What’s worth knowing in the Squarespace world.

For designers, developers, and people building businesses around Squarespace.

Omari Harebin 11/13/23 Omari Harebin 11/13/23

8 Must-Have Marketing, Sales, and CRO Plugins for Squarespace

Squarespace is a great platform to host a website, but it only has so much functionality built into it. That’s by design, of course. Squarespace has made a conscious choice to limit its extra functionality in favor of a streamlined and beginner-friendly platform. However, you can use third-party plugins and integrations just as easily as any other website on any other platform, so you have a lot of options available to you.

For this post, I’ve put together the most comprehensive guide I can on marketing, sales, a conversion rate optimization tools you can use with a Squarespace site. Many of these are tools I’ve used myself and can heartily recommend. If you know of a tool you think should be on this list and isn’t, feel free to let me know!

FOMO

FOMO stands for the Fear Of Missing Out, but that’s not a tool. FOMO.com is. You’ve probably seen it before on another website. When you visit a website – a restaurant, a store, a membership page – and you see a box appear in the corner telling you about someone else buying a product, that’s FOMO.com.

As the name implies, this app plays upon the natural fear of missing something good that your users feel. Seeing other people sign up, buy products, or reserve a space in your store/restaurant/webinar/whatever makes other people feel as though they should too. When combined with limited quantities of available spaces or products, this puts double the pressure on the user to make their purchase or reservation now, before they miss out and they’re all gone.

FOMO also helps as an element of social proof. It’s a visible indicator that other people are making purchases or reserving spaces, and that proves your site is trustworthy enough for people to make purchases, thus encouraging further purchases. It’s a little cyclical, but it works.

2. Live Chat

This is the first of two live chat systems I’ve found and can recommend for Squarespace users. This one is provided by Live Chat Inc. and is a powerful, centralized hub for communicating with your customers. On the surface, it looks like a simple website based live chat app. On the back end, it aggregates a variety of different channels, including SMS messaging, WhatsApp, Email, Messenger, and more. It gives you a central dashboard you can use to communicate with anyone who wants to reach out to your business.

Live Chat can be used in a variety of different ways. Well-timed prompts can allow you to reach out and answer questions your visitors may have, which gives you a chance to convert them into customers. Accessible chat apps serve as a great customer service portal, to address service and support issues your existing customers may have. Lie Chat has a variety of useful features as well, including the ability to embed product links as recommendations.

An optional (but useful) feature is the AI-powered chatbot. One of the problems with live chat systems is that you don’t always know the intention of a visitor. If a customer is browsing your page and you pop up a chat asking if they have any questions about your service as a sales push, you’re wasting your time. Conversely, if you pop up a message offering support for issues to someone who isn’t a customer, it does you no good. You can spend time customizing every page’s chat prompt for the people most likely to be on that page, sure. Or, you can use a chatbot to serve as a filter and screener. The AI can interpret the first few messages from a user, and refer the chat to the appropriate team within your business.

3. Pure Chat

Pure Chat is the second of the two chat apps I’m recommending today. It has the same sort of value proposition as Live Chat, so I’m not going to dig into it quite as deeply. It’s a little less sophisticated, though. It doesn’t have as many channel integrations, it has canned responses but only a basic trigger-response system rather than an AI, and while it maintains customer profiles so you can customize responses, it doesn’t do so automatically.

So why recommend this one when Live Chat is arguably better? Two reasons. The first is that sometimes a simpler system works better for a business. You don’t need robust integrations with a dozen communications channels if you don’t use those channels. You don’t need a complex AI when you only have a handful of reasons a user might chat with you.

The other reason is the pricing. Pure Chat has a simple two-tier pricing structure with a handful of included agent accounts. Live Chat charges per agent, which can quickly ramp up if you have a mid-sized or larger team, and their pricing structure is more complicated. In general, I think Pure Chat is better for small and mid-sized businesses, and Live Chat is better for larger brands. I’ve included both of them so you can make your own decision.

See here for more Live Chat options for Squarespace

4. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a great marketing and sales tool. It’s primarily focused on email marketing, and it covers every stage of that process.

Landing pages. ConvertKit allows you to make landing pages in just a few minutes using an interface quite similar to the Squarespace page builder. This page single-mindedly promotes your product/course/project and encourages users to sign up for your mailing list to learn more.
Opt-in forms. Sign-up forms embedded on various pages on your site – whether it’s on a sidebar widget or the primary focus of a page – allow you to capture interest no matter where on your site a user might be.
Email designer. No email marketing program would be complete without the ability to create beautiful, engaging emails. The email designer ConvertKit uses lets you create gorgeous emails that work for conversions, newsletters, or other purposes, and function equally well on desktop and mobile viewers.

