How To change template squarespace ( 7.0 and 7.1 )

Nov 17

Change is inevitable. As your business grows, so does the need to add a few things to your Squarespace template. If you are thinking of changing your Squarespace template for any of the versions, I got you covered. I will take you through the process of changing your template on your Squarespace 7.0 or Squarespace 7.1 websites. If your concern is moving your site from Squarespace 7.0 to Squarespace 7.1, I addressed it in this article as well. All you need to do is read through the article. Let’s start this adventurous journey!

If your site is still relatively new and you are unsure of the template that would fit your type of business. Find out how to choose a template here. Fortunately, you don't have to input any code in your Custom CSS

RELATED ARTICLE: How To Create A Squarespace Landing Page

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Switch Templates in Squarespace 7.1

Looking for a unique website design for your business? Explore our Squarespace Web Design packages for a stunning website. Need to enhance your site's visibility? Our Squarespace SEO services are here to assist you. Curious about our work? Take a look at our Squarespace website designer portfolio for some inspiration!

Every template in 7.1 have the same style, features and customization and are all created from only one template design thus you cannot change templates in 7.1. If you find a new template in Squarespace, you can customize your existing template page layouts to look exactly like the new template's style by tweaking some things. The Squarespace team decided to give you the flexibility to make your site look like any template available, this would not only reduce the tedious work when you switch templates, it would also give the Squarespace team less maintenance work.

Every page on your 7.1 website is made of blocks that you can add, remove and rearrange as many times as needed to get your desired look. All you need to do is to figure out how the new template look was achieved and implement it right into your existing template.

I get it... it may seem that version 7.1 is less flexible and the editor can be discouraging especially when you are familiar with version 7.0 but if you decide to take time out to make friends with the editor, explore different customizations, you would agree that Squarespace 7.1 isn’t as bad as you thought.

When it comes to building a new website in Squarespace, it is best to opt-in for Squarespace 7.1, not only because it is the latest version of the website builder, but you would also have great flexibility to transform your website to your desired choice.

Switch to a new template in Squarespace 7.0

Squarespace 7.0 have various template families with different page types and features unique to each family. While Brine is the most popular and advisable Squarespace template family to go with because of its site styles and wide variety of features, other template families provide features Brine doesn’t offer. Some template families have background images, index page, blog sidebars while others don't. You can check out the Squarespace family comparison table to find out more on these features.

The best thing to consider when you want to switch templates is the features present in the new template and how important it is for your business. You should also decide if the features you are currently enjoying on your active template is worth losing. When that has been settled, you are ready to make the switch.

Let’s say your site is hosted on Squarespace 7.0, and it's time to create a blog to further enhance your traffic but your current template doesn’t have a blog sidebar. After much consideration, you finally decided that the best thing to do is change to a different template with a blog sidebar, here is how to make the switch. But before we go into that, there are a few things you must consider.

When it comes to switching templates especially for a site with decent traffic and SEO rankings, it would not be advisable to automatically make your new template live and just start editing. Here are the methods you can use to make your switch seamless

Related Article: Premium Squarespace Templates For Any Business

Squarespace 7.0 to Squarespace 7.1

If you are considering changing templates or upgrading from version 7.0 to 7.1, it isn’t possible. I am not trying to dampen your spirit, what I am trying to say is that migrating from 7.0 to 7.1 if you have more than 100 pages would require you to rebuild your site, technically from scratch on 7.1.

Therefore, you will have to make new customizations, add new styles and create pages. In Squarespace 7.1, the biggest challenge you may have to deal with when building your own website is the new centralized editor. The editor contains blocks rather than pages. Unlike 7.0, there are now separate menu options for your buttons, colors and image blocks

The editor needs some getting used to but once that is out of the way, you can customize your website however you may want it. You can also export some of your page content like your product list from your 7.0 website to 7.1 but any other content such as blogposts is exported manually.

It is worthy to note that data such as customer accounts, email campaigns and Analytics (if yo do not have a third-party analytics software like Google analytics) are lost during the process. So, it has to take some pretty good reasons to migrate to a Squarespace 7.1 website.

How to choose the right Squarespace template for you

If you are considering choosing a template for your new site. You should consider these few points.

Define your website goals

The first question you should answer is ‘why am I building a website?’ Try as much as you can to find out the purpose of your website. Are you building a website for your restaurant, your online store or your portfolio?

