I decided to write this blog post because many of my Squarespace clients don’t know what is included in the annual Personal Subscription they’re paying for, so I thought it would be helpful to list those resources and explain briefly what each of them are, how you can access them. 

Whether you’re DIY-ing your Squarespace website, or have hired a designer to do that job, knowing what resources come along with your annual Personal Subscription is really useful. Having this knowledge empowers you to learn the ins and outs of your site, it enables you to effectively manage your website once it is up and running, and it saves you spending additional money on tools that may already be at your disposal for no cost. The benefits of using the resources that Squarespace makes available with the Personal Subscription are:

• These resources are tailored specifically for Squarespace

• They’re trustworthy

• They’re already included in your subscription fee

• They’re all housed in the same place, so they’re easy to find

Expert Tip — You can pay your personal subscription fee monthly (helpful if you're just testing out a new idea but don’t want to fully commit to it yet), but I generally recommend you take the plunge and select the annual subscription because you save money in the long term and you get access to the following features.

01 | Free Custom Domain

Before you head off and buy a domain from GoDaddy, Afrihost (hello fellow South Africans), NameCheap or any other number of domain providers, know that if you’re paying an annual subscription for a Personal Squarespace site, then you get a free custom domain thrown in for the first year. After the first year, you will pay approximately US$20/year to renew this domain. 

The benefits of using this option:

• Its free for the first year

• You literally click and connect your domain to your site

• You can choose from a wide range of domain ‘suffixes’

Squarespace adds new options all the time so instead of the usual .com .org .net .edu you now have access to all sorts of weird and wonderful TLD’s (or suffixes). A word of warning though, the more obscure they are (.dog, .club, .faith .guru) the more you can expect to pay for them, perhaps $40/year rather than the standard $20/year, so watch out for that. 

02 | SSL Security

The benefits of SSL are that it creates trust with your visitors showing that their information is secure when they're on your site. You know how disconcerting it is when you visit a site which has a lapsed SSL certificate (or none at all) and you get that ‘not secure’ warning showing up. It’s a little frightening and you don’t want to be there. SSL protection also prevents hackers from stealing any data that visitors submit through your site’s forms. It can help your site load faster and its helps with SEO.

SSL certificates on the Squarespace Personal Subscription are automatically included for:

• Squarespace domains (registered or transferred to Squarespace),

• connected third-party domains (something you bought from GoDaddy or another provider),

• subdomains (e.g. www.blog.squarespace.com) and

• built-in domains (the one Squarespace gives you automatically while you’re building your site). 

03 | SEO Features for Site Visibility

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the process of improving your site's ranking in search results. Squarespace has built all known SEO best practices into every Squarespace site which means you don’t have to buy additional plugins or go crazy trying to figure out the secret sauce for your website SEO.

Here are some SEO-friendly features that Squarespace has built into each site:

• Site map (a file which provides information about all your site pages, files and the relationships between them which helps Google crawl your site more efficiently)

• SSL certificates (we covered this before)

• Clean HTML Markup (easy to read, logical, minimal)

• AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages, creates lightweight versions of web pages to help them load faster on a mobile device)

• Built-in mobile optimization (so your website looks good on any size device)

You can do a little more research by reading the full list here.

04 | Mobile-Optimised Websites

Your website is going to be viewed on any number of devices from large screen computers to laptops, tablets and smartphones. You want to be sure that your site can be easily viewed and navigated on any of these devices without fonts suddenly becoming tiny and unreadable, or your menu disappearing into thin air. All Squarespace sites automatically adjust to smaller devices to fit that format using something called responsive design. 

05 | 24/7 Squarespace Help + Customer Support

I think that Squarespace’s Help site and their customer support are two of the most under-utilised resources for any Squarespace owner. On the Squarespace Help site, you can browse by product or topic, learn through video content, join a webinar, or search a community forum to find answers from other Squarespacers just like yourself. 

Or, importantly, you can contact one of the Squarespace help team directly through an online chat. This can be a little tricky to find but if you persevere you will find the chat at the bottom of the help page where it says ‘Contact Us’. I noticed that more recently they’ve marked the live chat option via a little “question mark in a chat” bubble at the bottom right hand side of the help page. 

If you have a question, a problem or query, reach out to a Squarespace Helper either using the online chat during office hours or sending them an email if the live chat is closed. I have always found them to be polite, professional, helpful and friendly and they will never shame you for asking ‘dumb’ website questions. That’s what they’re there for and the help desk option is included in your subscription fee so make use of it. 

06 | Basic Website Metrics 

Squarespace offers subscribers the use of some basic website metrics which you can use to learn where your website traffic is coming from, find out what your visitors are looking for, and discover how they’re interacting with your content or products.

You can see how many site visits you’ve had, how many page views there’s been over time on a particular page, and you get some really helpful insight into where your top traffic sources are coming from. Are people visiting you from Pinterest, directly from a Google search, via the links on your Instagram profile? All of this information is helpful to know how best to manage your online presence and make your business, blog or project more visible online. You can also see which content viewers are finding helpful, so you can create more of that type of content and respond to the patterns you’re seeing. 

Business Subscription

What I haven’t covered in this blog post are the resources that are made available to you when you select a Business Subscription. These are: 

• Professional Email from Google (for one year)

• Premium Integrations and Blocks (e.g. menu blocks, restaurant booking blocks)

• Complete Customization with CSS and JavaScript (enabling you to really customise the look and function of your site)

• Advanced Website Analytics (an upgrade on the basic website metrics)

• Up to 100$ Google Ads Credits (always helpful!)

• Promotional Pop-ups and Banners (to capture email subscribers and post announcements on your site)

• Integrated Ecommerce (for digital goods, services and products)

• Accept Donations (helpful for NGOs and charities)

• Gift Cards (great if you have an online shop.

Make the most of it

Don’t you hate it when after years of using a product you find out there are all these great features that you had no idea existed? I do! Well, hopefully this post helps you to know and make use of the resources that are freely available to you when you select the Personal Subscription with Squarespace.