7 Costly Mistakes to Avoid When You DIY a Squarespace Website
When you're creating a website, there are hundreds of elements and factors to consider. From design, to SEO, to mobile optimisation and image optimisation and logo, favicons, CTAs... it can feel extremely overwhelming at times!
Sometimes, it's the little things which you thought insignificant and glossed over a little too quickly, which prove to have a significant long term effect on your traffic and website's success.
In this blog post, I'll be sharing with you the top 7 costly mistakes I often see Squarespace users make when they DIY their website.
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CONTENT:
Leaving Squarespace's Standard Favicon
Keeping automated URL slugs
Too much on the navigation
Forgetting to update the social icon links
Neglecting Mobile Response View
Not Optimizing images for the Web
Neglecting simple SEO best practices
1. Leaving Squarespace's Standard Favicon
This is the little icon that appears on your internet browser. You can see in the image below a few examples of favicons. The square cube on the left of mine is Squarespace's standard favicon.
One look at that and people know it's from Squarespace (not that there's anything wrong with that!). But for business, this looks very... not-on-brand, cheap and unprofessional.
So you definitely want to change that to your own unique Favicon graphic!
Most people use their logo, but make sure it's clear, simple and suits both light and dark mode. For example, most of the favicons in this image are great, except for the one on the far right. I cannot make out what it is and it's basically non-existent in dark mode.
Tip for DIY Favicon: create one in Canva, export it as PNG and then upload it to Squarespace!
2. Keeping Automated URL Slugs
When you create any page, most likely it will come with a URL slug like the one in the image: /new/get-out-there-99myw
Firstly: if you were reading someone else's blog with a URL like that you'd be thinking "is this spam?".
Secondly: Google picks up on random, non-cohesive words and also marks them as non-relevant or spam.
So yes, definitely change your URL slugs to keywords which describe what the page is about. Keep it to max 5 words with hyphens (not underscore).
Tip: it's super easy to change, just open up the page settings > options > page or post URL and type in your new desired URL
3. Too Much on the Navigation
I get it. You want to tell people a lot of things. You have a lot of important things to say and show! But honestly... having too much on your navigation panel will actually do the opposite of what you want people to do!
They feel overwhelmed and unsure where to begin. Also, nobody fancies having dozens of tabs open at once. So instead of clicking on something, they might even just click .... nothing?
Think of it like a house tour. You don't just say "hi welcome to my house" and then expect them to free reign and peek in all the rooms themselves! No!
A good host, would lead them on a journey through their website. Some websites even have a "Start Here" button, which is fantastic! From there, you can lead them to your services page, then your about page, then your contact page, etc.
Tip: Keep your nav panel to a max of 5 only! Think about what your website goals are and write down the 5 MOST important pages you need.
Bonus: If you have many sub-categories, you could also consider housing those pages under a folder in your navigation!
4. Forgetting to Update the Social Icon Links
When you're starting with a base template that has the social icons in the footer or header already, it can be easy to forget to actually link that up to your social handles!
Because on one side, you may have done so in the Squarespace Settings and thought - oh it'll just automatically hook me up. Well, sometimes - but not always. So double check your social icons actually link up to your social handles!
Looking for more design resources to help you create a website that converts? Get access to my free collection of guides, checklists and cheatsheets here!
5. Neglecting Mobile Response View
Obviously, you'll be creating your website on a desktop or laptop - so it's very likely that you'll be focusing much more on the desktop view than mobile view.
Squarespace already has a fantastic mobile responsive automation... but sometimes you need to go in there and do a little tweaking for it to look good and flow well.
The biggest mistake I see is alternating layouts collapsing down into a disorganised hot-mess. And background images that complement the headings on mobile.
Tip: Use Squarespace's mobile view more often during the design process. It'll help keep you on track and create a design that's both desktop and mobile friendly.
6. Not Optimizing images for the Web
Is your website running like... reaaaaally slow? Taking aaaages to load, especially those gallery pages? Sadly, pages with long loading times are often black flagged by Google and rank lower on SEO. Why? Because it kinda hurts user experience if they have to wait ages for your page to load.
So, here are some simple tips to help you speed those pages up and get you ranking higher on Google!
Use an image compressor like Tiny PNG to compress your images. Most ideal size is around 500KB. Yours are probably over 3MB? That's why it's taking so long!
Name your image files with descriptive keywords so Google can crawl them and bring your more traffic! ie. don't just leave it at IMG_64335. Change it to: summer-sunset-santorini-greece
Give the image a descriptive title once you upload it to Squarespace. It'll prompt you with: Filename (optional). If you don't write anything here, then it will just default to your image file name (ie. IMG_64335 or summer-sunset-santorini-greece)
7. Neglecting Simple SEO Best Practices
Squarespace is actually AMAZING for SEO and they make it SO easy for you to optimise your SEO as well! It's such a pity that most people simply ignore these prompts because they have an (optional) beside them - so people assume it's not important.
But it so is! Fill out everything SEO related with descriptive keywords and I guarantee this will help boost your rankings on Google. Such simple things make a huge difference.
I could and will be writing much more about Squarespace SEO in the future, but for now my biggest tip is to make sure you go into the SEO tab of every page and fill in the title and description.
If you leave this blank, then it will default to the page title you gave it (or the one Squarespace automatically assigned it - eg. General 1) and the first few sentences of text on your page.
Let me know, did you find this article helpful? Which one of the above are you going to go fix right now? Tell me in the comments below or dm me here @arohavisuals!
