Squarespace SEO: what it does for you and what it leaves to you

Squarespace SEO is the set-up work the platform can't do for you: sitemaps, the SSL certificate, static URLs and some of the structured data are automatic, while meta descriptions, titles, H1s, image alt text and the site language are up to whoever runs the site. In our 9 October 2026 test on 54 pages from 9 Italian sites built on Squarespace, 81% had an empty meta description and only 30% had a single H1.

In short, Squarespace does the technical part well. It's the editorial part that's left blank.

And in the UK that matters more than in Italy, because here Squarespace is far more common.

The HTTP Archive Tech Report for August 2026 counts 8,920 Squarespace sites visited by users in the UK, against 125,625 on WordPress (Chrome mobile data): one for every 14. In Italy, where we ran the test, the ratio is one in 144.

We also ran a check closer to the market: five searches on Google UK on 10 October 2026, in sectors where Squarespace is popular (wedding photographers, wedding planners, architects in London, interior designers, art galleries). Page one is mostly directories, marketplaces and magazines, so the businesses themselves are few. Of the 18 sites where we could identify the platform from the HTML, 10 were on WordPress, 2 on Wix and 1 on Squarespace (LA London, an architecture practice), with the rest on Showit, Weebly, Drupal and custom builds.

And where do Squarespace users find instructions?

There's no shortage in English. For "squarespace seo", which gets 210 searches a month in the UK, page one on Google UK opens with an AI Overview built mostly from Squarespace's own help pages, followed by the Squarespace SEO checklist, Reddit, the SEOSpace plugin, YouTube tutorials, a Coursera course and two freelance blogs.

Plenty of instructions, and yet the same mistakes keep coming back:

• meta descriptions left empty because "Squarespace is already optimised anyway";
• duplicate pages titled "Copy of", published and sitting in the sitemap;
• the site language set to English on a site written in Italian;
• images with the file name as alt text, IMG_0832.jpg included.

The yardstick we use to judge a site, whatever CMS it runs on, comes from the projects we work on. At Macropix, a Milan-based maker of LED screens, every product line has its own page, and for "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising display) the site went from position 88 to 2 on Google Italy (the full case is in our guide to SEO for manufacturing).

At Sunscape, which develops solar farms in Italy, we built a page architecture by region: in six months organic impressions rose from 329 to 5,809 a month.

And what has that got to do with Squarespace?

Everything, because in both cases what moved the rankings was pages, titles and structure, which are exactly the fields Squarespace leaves to you.

Here you'll find:

• what Squarespace does on its own and what it doesn't, with sources from the official documentation;
• the results of our test on 54 pages, item by item;
• how to fix titles, H1s, language, slugs and redirects from the panel;
• the Core Web Vitals of Squarespace sites in the UK, compared with the rest of the world and with other CMSs;
• when Squarespace isn't enough and it's worth switching platform.

Let's start.

Is Squarespace good for SEO? (yes, if you know what it doesn't do)

Yes: Squarespace is a good fit for the SEO of brochure sites, portfolios and small shops, because it handles on its own the technical basics that need a plugin on other CMSs. It's used by 3.6% of sites with an identifiable CMS, according to W3Techs (October 2026).

The official documentation, updated in July 2026, lists what it does automatically: it generates and updates the sitemap, uses static URLs, includes an SSL certificate on connected domains, makes sites mobile-friendly and adds structured data for six content types (blog post, event, local business, organisation, product, website). That structured data, the same page says, can't be edited or removed.

In the test, the automatic part held up: sitemap reachable on 9 sites out of 9, canonical tag on the home page on 9 out of 9, WebSite markup on 9 out of 9 and LocalBusiness markup on 6.

The rest is down to you. Here's the split:

Element	What Squarespace does	What you have to do
XML sitemap	Generates and updates it on its own	Submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
SSL certificate	Included on connected domains	Check that the SSL panel is set to "Secure"
Structured data	Six markup types, not editable	Add other types only with custom code (how to do it without duplicates)
Title	Builds it from the page name and the site name	Write an SEO title for every page
Meta description	Nothing	Write one per page, between 50 and 300 characters
Alt text	Uses the image description or the file name	Describe what the photo actually shows
URLs	Static, but random if you save before giving a title	Fix the slugs and set up 301 redirects
Multiple languages (hreflang)	Nothing	Use an external service, Weglot for example
AI crawlers	Lets them in by default	Decide whether to block them from the Crawlers panel

The test: 54 Squarespace pages from Italian sites (and where they trip up)

You can repeat the test in an afternoon. On 9 October 2026 we searched Google Italy for pages on .it domains carrying the words "Powered by Squarespace", kept the sites still live on the platform (8 .it domains plus a dental practice still on a squarespace.com subdomain) and for each one downloaded the home page and five pages taken from the sitemap.

