What Makes a Good Squarespace Website Design?
A good Squarespace site looks deliberate rather than assembled. The platform makes it very easy to add things and gives you no reason to stop, which is why restraint turns out to be the whole skill.
The Test
Does this site look deliberate rather than assembled? Two Squarespace sites can use identical components and differ entirely on that question, since what separates them is whether somebody chose each element or whether things simply accumulated.
The test applies element by element. Look at any page and ask of each thing on it: was this put here, else did it end up here? Most people can answer immediately about somebody else's site. Almost nobody can answer it about their own.
Why this test rather than whether it looks good? On this platform looking good is largely handled for you. Type sits at sensible sizes. Spacing stays even. Colours apply site wide. The visual failures other tools permit are mostly prevented here by design.
What the platform does not prevent is accumulation. It will let you add a fourteenth section to a page as readily as a second, then make the fourteenth look just as tidy as the rest.
So the craft question on Squarespace is not about avoiding ugliness. It is about whether anybody decided. Block nine explains where this stops and a different question begins, since a site can pass every test on this page and still produce nothing.
Working With The Section System
Modern Squarespace pages are stacks of sections, each a self contained horizontal band with its own settings. There are two ways to build on that, producing identical results on launch day.
Working with the system. Arranging the section types the platform provides, configuring each one, accepting the shapes they naturally make.
Forcing it. Pushing sections into arrangements they were not built for, using code to override the platform's behaviour, using images of text to achieve a layout, perhaps stacking empty spacers to fake a shape.
The commercial difference arrives later. A site built the first way can be rearranged by its owner in an afternoon. A site built the second way needs whoever built it for every change, permanently, including trivial ones.
There is a second consequence people rarely consider. Forced layouts are fragile. They depend on the platform continuing to behave exactly as it did on the day they were made, so a change at Squarespace's end can break them with nothing to fall back to. A site working with the system absorbs platform changes without anybody noticing.
The test takes a minute after handover. Open the editor and try to move a section on a page you were shown. If you cannot, you have the second kind of site.
Restraint Is The Whole Skill
Almost every Squarespace site that disappoints its owner has the same fault. There is too much on it.
The reason is specific to this platform rather than a comment on anybody's judgement. Adding a section takes seconds and always feels like an improvement, because at the moment of adding, the thing you are adding is the thing you are thinking about. Nothing pushes back. No cost is incurred at that moment. The cost is diffuse, it lands later, then it lands on everything else rather than on the thing you added.
How to recognise it. More sections on a page than you can recall without scrolling. Two sections doing substantially the same job in different words. A section whose purpose you would struggle to state in a sentence. Anything added because there was space rather than because it was needed.
What removing something does. This is the counterintuitive part. It is why restraint is a skill rather than a preference.
Emphasis is finite. A page has a fixed amount of attention to distribute, so you cannot add emphasis to anything. You can only take it from something else. Every section you remove makes the remaining ones more prominent without anybody touching them. That is the whole mechanism. It explains why a shorter page frequently outperforms the longer version it was cut from.
Typography And Spacing
Squarespace gives real control over type and space, applied across the whole site rather than page by page. Four things go wrong reliably.
Line length. Text running the full width of a wide screen is tiring, because the eye loses its place returning to the start of the next line. Constraining the width of text blocks is the single easiest improvement available on most self built sites.
Heading levels used for size. Choosing a heading level because it looks right rather than because it describes the structure. This flattens the page, since nothing indicates what is subordinate to what. It also makes the page meaningless to anything reading structure rather than appearance.
Not enough space. Crowding is far commoner than sprawl. Space is what tells a reader which things belong together, so a page with even spacing throughout has told them nothing.
Too many typefaces and sizes. Every additional one weakens the distinction between all the others.
Two practical rules cover most of it. Settle on a small number of text sizes and refuse to add more. And when something needs separating from what surrounds it, add space before adding a line, a box or a colour, since space does the same work without adding anything to look at.
Imagery
Squarespace is unusually unforgiving of poor photography. The templates are built around large images, so a photograph does not sit modestly in a column. It occupies the screen, at which point every flaw in it is enlarged along with everything else.
This matters most for the businesses least likely to have good photographs, since a service business has nothing obvious to photograph.
The options, in order of how well they work.
Commission photography. The best answer and the one that costs money. For a business whose site is its main shopfront it is frequently better value than design work.