ConvertKit also has a suite of automation features that let you set up trigger and event chains to automatically kick off welcome campaigns, drip marketing, ongoing newsletters, new product ramp-up, onboarding, and other email chains. They have some example chains, but you can create your own from scratch as well.

5. MemberSpace

MemberSpace is an app that some people love and other people hate. It allows you to set up a members-only area and lock content on your site so that only people who sign up can view it. A lot of people use it for courses and other content-based products, but you can use it for anything you like, it’s very flexible.

MemberSpace also has a host of features for pushing that membership. They integrate “abandoned cart” recovery features, failed charge recovery, alternatives to cancellation to retain members who might want to cancel, automated upsells, and more. You can use tiered membership plans, the ability to smoothly upgrade and downgrade plans, and an unlimited membership roster.

Overall, this app is very good if you want to lock content or products behind a membership. Some people love it. If you don’t have a compelling reason for people to sign up, though, it won’t work very well. Since content hidden behind a paywall isn’t visible to Google, you can’t just lock a blog and expect it to work, it’ll tank your SEO, so you need something above and beyond your basic marketing to compel people to sign up.

6. SEMRush

SEMRush is probably the best-known tool on this list, and it’s certainly among the most powerful. It’s a very powerful and very robust tool for analyzing a website, whether it’s your own or a competitor’s.

SEO. SEMRush helps perform a keyword analysis of a site to see what keywords it is targeting, what domains are linking to it using what anchors, and more. It can also do SERP tracking and has an SEO auditor that can analyze your site for technical and general SEO mistakes.
Content Marketing. When SEMRush scans a site, it can analyze what kinds of topics you cover, as well as what kinds of content in that same niche are ranking well online. It can give you content ideas and recommendations, track brand mentions, and even analyze your existing content and find ways you can improve it.
Competitor Research. While scanning your website is powerful in its own right, so too is scanning your competitors. Analyze their traffic, discover competitor promotion strategies, and uncover keyword coverage gaps you can take advantage of.
Advertising. Analyze your or a competitor’s paid advertising campaigns, look for strategies you may be missing, and find the best keywords to target with your campaigns.
Social Media. SEMRush allows you to schedule and post your social media content through it, analyze your article performance, monitor and analyze competitors, and handle social media ads.

All of this is extremely powerful, and I wholeheartedly recommend that anyone with the budget for it buys access to this tool. That’s the kicker, though; you need the budget. Even the basic plan costs $120 per month, though, so it might be out of the range of many small businesses.

7. MySiteAuditor

SEO is a huge part of online marketing, and it can be distressingly difficult to figure out where your site is weak and what mistakes you’re making. MySiteAuditor does two things for you, as a business owner.

First, it offers the ability to perform an automated SEO scan to audit your website and find SEO mistakes you might be making. It’s not the most robust SEO auditor out there, but it covers most of the bases and gives you actionable ways you can improve. You can see their example report here.

Secondly, it gives you the ability to “sell” these SEO audits. You can embed a form on your site to, essentially, refer users to MySiteAuditor for their SEO scan. The primary benefit to you is that, to claim that audit, they have to sign up for your mailing list. You can make the opt-in and even the report branded with your brand as well, which helps encourage users to believe it’s your offering, not a resold offering.

The biggest drawback to this as a lead generation tool is simply that it might not be in line with what you already sell. A marketing company, a web services company, a consulting company; these kinds of businesses can give away an SEO audit with some semblance of authority. A clothing retailer, a gardening consultant, or a musician? People outside of marketing will have a harder time using a marketing service as an incentive.

8. RightMessage

RightMessage is a service that is centered around one primary idea; that the best marketing involves delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Marketing is about timing just as much as it is about persuasion and value propositions.

RightMessage goes about this from several angles. First, they help you uncover who your visitors are, what they’re interested in, what they’re looking for, and what their needs may be. Second, they let you use that information to personalize – automatically – the calls to action that appear on your site. Three users visiting the same page on your site can get three different CTAs based on how much the system knows about them and their stage of your customer journey.

