7 Squarespace Hacks to Transform Your Squarespace Website
It pretty much goes without saying that Squarespace is a very popular website platform for businesses. It’s not very hard to figure out why. Squarespace is affordable, powerful, versatile, and generally pretty easy to make look great and professional.
However, one of the challenges for businesses is that Squarespace (like every platform) is that it doesn’t necessarily to EVERYTHING that EVERY business would need it to do.
So how do you get a drag and drop platform like Squarespace to add the features your business needs?
The answer: plugins.
Plugins, if you’re unfamiliar, is a generic term for a software component that adds a custom feature to a website using some kind of code. Squarespace allows you to add all kinds of plugins to change the design and functionality. They are usually pretty easy to use and don’t require extensive coding experience. The challenge is to know where to find these plugins.
This is why we put together this post, to point you toward the best plugins and plugin developing companies to help take your business Squarespace website to the next level. If you do not yet have a Squarespace website, go ahead and click here to start one today!
1. Countless design enhancements with Ghost Plugin
To kick things off I’d like to send you over to Ghost Plugins. I can’t say enough great things about these guys as they offer by far the most helpful and affordable plugins for Squarespace.
They offer a wide range of design options from simple free plugins to add a unique design element to your website (expanding buttons, casting a shadow on your images, enhanced summary block designs, etc). They also offer a number of “super plugins”, which is what they call their enhanced paid plugins. Among these are real game-changing plugins that have the potential to transform your business website into something truly unique.
Want to buy a template so you don’t have to start from scratch? They sell those as well for around $200, which for the time this could save you building from scratch is a great value. Use the coupon code “CLEARPATHCHURCH” and get 10% off anything in their store. Check them out!
3. Countdown Timer with Squarepaste
Squarepaste is another one of my go-to plugin websites because of the relevance of their plugins for business websites.
One of those really helpful plugins is a countdown timer. Businesses often love to place a countdown on different parts of their website in order to create excitement about an upcoming launch or event, but Squarespace doesn’t have a built-in tool for this.
The countdown timer from Squarepaste is easy to install and can be adjusted over and over again for new upcoming events.
4. Blog Archive Sorting with Squarepaste
Another one of Squarepaste’s offerings is its summary filter plugin. If you don’t know, the best ways to attract visitors to your website is through you blog (hence you'r presence here and now) to organize your blog archive in Squarespace is to create a blog page and then use categories and tags to organize your sermons by series and subject.
However, the built-in search and filtering tools in Squarespace could stand for some visual and functional improvements. The Squarepaste summary filter creates filters for all of the ways you could organize your blog summary blocks and with the click of a button, sorts and pinpoints the article you’re looking for. It’s quick, smooth, and totally worth it.
5. Content Accordion with Squarepaste
Another one of Squarepaste’s plugins I’ve used many times is their accordion-style dropdown plugin. This helps businesses place the quantity of content they want on every page without having it all visible at once. So if you have a section on vision, mission, and values, you can have one section with three accordion drop downs that allow people to click on which one they want to see. While Squarespace DOES have a built in accordion, it doesn’t allow you to add anything to it other than text.
This feature makes your website design much cleaner and also more interactive.
6. Admin UI Tweaks with Squarewebsites
This one is not as exciting but believe me, it’s important if you find yourself editing your website a lot. The SquareWebsites UI (user interface) Tweaks plugin is crazy simple to install and in a nutshell, makes everything in the Squarespace user interface better.
It makes quick links to frequently used developer pages for quicker editing, makes the blogs easier to categorize and tag, and a long list of other enhancements.
But the really clutch feature that I couldn’t do without for businesses is it brings back the gallery summary blocks to Squarespace 7.1. So if you’ve built your business website in Squarespace in the 2-3 years, odds are you built it on 7.1. I think 7.1 is an improvement on the Squarespace platform in many ways, but one thing they decided to leave off the upgrade are gallery blocks.
If you’re unfamiliar, gallery blocks are a lot like summary blocks, and while summary blocks are to “summarize” block posts in a block anywhere on your website, a “gallery” block does the same for your photo galleries. I use this feature a lot on business websites to create a simple place to put sermon art for sermon series or staff pages. Gallery blocks are helpful for these features because whenever you add a new series or a staff person, you need to easily rearrange their order, which is much harder to do with individual image blocks.
Anyway, this plugin brings it back like it never left. Love it!
7. Lazy Summaries with Squarewebsites
Another really helpful offering from SquareWebsites is their “Lazy Summaries” plugin. Like the UI Tweak plugin, this one alters the user interface of all of the summary blocks to add a lot more functionality. It allows you to add a lot more posts to any given block, tweak the size and design of the block to be mobile responsive (different settings for desktop, tablet, and mobile). It just generally gives you a lot more control. So when you’re adding a summary block of sermon posts, you can do so much more with them.
Need some help with your business website? We’d love to connect and discuss it with you! From custom Squarespace builds to beautiful templates to ongoing website management, Square Switch is your one-stop-shop for your business website needs. Just reach out and we’ll get a conversation going!