Total: 9 sites and 54 pages. They include a geology consultancy, a fencing club, a research project, an architecture practice, a multi-sport club, a wedding venue, a wine business, a cultural association and the dental practice. A tenth site found in the search had already moved to another CMS and we left it out.

Check	Result	Share
Empty meta description	44 pages out of 54	81%
A single H1	16 pages out of 54	30%
No H1	13 pages out of 54	24%
Two or more H1s	25 pages out of 54	46%
Code language set to English on a site in Italian	2 sites out of 9	22%
Pages titled "Copy of" or "Copia di"	3 pages on 2 sites	n/a
Inner pages with the same title as the home page	1 site, 5 pages out of 5	n/a
Template demo pages still in the sitemap	1 site out of 9	11%
Random or generic slugs ("nuova-pagina-2", new page 2)	3 sites out of 9	33%
Alt text identical to the file name	323 images out of 353	91.5%
hreflang tags	0 sites out of 9	0%
AI crawlers blocked in robots.txt	0 sites out of 9	0%
XML sitemap reachable	9 sites out of 9	100%

The sample is small and we'll say so straight away: 9 sites aren't a national statistic, and they're Italian, not British. But the mistakes come back with a regularity that's hard to put down to chance, nearly all of them start from the same place, and none of them depends on the language the site is written in.

Squarespace leaves the field empty and only flags it if you open the SEO report, which the official checklist says is available on version 7.1.

Meta descriptions and titles: the fields Squarespace leaves empty (and Google fills in its own way)

The meta description is the two-line text that can appear under the title in Google's results. On Squarespace you write it in each page's settings, under SEO, and the Squarespace SEO checklist recommends 50 to 300 characters, different for every page.

In the test it was empty on 44 pages out of 54.

But doesn't Google write one itself?

It does. Google Search Central explains that snippets are primarily created from the page content and that the meta description is used when it gives a more accurate description of the page than the text. Leaving it empty means letting Google pick any sentence from your text, often opening hours, an address or a caption.

The title matters even more, because it's the clickable line of the result. Squarespace builds it in the format "page name — site name", editable under Page and title formats, and that only works if the page name says something. In the test we found titles such as "Contatti" (contact), "Gallery" and "Book Your Stay", followed by nothing but the site name.

Then there are the worst cases:

• a sports club with the home page title on every inner page we checked, five out of five;
• two sites with pages titled "Copy of..." and "Copia di...", left over from the Duplicate command, published and in the sitemap;
• a wedding venue with a 237-character title that repeats the name of the town eight times, almost four times the length Google shows.

That's ten minutes' work per page. How to write the right text is explained in our guide to the meta description.

H1s on Squarespace: why almost one page in two has more than one (blame the styles)

The H1 is the page's main heading, the one that tells readers and search engines what it's about. In the test only 16 pages out of 54 had exactly one: 13 had none and 25 had two or more, up to 30 on the home page of an architecture practice.

The reason is visual. In Squarespace "Heading 1" is a text style, and anyone who wants big lettering picks it, even for the name of every project in a gallery.

Blogs have a second effect: the template already prints the post title as an H1. In 13 posts across three different sites we found two H1s, and on one of the sites the first was empty.

The fix doesn't need any code:

1. use Heading 1 only for the page title;
2. in text blocks, switch to Heading 2 for sections and Heading 3 for sub-points;
3. if the H1 looks too big, make it smaller in the site styles instead of swapping it for a Heading 3 "because it's smaller";
4. in galleries, use normal text or Heading 3 for project names.

The full logic of headings is in our guide to heading tags.

Language, slugs and redirects: the site that declares the wrong language

Two sites out of nine had lang="en-US" in their code even though they were written in Italian. On a British site the same setting decides whether you declare en-US or en-GB. It takes a minute to fix, in the site's language and region settings.

Does it matter to Google?

Not much: Google states that it doesn't use the lang attribute to detect a page's language, which it works out from the text. Screen readers and automatic translators do use it, though, so it's a mistake your visitors pay for, not your rankings.

Slugs are the second point. The Squarespace checklist warns that if you save content before giving it a title, the slug becomes a random string of characters. We found this on two sites, with addresses like /blog/2017/4/16/npx53lrln42zu5ti2jds5mfxklvkbn. On a third site three pages out of five were called /nuova-pagina, /nuova-pagina-1 and /nuova-pagina-2 (the Italian for "new page"). How to write a readable address is in our guide to the URL slug.

And one site still had the template's demo pages, with titles like "Our Impact" and "Steps", reachable and listed in the sitemap.