The best part is, none of it requires tedious coding or developer implementation. Much like Squarespace and many of the tools I like to recommend, it can all be done through WYSIWYG and drag-and-drop editors, templates, and a little data-based analytics.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it; my list of highly effective and extremely useful tools for marketing, conversion optimization, and sales. To review:

Live chat software makes for a powerful call to action that gets the conversation started with your visitors, helping to improve conversions, reduce friction, and solve customer pain points.
FOMO is a set-it-and-forget-it CRO plugin to give your customers a sense of what’s popular and let them know about other customers who have purchased from you. This instills a sense of trust in your business and relieves checkout friction.
Convertkit makes it easier to create new pages for email blasts, sales, pay-per-click campaigns, and any other marketing tests.
SEMRush takes the guesswork out of your content strategy and gives you unique insights into your competitors. It helps to know what is working (and what isn’t working) for your closest competitors, so you can focus on topics that drive a large amount of traffic.
MySiteAuditor will find errors on your site and areas for improvement. If you’re in the marketing industry, you can even offer this to customers and turn their auditing tool into a lead gen tool.
RightMessage lets you set up customized calls to action. Trust me, this is a very sophisticated and effective solution compared to using the same call to action on every page. You can give your users exactly what they are looking for, depending on which page they land on.

I know it’s still a fairly short list of tools, and that’s why I’m asking you what you think.

If you have a moment, I’d like to ask you two questions for the comments below. First, have you used any of these, and if so, what do you think? Second, do you have other suggestions for tools and platforms I should check out? I always love hearing from my readers, so feel free to leave your feedback!

Support Team 10/10/23 Support Team 10/10/23

Squarespace Blogging: A Comprehensive Guide

Written by: Travis Vance | Owner of Coyote Moon

Blogging remains a fundamental tool for personal branding, content marketing, and knowledge sharing. Squarespace, the best website builder for bloggers, offers an extensive blogging platform that caters to both beginners and seasoned bloggers alike. In this comprehensive guide, we'll dive into the benefits that Squarespace brings to bloggers. From its intuitive built-in SEO tools to customizable display options and advanced content creation capabilities, Squarespace empowers bloggers to create an engaging ecosystem for their readers.

1. Leveraging Squarespace's Built-in Tag, Category, and Search Filters

Bloggers understand that effective content organization is vital for a great user experience. Squarespace simplifies content organization with its robust tagging and categorization features. These tools empower bloggers to create a logical and easily navigable structure for their posts, making it a breeze for readers to find relevant content.

Blog post tags and categories:The tagging and categorization system in Squarespace allows bloggers to classify their posts into topics or themes. This categorization is displayed prominently on your blog, making it easy for visitors to explore related content.
Squarespace search block: Additionally, Squarespace's search filter feature further enhances user experience, allowing your readers to search for specific topics or keywords, significantly improving the accessibility and usability of your blog.

For example, imagine you run a cooking blog. With Squarespace's built-in tagging and categorization features, you can neatly organize your recipes into categories like "Appetizers," "Desserts," or "Healthy Eating." When a reader visits your blog, they can easily navigate to the section that interests them the most, enhancing their overall experience.

2. Built-in Squarespace's SEO Tools:

Optimizing your blog for search engines is crucial to attract organic traffic. Squarespace understands the pivotal role of SEO and offers an impressive suite of SEO tools that empower bloggers to optimize their posts with precision.

SEO customization options: one of the standout features of Squarespace is its user-friendly SEO customization options. Bloggers can effortlessly customize critical elements of each blog post, including:

Thumbnail images
Blog post excerpts
Blog post URLs
SEO titles
SEO descriptions
Social sharing images

This level of control enables you to tailor your content to match the search intent of your target audience, ultimately improving your blog's search engine visibility.

Social sharing: Squarespace simplifies the process of integrating your blog with popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Search Console. By doing so, you can widen your reach and engage your audience more effectively. Sharing your blog posts on these platforms becomes a seamless part of your content strategy, increasing the chances of your content going viral and attracting even more visitors to your blog.

3. Squarespace Posting Options:

A flexible posting schedule is essential for bloggers to maintain consistency and keep their audience engaged. Squarespace's versatile posting options give you full control over your publishing schedule.

Create a blog post draft: write your blog post content and save it as a draft for future use.
Blog post needs review: maybe you have a large content team that needs to sign off on your blog post before it goes live.
Schedule a blog post: set a specific date and time for your blog post to publish to the web. Squarespace makes it effortless to ensure your content is released precisely when you want it to be.

This flexibility is especially useful for bloggers with busy schedules or those who want to maintain a regular posting cadence. You can batch-create content when you have the time and schedule it to be published at optimal times, ensuring that your blog remains fresh and engaging for your readers.

4. Blog Page Display Options:

The visual presentation of your blog plays a large role in capturing your audience's attention. Squarespace understands this and offers a wide range of diverse display options, allowing you to craft a blog layout that aligns perfectly with your brand's identity and your readers' preferences. You can choose from various blog page layouts, including:

Basic grid layouts
Side-by-side blogs
Single-column designs
Masonry layouts
Alternating side-by-side blogs

Each layout offers unique visual appeal, making it easy to find one that resonates with your content and audience.

