Squarespace 7.1 - What's all the fuss about?
After months of beta testing, Squarespace officially released its biggest updates in years in February. All new websites started on the Squarespace platform going forward will automatically be a 7.1 website.
There’s been some big and exciting changes with the update, but there’s also some frustrating drawbacks. If you don’t have a website yet and are looking at Squarespace, I would still highly recommend it. Or if you already host your website and are thinking about rebuilding it on 7.1 - here’s a list to help you make sure it’s a good fit for you!
The best features of Squarespace 7.1 :
Even more modern templates
Squarespace has always been known for its beautiful and simple looking website templates - which they grouped into families based on features and style. The templates have gotten even better looking AND now all have access to the same functionality. This means as your business grows and evolves, you can effortlessly add new areas to your website to help you to serve your customer base.
Style editing
Squarespace has made it incredibly easy to style your entire website with your brand colours, by just uploading your logo. It will then give you a few themes to choose from and all of the text, sections, buttons and more on your website will fall into line with your chosen theme.
Want to change a section? It’s easy to remove the default to make a bolder statement and draw attention to specific statements.
Additionally, changing fonts for the entirety of the website has also gotten more straightforward. You can choose from a wide range of web fonts to ensure your brand is represented beautifully.
Page sections
Squarespace 7.1 pages are designed to add sections of content, rather than the content blocks previously used in 7.0. These allow for more functionality, better styling and easier to find features. It encourages scrolling, multi-functional website pages.
Heading 4
It seems small, but this is really important for aesthetics, but also for search engine optimisation (SEO). The older version of Squarespace only allowed for 3 levels of headings, which was very limiting. They’ve also made it more user friendly by calling the headings ‘Extra Large’, ‘Large’, ‘Medium’ or ‘Small’ rather than H1-H4.
Easier banner and background images & video
They have made having images and video behind text a much nicer experience. You have more control over how much of the image appears, the transparency and more. All of this you were able to do before, but it took a lot more effort to get the look just right!
The platform will continue to get better and better
As this is the new Squarespace, there are still some features that don’t work perfectly or that haven’t been built yet. But they will be perfected as Squarespace continues to develop this version of their platform. The last overhaul was around 5 years ago, so we can only assume that Squarespace will spend the next few years listening to their users to perfect version 7.1.
What Squarespace 7.1 still needs to improve :
Migration from 7.0 to 7.1
This is the biggest one! If you are currently on Squarespace 7.0 (almost any website created before February) there is no simple way to move your site over. You literally would need to build the site again from scratch.
So if your website is smaller, you might be able to copy & paste over most of the text and have a new website going pretty quickly! But if you have a larger website or loads of blog posts - it could take you a while.
Squarespace hasn’t made it clear yet whether or not they will ever be building this pathway or at least allow for the export & import of blog content, but the community of Squarespace users and website builders is crying out for it.
No social share buttons
If you run a blog, it’s likely you use these buttons to encourage your readers to share your content across their favourite social media platforms. Currently, Squarespace 7.1 doesn’t offer these buttons natively - however there are third party providers you can use such as AddThis!
The user-experience takes a while to get used to
At this stage I’ve built upwards of 10 Squarespace sites and I really struggled with 7.1 when I first started with it. I found myself having to Google things that I was able to do with ease in 7.1!
Things like editing the date and author of a blog post (the advanced settings for blog posts proved challenging to find). Or things like adding in a fourth image to a section that already had three.
And then there’s all the manual saving. Squarespace 7.0 pretty much autosaved most of your work and asked you to confirm changes if you tried to leave the page you were working on. There’s a lot more clicking in 7.1 and a slightly higher chance at accidentally losing your work if you forget to save it (there are still reminders).
Cover pages (often used as landing pages in 7.0) are gone
This one seems more inconvenient than it is in practice. Instead of having a single page that is designed as a landing page, you will build a regular page and add a section for ‘Contact’ or ‘RSVP’ and edit it from there or you can build the form you’d like manually.
I’ll be rebuilding my own website in Squarespace 7.1 over the next month or two. So keep your eyes peeled as I continue to learn and the platform continues to improve for more tips, tricks and unique ways to start with Squarespace.
