Is Squarespace good for SEO? My review
This is my experience of growing a blog on Squarespace through SEO.
There is a common and very persistent myth that Squarespace is bad for SEO.
Here is the key thing you need to know: Good SEO doesn’t depend on the platform you use.
Showing up in search is more a result of good SEO practices — both on and off page — and solid content. Google doesn’t take into account the CMS a website is built with.
Many blogs are built on WordPress, and many people selling blogging courses will advise that this is the best platform for scaling a blog, due to SEO.
But, I successfully grew my Squarespace travel blog from less than 1000 to nearly 100,000 page views per month, in less than a year. If Squarespace was bad for SEO, I would never have been able to see that kind of growth.
Here is my honest experience of growing a site on Squarespace. This is mostly focused on developing a blog, but the SEO tactics I use could apply to any kind of website.
Can Squarespace websites get a lot of traffic?
If Squarespace websites have good content, address genuine user needs, and are optimised for SEO, there is no reason they wouldn’t get huge amounts of traffic.
My travel blog gets close to 100,000 page views per month in the peak period, on average 60,000 in the off season.
And North is a beautiful hyper local travel site built on Squarespace, getting at least 200,000 visits per year.
How Squarespace is good for SEO
As I mentioned above, no one platform is inherently better or worse for SEO. It depends on how you use it.
Squarespace does have certain features that can help boost your SEO, though.
No one knows exactly what signals Google uses to rank content — it’s mostly educated guesses.
One of the factors that seems to have an impact is user behaviour on site. That includes time spent on site, and the number of page views per session. This might not be a direct ranking factor, but this kind of feedback likely indicates quality to Google, which in turn can influence your visibility in search.
So, having a site with a smooth user experience does impact SEO.
This is where Squarespace shines, as websites built on the platform typically have a user focused design.
How Squarespace is bad for SEO (and why people seem to hate it)
There are fewer SEO plugin options for Squarespace, unlike Yoast or Rankmath for WordPress, for example.
I really don’t see this as an issue, as plugins alone do not determine SEO success. In fact, I think a lot of them operate in a way that is a little outdated, encouraging overuse of keywords.
There is still at least one dedicated Squarespace SEO plugin, SEOSpace, and plenty of SEO tools that work on Squarespace sites.
There is a commonly cited myth that Squarespace has terrible page speeds, which drags down search performance.
Two things here.
One, page speed alone doesn’t dictate search performance — it’s one of many ranking factors.
Two, Squarespace websites were shown in a Backlinko report to have faster page speeds on average than WordPress websites.
Squarespace does look bad in the Page Speed Insights report, but it seems like that report alone doesn’t tell the full story.
Any WordPress site, or Squarespace site, can have slow page speeds, if the content isn’t optimised properly — for example, if there are dozens of huge images or videos on a page.
Squarespace SEO tips
When Squarespace sites don’t show up in search, it’s not because the platform itself is bad for SEO — it’s usually because the site managers don’t know search optimisation best practices.
These are my best Squarespace SEO tips:
Make sure your images are properly optimised
Have strong internal linking practices (and check for broken links consistently)
Optimise your headers
Make sure you have a specific intention for each page or post — i.e. that you’re answering a query from your audience.
If you found this helpful, you might also like to take a peek at my other tips on blogging on Squarespace:
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