Fine-tuning the details is where Squarespace truly shines. You can adjust the number of columns, image placement, text alignment, excerpt visibility, and more to create a visually captivating blog layout. For instance, if you run a photography blog, you might prefer a masonry layout that showcases your images in a stunning grid format, allowing your readers to appreciate your work in all its glory.

5. Tailoring Blog Post Display Options:

Each individual blog post is an opportunity to engage your readers and leave a lasting impression. Squarespace allows you to tailor each post to perfection by offering various display options to match your brand's style and the preferences of your audience.

Customize the content width
Set the text alignment
Adjust the meta content positioning (above or below the title)
Show/hide categories, publish dates, author names, and author profiles based on your blog's unique needs.

These customization options are invaluable for bloggers who want to create a cohesive and immersive reading experience. Whether your blog focuses on tech tutorials, travel stories, or fashion tips, Squarespace's flexibility ensures your content is presented exactly how you envision it.

6. Building Captivating Blog Posts:

Creating compelling blog posts is at the heart of successful blogging. Squarespace offers an extensive range of content blocks that help you craft captivating and informative posts. Here is a list of useful content blocks for your blog posts:

Text block
Image block
Button block: calls-to-action
Gallery block: display a gallery of images related to your blog post
Video block
Form block: collect feedback or comments on your blog post
Newsletter block: allow your readers to sign up for your newsletter
Social links block: allow your readers to connect with you on social media
Product block: pull in products from your online store to sell through your blog post

Squarespace provides the tools you need to bring your ideas to life. Imagine you're a travel blogger sharing your adventures around the world. With Squarespace's content blocks, you can seamlessly integrate stunning photo galleries and even embed videos to provide your readers with an immersive travel experience. Adding interactive forms allows your audience to engage with you directly, perhaps by asking questions or sharing their own travel stories.

7. Enhancing the Reader's Experience:

Creating an exceptional reader experience is key to building a loyal audience. Squarespace offers many interactive features to engage with your audience. But there are customizations you can add to take your blog to the next level:

Reading Time Calculation: Squarespace allows you to insert code that calculates estimated reading time based on word or character count. This feature gives your readers an idea of how long it will take to consume your content, helping them plan their reading accordingly.
Social Share Buttons: You can easily incorporate social media share buttons using embed codes from platforms like ElfSight. This enables your readers to share your content with their networks, increasing your blog's reach and potentially attracting new visitors.
Table of Contents: Squarespace supports the inclusion of a table of contents using code snippets from services like Adlytic Marketing. A table of contents makes it easier for readers to navigate longer posts, quickly finding the sections that interest them the most.
Related Articles: Keeping your readers engaged is essential. Squarespace offers built-in summary blocks that allow you to display related articles at

8. Creating a Standardized Blog Template:

Consistency is key to building a strong brand and a loyal readership. Squarespace makes it easy to create a standardized blog template that you can use for every new post. This template ensures that your blog maintains a cohesive look and feel, making it instantly recognizable to your audience. In your standardized template, you can include elements such as:

"Related Posts" summary blocks: to encourage further exploration of your content.
Newsletter block: allows your readers to subscribe to your updates, ensuring you can reach them with new content and updates.
Button blocks: consistent call-to-action sections at the end of each post can guide your readers to take desired actions, such as signing up for your services or purchasing your products.

Conclusion:

Squarespace offers a comprehensive and user-friendly platform for bloggers to build, customize, and optimize their blogs. With its built-in SEO tools, flexible display options, and a wide range of content blocks, Squarespace empowers bloggers to create engaging and visually appealing content that resonates with their audience.

By utilizing the full suite of Squarespace's blogging features, you can improve your online presence, drive more traffic to your website, and ultimately boost your chances of ranking on page one in Google search results.

So, whether you're a seasoned blogger looking to revamp your website or a newbie, Squarespace is your ideal partner for publishing your content online. Your path to successful blogging begins here, with Squarespace.

Travis Vance is the owner and lead designer at Coyote Moon, a Squarespace web design studio. After working as a Squarespace employee for 7 years, he’s taking his in-depth knowledge on the inner workings of the Squarespace platform to help business owners of all sizes reach their full potential online.

Omari Harebin 8/18/23 Omari Harebin 8/18/23

2023 Squarespace Template Industry Report

I've been studying the Squarespace template market since before it was a thing.

As a marketer it’s been fascinating to watch it grow.

The designers who've paved the way have done so through sheer passion, creativity and innovation.

Recently I surveyed 70+ shops to get a better sense of where the market is today.