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Squarespace Website SEO Checklist: 12 Fixes

5 minute read Updated 4 November 2026

Squarespace already builds your sitemap, issues a free SSL certificate and makes pages work on phones. What it leaves to you is the words: a clear SEO title and description for every page, readable URLs, redirects when an address changes, headings and image alt text. The twelve fixes below say where to click for each one.

What Squarespace already does for you

Some SEO work is done before you start. Squarespace’s help centre says it creates and updates a sitemap for your site, at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. It gives every connected domain a free SSL certificate. It makes every site work on phones, adds some structured data, and sends your extra domains to your main one with a permanent redirect. You cannot edit the sitemap or the robots.txt file, and you do not need to. The steps below cover what Squarespace leaves to you. Most need no code at all.

Step 1: Make sure search engines are allowed in

Open the Settings panel and click Crawlers. If the box Block Search engine crawlers is ticked, untick it. While it is ticked, Squarespace tells every search engine to stay away from the whole site. Also check that the site is public, not private or behind a password. Squarespace’s sitemap does not work on a private site. You can read your robots.txt file with our robots.txt tester.

Step 2: Turn on secure browsing

Open the SSL panel. Under Security preference, choose Secure, and switch on HSTS Secure as well, as Squarespace recommends. Older sites connected before October 2016 may still be set to Insecure, which lets visitors reach the site over plain http. A change to HSTS can take up to 48 hours to work. Afterwards, check the certificate with the SSL checker.

Step 3: Write your site title and home page description

Squarespace asks for a site title even if your header shows a logo. To write the description for your home page, open the SEO/AI Visibility panel and click SEO Settings. In Search appearance, choose the Home tab, fill in SEO site description, and click Save. On version 7.0 the panel is called SEO appearance. Say what the business is and where it works, in a sentence or two.

Step 4: Give every page its own SEO title

Google says a title should be descriptive and concise. It also warns against giving many pages the same title, or titles that differ by only one word. To set one, open the Pages panel, hover over a page and click the gear icon. Open the SEO tab and type in SEO Title. Squarespace suggests 70 characters or fewer. Home pages have no SEO title box, so the site title does that job. To change how titles are put together across the site, use SEO Title Format in the same SEO Settings screen as step 3.

Step 5: Give every page its own description

In the same SEO tab, fill in SEO Description. Google says it sometimes uses this text for the snippet under your link, when it describes the page better than the page’s own words do. It also says the same description on every page does not help. Write one for each page, and for each blog post and product. You can see what Google may show with the snippet preview, and check the tags on a live page with the meta tag checker.

Step 6: Use readable addresses

Google recommends readable words in addresses, with hyphens between them, rather than long numbers. In page settings, look at the URL slug field. Change any slug that is not made of real words, such as /page-2 or /new-page-1. Do this before the page has been live long, because of step 7.

Step 7: Redirect any address you change

When you change a slug, Squarespace does not send visitors from the old address to the new one. Old links and old QR codes then land on an error page. Open the Developer tools panel, click URL mappings, and add one line per change, like this: /old-page -> /new-page 301. Click Save. A 301 is a permanent redirect. Google says it shows the new address in results for those. Test each one with the redirect checker.

Step 8: Use headings to break up each page

In a text block, choose a heading style from the formatting options in the text toolbar. Squarespace suggests one Heading 1 per page, then Heading 2 and Heading 3 below it in order. Google’s starter guide says headings help people find their way around a page. It also says there is no ideal number of them. So use them where they help a reader. The heading checker lists every heading on a page in order.

Step 9: Describe your images

Google uses alt text, along with the page around it, to understand what an image shows. To add it, open the page, click Edit, click the image block and then its pencil icon. On the Content tab, type in Image alt text. Describe what is in the picture in plain words. Before you upload, give the file a name made of words too, rather than a camera number.

Step 10: Hide pages that should not appear in search

Thank-you pages, test pages and private offers rarely belong in search results. In the page’s settings, open the SEO tab and switch on Hide page from search results. Squarespace says this adds a noindex tag to the page and takes it out of your sitemap, while visitors can still open it. Google’s documentation explains that a noindex tag keeps a page out of its results once Google reads it. Check the tag on the live page with the meta tag checker.

Step 11: Connect Google Search Console and add your sitemap

Open the Analytics panel, click Search keywords, then Connect, and sign in to your Google account. Data can take up to 72 hours to appear. Squarespace does not say that connecting submits your sitemap, so do it yourself. In Search Console, open Sitemaps, enter sitemap.xml and click Submit. Google’s documentation describes submitting a sitemap through Search Console. Our sitemap validator shows what your sitemap lists.

Step 12: Check how fast your main pages load

Google’s guidance for Core Web Vitals is for the largest content on a page to appear within 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load. Large images are a common reason a page misses that. Test your home page and your most visited pages with the page speed test, on a phone and on a computer. If an image is the slow part, upload a smaller version of it.

Checking every page at once

These steps take a while page by page. Lala SEO runs 136 checks across a whole site, free for up to 300 pages. They cover missing and repeated titles and descriptions, redirects, headings, image alt text and pages hidden from search. Each check is described on the list of checks, and the glossary explains the terms in plain English.

The bottom line

Squarespace handles the sitemap, the certificate and the phone layout. You handle the words and the addresses. Start with steps 1 and 2, because a blocked or insecure site undoes everything else, then give every page its own title and description. A free audit shows which pages still need work.

This article is general guidance. Fixing what it describes makes a page easier for search engines to reach and read; it cannot promise a ranking. We are not affiliated with Google or endorsed by it, and cannot see inside how it ranks pages, so we make no ranking predictions. Lala SEO is independent and not affiliated with Squarespace. Squarespace is a trademark of its owner.