How to Choose the Best Squarespace Template For Your Business - The #1 Mistake People Make

 
How to Choose the Best Squarespace Template

The #1 Mistake People Make When Choosing a Template

So you’re building a website, and you’ve chosen Squarespace as your platform (good choice!). Your next step is to choose a Squarespace template, so you start browsing through their options and realize there are a lot of them.

You look for your business’ category to help narrow down the options, and even google something along the lines of “best Squarespace template.” You skim the descriptions and preview a few to click around the demo site. I mean, they all look great - clean, modern, beautiful photography. You start narrowing down your favorites, ruling out ones that you don’t love, and eventually settle on a template.

All Squarespace templates are free, so you don't have to worry about investing money in a theme and changing your mind afterwards (unlike someee platforms I know *cough cough Wordpress*).

For most people, this is more or less what picking a website template looks like. In all honesty, this is how I used to pick my templates too when I first started using Squarespace.

But what if I told you that this is the totally wrong way to go about it?

When you look for a template this way, what are you really judging it on? You’re looking at the layout, obviously. You look at how the different sections of the page are ordered and placed. You imagine how your words and your photos would look if you replaced the demo content. You’re taking into consideration the style of each demo site and whether that suits the style you’re going for with your brand. You’re reading the template descriptions to get a sense of who the template was made for and what its main features are.

While this may be the easiest way to pick a Squarespace template, it’s also the quickest way to set yourself up for failure down the road, and it's the reason why so many people run into brick walls when they try to make their own websites.

I learned my lesson first hand when in 2016, right before a site launch, my client decided the site had to have a side navigation bar. “No problem!” I quickly answered. I had seen many Squarespace demo sites with this feature, so I knew it was possible.

But boy was I mistaken, because turns out, it was a giant problem. I stayed up all night trying to get it done with the template I was using, looking through all of the site’s settings and triple checking that I hadn’t overlooked it. It wasn’t until 4 A.M. when I came across some Squarespace documentation that I learned that it simply wasn’t possible to add a side navigation bar with the template I had built the whole site on (at least not without a ton of custom code and we were running out of time).

I read more into the subject and installed a template that did support the feature. Lo and behold, the option to add a side navigation bar was right there in the style editor, staring me in the face. It took me 5 minutes tops to set it up, but I had to spend the next couple of hours making sure all the content from the previous template moved over properly and re-setting up everything to recreate how the site was supposed to look. I considered this to be a result of my error and didn’t bill the client for it, but I’m pretty sure I sprouted a handful of grey hairs that night.

Now, here's how you can choose the best Squarespace template for your business, so hopefully you never have to go through something like that!

 

How to Choose the Best Squarespace Template For You

Note: If you're DIY-ing your site for the first time and your business is very young, you can probably get away with a simplified version of this process. You'll probably need to launch your site quickly and on a tight budget, in which case, most Squarespace templates are great as is to get you up and running.

I would argue that it's more important for growing and established businesses to have sites that are super polished and optimized to help reach specific business goals (making sales, growing leads etc), which is when the following process really comes into play.

Whether you follow these steps yourself or enlist the help of a designer to do the heavy lifting, you'll end up with a template that will grow with you.


What’s important to understand is that Squarespace sites are built on the foundation of their templates. While you can customize tons of settings like font, button color and layout, templates set up the underlying structure of your site and dictate what is and is not possible to achieve on your site.

Instead, here’s a better list of criteria to use when choosing your Squarespace template:

 

Make a list of requirements

Deciding on the features that are non-negotiable must-haves before you start building your site will save you a ton of headache and time. I highly recommend looking for some sites that inspire you and gathering a list of feature requirements for your own site.

You should also prioritize these features and think about why they're important for your site. Do you like how it looks? Will it help your clients save time or find info quickly, giving them a better user experience? Maybe you've seen it on a lot of other sites and figure yours should have it too. Whatever the reason, remember that the key to building a strategic website is balancing decisions that benefit your business and decisions that benefit your consumers.

Some features that clients often ask for that influence what template they should get include full-width photo galleries and parallax scrolling (that cool effect when an image scrolls at a different speed than the text on top of it).

Oh, and a sticky nav (where the navigation bar is fixed to the top of the page while you scroll). Everyone loooves a sticky nav.

The more you get to know Squarespace, the more you’ll learn about what template families have what features. Besides learning this through first-hand experience working with Squarespace templates, comparison charts like this one by Squarespace and this one by Using My Head are very helpful when looking for the right theme to do the job.

After you install your template, quickly run through your list and play around with your settings to make sure your template ticks all the boxes.

If it does, YAY! Throw your feet up for a bit because jeez, finding that perfect template was more work than it should be.

If it doesn't, bookmark it, then go install some other templates. Hopefully you find *the one*, but even if you don't and have to settle for a template that doesn't have everything you wanted, you're not out of luck just yet.

The great thing about Squarespace is that there are workarounds for most of its "limitations." These can range from quick hacks of the "OH! I didn't know you could do it that way!" variety, to the "Wait... I have to deal with code...?" variety. Stay tuned for my upcoming blog series of easy step-by-step Squarespace hacks!

 

Take Squarespace’s Suggestions With a Grain of Salt

Some Squarespace templates are described as being "perfect for musicians" or "great for photographers," and our inclination is to skip past them if those descriptions don't apply to us. While those templates might have features that you don't need, don't be so quick to write them off.

For example, the Margot template is supposed to be for food and drink businesses, but it’s actually amazing for any business that’s service-based and benefits from displaying testimonials. Making the template fit your business and site goals is as simple as removing the menu page and ignoring the reservation system.

You don't need to choose a template based on your industry, so go ahead and don't be afraid to try out any template that might have potential!

Squarespace also likes to highlight stand-out features in the template descriptions. Even though I usually give them a cursory glance before previewing the demo site, I've found that they're not all that helpful. They always make me think that I've found *the one*, but in the end, not what I'm looking for.

Sounds like my love life LOL.

Sorry, back to business!

The second part of this point is that you'll find many templates described as having scrolling formats and 3D effects, but you really need to see the demo site for yourself to understand what that actually means.

Also keep in mind that just because a template's description doesn't mention a specific feature, that doesn't mean the template doesn't have it. Do your own research and see for yourself!

 

Ignore the demo content

Last but definitely not least, I know it’s reeeally hard, but try not to get swayed by the demo content too much. Squarespace's demo sites are meant to showcase what you can do with the templates, but they only show one version of what’s possible. The whole point of using Squarespace is that sites are highly customizable, and the different combinations of settings and layouts mean that the possibilities of just one template are endless.

On top of that, I love cookies, but I certainly don't love cookie-cutter web designs. If you want a site that looks professional, you'll want to make changes to the template to avoid having the same exact site as everybody else. This is a whole other blog post on its own, but my point is: you should be customizing lots of things on your site to suit your business and its unique needs, so you should never just be dropping in content anyways.

 

Final Thoughts

All this work might take a little longer, but it's definitely worth it if you're looking to invest in a great website that helps achieve your goals. Take the time to choose the right template for your needs, and I promise you won't regret it.