Doing this gives you a sense of the features, style and customization you would be needing to make your site functional.

Determine the features your website would need have

A portfolio website does not need to have a blog because the website’s purpose is to allow potential clients view the work of the artist, not read articles. It would be nice if you can determine the features that must be included in your site. If you are an online store, you certainly need a product list, if you offer consultation services, your landing page should contain a form and if it is a restaurant site, it certainly should have a menu.

Determining the features your site should have helps you fulfil your audience’s goals. You should note down these features, the ones you are including now and the features that may be included in the long run.

If unsure of what your business would need. You can book a consultation with me. I'm a Squarespace web designer helping business just like yours make their online presence sing.

Search for the best template

When you land on Squarespace website, they would ask you the kind of site you are looking forward to building and show you the template category available in the business niche. While it is good to choose from the category, I want you to understand something. In 7.1, all templates come from one core template which means they have the same features and customizations. The difference is the layout. Thus, any category can serve the same purpose. For example, when working with my clients, I love to choose a blank template and start from scratch. My main aim is to translate my client’s ideas and goals into a beautiful, functional and fulfilling website.

So, try to explore different templates in different categories and choose the one that closely satisfies your business needs. Don’t stick to one category, Explore!

If you are using Squarespace 7.0, each family have its unique features, all you need to do is check them out and decide the best for your business.

The great part is, there are third-party Squarespace templates you can purchase in case you do not find your desired template, and most third-party templates are built uniquely for your business niche needless to mention the great customer support you would be getting

Start building

After you’ve chosen your template, what you need to do next is to start building. By now you should have decided how you want your site to look, your domain name, site content, have your collections of photos, decide the fonts you would love to go with. Don’t get overwhelmed, it is something you can do. In a case where the template's layout is perfect, all you need to do is delete the demo content and start right away.

By the way, if you are unsure of the font combination to go with, you can check out my article on that. What if you’ve chosen fonts that are not available on the Squarespace font library, I also got you covered on how to upload custom fonts on Squarespace

Site Styles

Start building, adding, rearranging and removing blocks to achieve your dream site. Like I said earlier, if you are not feeling the template you chose, all you need to do is discover how to achieve your preferred template and tweak your pages to get the same result.

When you don’t want to go through the technicalities of building your site from scratch, designers like myself are ready to turn your dream website into reality. All you need to do is book a consultation with me and I will work hand in hand with you to make your site function to its maximum capacity and stand out amongst its peers. While doing massive changes on the website that is already live and published, i would suggest setting up a cover page , or placing your website under protected password.

Set a password:

Setting a password means your entire website would be locked and would require a visitor with the password to access it. While this is a better method when you have subpages url on Ads and the likes, it is still not nice to keep your Squarespace site locked for a long period. So, if you are going to use this method, try to make your new live site up and running as soon as possible.

To set a password, go to the Home Menu, click on Pages, in the Pages settings, click on the gear icon at the right of your page’s title. Scroll down to Password and enter your desired password. Click save to activate. You can decide to lock as many pages as you want.

Editing in the preview mode:

It’s possible to edit your new template in preview mode with your live template running as usual. All you need to do is to go to your installed template, click Preview Mode. Once you are there, go to the preview setting. The first thing you will want to do is delete all demo content and drag your website’s pages from the not linked section to the main navigation of the new template. From there, you can start branding your template by changing the color, font and images.

The hurdles you may likely face when using this method is when your new template doesn’t support some features in your current live template. Also, when you have thousands of pages to migrate. In a case where you would need to make changes to some of your pages, what you can do is to duplicate the pages from your previous template, move the duplicate pages to the not linked section and make any necessary changes.

There are some template specific changes you cannot make when editing in preview mode, here is a list of template specific changes.

Change template Squarespace Recap

To recap, changing template in Squarespace 7.0 is possible as long as you are ready to go through the process involved. Before making the new template live, you must decide whether you will set a cover page, a password or edit directly in the preview mode.

Unlike 7.0, changing templates on 7.1 is not available for now but you can easily tweak your current template to look like any other template.

When you’ve decided that you want to migrate your 7.0 website to 7.1 and you have over 100 website’s pages, you will need to build your site from scratch, although you can still use your domain name for your new site.