When you change a slug you need a 301 redirect. On Squarespace you write it in the URL mappings panel, under developer tools, one line per redirect: /old-url -> /new-url 301. According to the redirects guide updated in September 2026, the field holds up to 400 KB, roughly 2,500 lines.

Last point, multilingual sites. Squarespace doesn't generate hreflang tags: for sites in several languages you need an external service such as Weglot, which adds them automatically to every translated version. The site in the test with duplicate pages in Italian and English (/ricerca1 and /research1) had no hreflang at all: Google gets no explicit signal about which version to show to someone searching in Italian. How to set them up is explained in our guide to hreflang tags.

Speed and images: in the UK 85.1% of Squarespace sites pass Core Web Vitals (worldwide 72.1%)

Core Web Vitals are the metrics Google uses to measure loading, responsiveness and visual stability, on real data from Chrome users. According to the HTTP Archive Tech Report, in August 2026 72.1% of Squarespace sites worldwide passed them on mobile, and 85.1% of those visited from the UK. In Italy the figure is 59.7%.

CMS	UK, mobile	Worldwide, mobile	Sites measured in the UK
Wix	91.0%	81.2%	13,241
Squarespace	85.1%	72.1%	8,486
Shopify	84.3%	76.5%	39,341
Webflow	78.9%	71.2%	4,078
WordPress	65.8%	48.7%	121,260

Is it because the servers are closer?

Partly, yes. Server response time is good on 97.4% of Squarespace sites visited from the UK, against 79.3% worldwide. Largest Contentful Paint, the time it takes for the biggest element on the page to appear, is also ahead: 90.6% of sites pass in the UK against 79.6% worldwide. It's still the metric that fails most often, ahead of layout stability (93.4% pass) and responsiveness (98.5%).

And on a Squarespace site, the biggest element is almost always a full-screen photo. The official checklist asks for images under 500 KB and pages under 5 MB in total.

The UK figure is also rising: in August 2025 it was 70.1%, a year later 85.1%.

On images, alt text remains. If you don't write a description, Squarespace uses the file name: on the four pages with galleries in the test, 323 images out of 353 had the file name as alt text, IMG_0832.jpg and the like. For Google Images and for anyone using a screen reader, it's text that says nothing. How to write it well is in our guide to alt text.

AI crawlers and robots.txt on Squarespace: by default they all get in

Squarespace's robots.txt can't be edited by hand: it's controlled by two switches in the Crawlers panel, one for search engines and one for artificial intelligence crawlers. When the option arrived, in November 2023, PetaPixel reported photographers' protests precisely because AI crawler access appeared to be switched on by default.

In the test none of the 9 sites blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended. The standard robots.txt names them, 26 AI crawlers in a row, but groups them with every other user agent and applies the same rules: the only areas kept out are system ones such as /config and /search.

Should you block them?

It depends on what you sell. A photographer who doesn't want their images in training data has a concrete reason to do it. A practice that wants to appear in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers needs to know that each platform uses different crawlers for training models and for finding sources, and that blocking them all at once can cost it visibility. The difference between the various bots is explained in our guide to AI crawlers.

When Squarespace isn't enough (and another CMS makes sense)

Squarespace copes well as long as the site has a few dozen pages, one language and one person updating it. The sites in the test had between 6 and 152 URLs in their sitemap, and at that size the platform does what it promises.

It gets tight in three cases:

• multilingual sites for export, because hreflang and language folders depend on an external service;
• large catalogues, which need filters, canonicals and custom crawl rules, while structured data and robots.txt can't be touched;
• content-heavy sites, which need different templates for each section, systematically managed internal links and plugins.

The platform comparison is in our guide to the best CMS for SEO. For the closest alternatives, see Wix SEO and WordPress SEO.

If you decide to switch, the real risk is the migration: every old URL has to be mapped with a 301, or the rankings you've earned are lost. The right sequence is in our guide to SEO for a website redesign.

Frequently asked questions about Squarespace SEO

Squarespace SEO in short

Squarespace does the technical part on its own.

Meta descriptions, titles and H1s it doesn't: in the test they were wrong or empty on more than half the pages.

Site language, slugs and duplicate pages need checking by hand.

Heavy photos cost you: even in the UK, where 85.1% of Squarespace sites pass Core Web Vitals, the biggest image is the metric that fails most.

AI crawlers get in, unless you decide to block them.

The idea we take away from the test is a different one. Squarespace presents itself as the platform that takes care of everything and, on the technical side, it keeps that promise. That's exactly why its users stop looking at the fields that stay empty: on WordPress a plugin like Yoast shows a red light every time you save, on Squarespace the SEO report exists but you have to go and open it. On small sites the difference between CMSs isn't how optimised they are, it's how much they force you to look. If you want someone to look at yours, it's the first check we run in our SEO consultancy.

Until next time!