website. 

Where things fall apart is if you have multiple sites. Many merchants set up accounts with multiple suppliers, and when you're managing multiple suppliers, you might need a more robust system to handle them. Additionally, some people set up multiple commerce sites in different niches, all selling through the same platforms. ShipStation will require you to configure each of these individually, and it can be a hassle to do all of this through Squarespace.

Using a "middleman" plugin can help a lot with this. For example, you have an option like CartRover.

CartRover is a platform that streamlines the order process. They sit in the middle of the network, aggregating all data feeds and distributing data to different channels as necessary. 

So, on one side, you have Squarespace, with one or many different Squarespace sites. You can also use CartRover with various other platforms, such as Shopify. If you're running multiple different stores, they can all feed data into CartRover.

On the other side, you have the fulfillment system. ShipStation is the focus of today's post, but there are dozens if not hundreds of other fulfillment platforms out there, all of which perform similar sets of features. Finding the one you like the most (or using more than others) is part of the challenge of running a business successfully.

The key benefit to this system is that, if you choose to change aspects of your business on one side or another, you don't have to worry about a service interruption. If you change away from ShipStation, CartRover will still be receiving your data and can still forward it on as long as you have orders coming in. You can add integration for your new shipping system and seamlessly transfer over, without interruptions.

The same goes for the site side. Want to change away from Squarespace? I don't know why you would, but if you do, you can, and you will just need to forward data to avoid interruptions. You can read more about this integration here.

Use an Automation Engine

In my mind, if you're going to use a middleman, you might as well go with something more robust. CartRover is great if all you want to do is manage the transferring of eCommerce data from Squarespace to ShipStation, with a little extra thrown in for management and flexibility. 

However, CartRover only does so much. They're an automation engine, but not a true automation engine. They're narrowly focused. 

True automation engines are just API linkups that allow you to do whatever you want. You can send data through ten different systems automatically with the right configuration of flows. Want to send data to an archive? Want to automatically generate custom reports? Want to handle data in a unique way? Want to inject custom code with API access? You can't do that with Cart Rover or with default integrations.

If you want a more customized solution, you want a real automation engine. Luckily, there are several you can try. Zapier, Automate.io, and IFTTT are all popular options. There are, however, quite a few more out there. Microsoft owns one, for example, as does Adobe. If you have ties to one or another ecosystem already, using their system might be a good idea.

The biggest downside to using an automation engine is that you need to customize everything yourself. A platform like CartRover has all of the business processes you need already configured. With something like Zapier, you need to configure it all yourself.

While this gives you more flexibility, it also means you have to make sure you're covering all the bases. If a user purchases an order of multiple products, will it be bundled properly? If they apply a shipping discount, will the data be forwarded correctly? You need to think through the process carefully.

You're also susceptible to API limitations and limitations on the platform itself. This can be an added expense you don't want to pay, on top of what you're already paying for Squarespace and ShipStation. 

Alternatives to ShipStation

ShipStation is a pretty great shipping and fulfillment platform, but it's not the only one. As I've mentioned, there are quite a few others out there.

If the reason you want to use something like CartRover or Zapier is that you want a feature that ShipStation doesn't offer by default, another thing to consider is that maybe a ShipStation alternative does. So, what are some of those alternatives?

Spocket. This is a fulfillment app specifically made for dropshipping. It works with both US and EU suppliers, making it an ideal platform for that particular kind of eCommerce. It helps you get wholesale prices, which is a core business model for many.

ShipBob. This shipping and fulfillment platform is often cited as one of the biggest competitors to ShipStation. It too has Squarespace integration by default. More importantly, it allows you to leverage their network of global warehouses, so there's virtually always going to be two-day shipping no matter where in the world your customers happen to live. It's very convenient and surprisingly cheap for what it is.

Shippo. What about cases where you want to handle all of the shipping and fulfillment yourself, but you don't like the way Squarespace runs things? Shippo is a simple app that handles generating and printing shipping labels, very cheaply. They can get you discounted shipping rates for all of the major carriers, automatically. The downside is, well, that's all they do.

Order Desk. This is an order management app similar to ShipStation, intending to add more automation to the entire process. They have a rule builder to help you sculpt out a completely automated workflow. They have over 300 integrations with other systems as well, so if you want to add in another data feed the way you might with Zapier, you can do it from one centralized platform. It can work quite well.

Easyship. This is very similar to both Order Desk and ShipStation. It does shipping labels including discounted shipping, it syncs orders and handles returns, and it has worldwide tracking integrated into it.

These are just the shipping and fulfillment apps available to you with Squarespace by default. If you're willing to link a third-party app instead, you have even more options on the table. Pretty much no matter what you want to do with your shipping, you can, if you can find the right app.

Which Option is Best?

So which of these choices is best for you? Well, that depends entirely on your business needs. If you're trying to get a simple system up and running, using the default integration with ShipStation is more than enough. If you want something with more robust features or deeper integration, using a middleman is great. If you want a completely custom setup, Zapier or Automate.io can help. It all depends on what you need and how your business grows over time.

Have you used ShipStation with a Squarespace site before? If so, how did it work out for you? Let me know in the comments below.