Use fewer images, larger. Three good photographs used properly beat twelve mediocre ones. This costs nothing.
Choose a starting point that is not built around imagery. They exist. They are simply under represented in the demonstrations, because image led designs photograph better in a template gallery.
Stock photography, with real caution. Readers recognise it. For a service business selling trust it works against the thing the site exists to do.
The rule worth remembering is that an image slot is not an obligation. A section with no photograph is better than a section with a bad one.
Navigation And Page Count
Fewer pages, arranged properly, almost always beats more. The difficulty is that nothing tells you when to stop creating them.
Three questions decide whether something deserves its own page. Would somebody look for this specifically rather than encountering it while reading something else? Would you ever send a link to it on its own? And does it have enough to say to fill a page without padding?
Three answers of no means it is a section inside another page rather than a page of its own. Most sites have several of these.
Why owners create too many. A page feels like progress in a way that adding a paragraph does not. It is also the obvious destination for anything that does not fit elsewhere, so pages accumulate as a filing solution rather than as an editorial decision.
What it costs. The same mechanism as block three, applied at site level. Attention divides across whatever exists, so fifteen pages each receive a fraction of what five would have received. Every page gets thinner, including the pages that matter.
This is a question about how many things exist. Whether a stranger can then find their way around is a separate matter, covered in the conversion guide linked in block nine.
Consistency Across The Site
A site whose character changes between pages reads as unfinished, even where every individual page is perfectly acceptable. Visitors register this immediately without being able to name it.
What causes it. Pages built at different times, frequently months apart. Pages added after the styling rules were settled, by somebody working from what looked right that day. And pages built by different people with no written agreement about how things should look.
What holds a site together. The same section patterns reused rather than reinvented for each page. Headings treated identically throughout. Images cropped and handled the same way, which matters more than the photographs themselves. And a consistent spacing rhythm, so the gaps between things mean the same thing everywhere.
Why this matters beyond tidiness is worth stating, since consistency sounds like a minor virtue.
Consistency is what makes a website read as an organisation rather than as a collection of documents. A visitor who moves between three pages that behave identically concludes, without ever forming the thought, that somebody is in charge here. One who moves between three pages that each behave differently concludes the opposite. Neither reaction is articulated. Both affect whether the business seems substantial.
Can The Owner Maintain It
A site that needs its designer for every change is a liability rather than an asset. On this platform there is very little excuse for building one.
What makes a build maintainable here. Sections used as the platform intends, per block two. Styling set as site wide rules rather than as overrides applied page by page, so a change made once takes effect everywhere. Custom code kept to what genuinely needs it, documented rather than left for somebody to discover. And at least one person in the business actually shown how to use the editor.
How to make it a requirement. Before work begins, name five changes you expect to make yourself afterwards. Editing text in a section. Swapping an image. Reordering sections on a page. Adding a page. Changing a link in the navigation. Get written agreement that those five will not need the supplier.
That list costs nothing to agree at the start. Requesting it after the build approach is settled is requesting a rebuild.
The reason this belongs in a guide about design rather than about contracts is that maintainability is a design decision. It is determined by how the site was built rather than by what anybody promised afterwards.
Where Design Ends And Enquiries Begin
Everything above is craft. Whether the site produces enquiries is a separate question with separate answers. Conflating the two is how businesses pay for a redesign that changes nothing.
A site can pass every test on this page and still produce nothing. It can be restrained, beautifully set, consistent and entirely maintainable while never telling a stranger what the business does, never giving them an obvious next step and sending its enquiries to an inbox nobody checks.
Those are not design faults. They are decisions about what the site is for, covered separately in how to design a Squarespace website that generates enquiries, which deals with what the home page has to achieve, what happens on a phone, what you can genuinely control about speed, whether people believe you and where the enquiry route actually goes.
Read this page for whether the site is well made. Read that one for whether it works.
Most of our work
is removing things.
The commonest fault we are asked to fix is a site with too much on it. Emphasis is finite, so taking things away is what makes the remainder land. We build with the section system, so you can keep editing it afterwards.
What a Squarespace project covers:
Ongoing management afterwards sits inside our fixed monthly fee. Project work is quoted per site.
Fourteen guides.
One platform.
This page covers craft. The rest of the series covers the role, cost, timescales, templates, designing for enquiries, the platform comparisons and what to ask before hiring anybody.
