Why I started a travel blog on Squarespace (and how it’s going)
I ignored all the advice saying Squarespace is bad for blogging — and built a successful site anyway.
My Squarespace travel blog gets more than 50,000 monthly visitors — almost 100,000 in the highest traffic month.
It took me less than a year to grow my travel blog to this level.
I started my own site because travel writing is a precarious profession. Having my own travel blog has allowed me to secure a different income stream, while expanding my presence in search.
I now make regular monthly income from my travel blog.
If you’re thinking about starting a travel blog on Squarespace, I’d love to share my journey with you. Despite what a lot of people say, it is possible to grow a travel blog on Squarespace and make money.
Here’s how I did it.
Why Squarespace?
In some Facebook groups, you’ll see most travel bloggers shouting loudly about how Wordpress is the best platform for travel blogging. Some will try to convince you that the only option for a successful travel blog is to run it on Wordpress.
I strongly disagree.
Squarespace is much easier to use and more intuitive than clunky Wordpress.
The blog template designs in Sqaurespace are also a lot more flexible and unique – I can recognise a Wordpress site a mile away as most bloggers use the same theme and plug ins.
I think Squarespace is beautiful and the templates I see appeal to my design loving brain.
If you have never managed a CMS before and are new to publishing content on websites, I can highly recommend using Squarespace.
Having a simple editor makes all the difference — there are so many other aspects of digital publishing you’ll need to learn, that saving yourself time and energy on getting familiar with the backend system is a godsend.
But the main reason I built my site on Squarespace: I was already paying for the domain. I had a Squarespace site for years as a portfolio for my freelance travel writing, so I started publishing content almost as an experiment, when I learned how much money travel bloggers were making.
It turned out to be easier to publish content and start ranking than I thought, so I carried on using the same platform and domain.
Now, one and a half years later, I have grown my appreciation for Squarespace as a platform alongside my travel website.
How I grew my Squarespace travel blog to nearly 100,000 monthly views
For some reason, a lot of people seem to think Squarespace is bad for SEO. My website is proof a Squarespace site can thrive in search.
Google doesn’t take into account the platform content is published on, so if you have valuable content and a site that is easy to navigate, there’s a good chance you’ll see success in search.
My process for growing my blog traffic was straightforward; consistently publish quality content.
There is a bit more detail than that involved in SEO, including carrying out keyword research, understanding my audience intent, and analysing the results. I already had some solid knowledge of SEO and content management from my career as a digital content manager for travel brands.
My main tips for growing traffic would be these:
Focus on developing content in one niche first — this will help you grow more quickly.
Learn the basics of keyword research, but don’t let this dictate everything you do. You should focus on understanding your audience instead, and making sure you are offering value. For example, when I write an itinerary post, I know my audience is searching for ‘two week itinerary in X’, but I don’t deliberately use this phrase 10 times in the post. If you’re writing on a topic, you’ll naturally use the right keywords.
Stay consistent — you don’t have to publish on a set day each week, but writing as many blog posts as you can is important. Not only do the impacts of your efforts start compounding after a while, but the more data you have, the more you can learn. You can pivot away from content that isn’t working and dial up what does work, but only if you have enough content out there to learn from.
A few things to note: I didn’t start off from nothing
There are a few caveats to my story, of course.
I already had a tiny bit of traffic coming in to my blog from posts I had published ages ago, on the topic of travel writing. It wasn’t a lot, but I was getting between 500 and 1000 clicks a month.
I also have experience in SEO and content writing from my professional life. Before launching my full time freelance travel writing career, I worked as a content manager for large travel brands.
That means I started my site with a pretty solid knowledge of SEO, how to carry out keyword research, the importance of audience intent, and so on.
I also already had good backlinks pointing to my site, from the freelance writing work I’ve done for publications, from huge names like National Geographic Travel.
These things meant I wasn’t starting from zero, but I truly believe that if you create good content, you will see success in SEO.
The pros and cons of using Squarespace for a travel blog
No website platform is perfect; no matter where you choose to launch your blog, you’re going to run into pros and cons. These are the ups and downs of using Squarespace, that I have encountered at least — I’m sure some people have more complaints, but so far this is my experience.
Pros
The blog editor is easy to use. It’s really that simple, it’s just so clean and straightforward.
There are SEO features built into each post.
Cons
Most of the downsides of using Squarespace for a travel blog are related to the constraints of the platform.
There are some niggles that mean Squarespace really isn’t efficient for publishing a lot of content. For example, you have to add alt text individually to image blocks each time you use an image — there’s no way to make sure the alt text of an image asset automatically populates when you use it.
While Fluid Engine means Squarespace pages can be easily customised, blog pages are still somewhat limited, like the 7.0 editor.
You can’t save draft changes to a blog post before publishing, which means you end up editing published posts in real time.
To easily add affiliate links, you need to be on a Business Plan (there is a plugin you can use, but it requires a custom code injection, a Business Plan feature).
Starting a Squarespace blog
Most guides to starting a blog on Squarespace will walk you through the most basic of steps: sign up, choose a template, and add your content.
In theory, starting a blog on Squarespace is that straightforward (and many people will tell you you can do it in a day).
But, in reality, getting a great blog up and running is a little more complicated than that.
There are some parts of starting a travel blog that can take a lot of time, especially if you’ve never launched a website before:
Choosing and buying a domain name.
Setting up Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Getting the hang of the platform you’re using to publish content.
Understanding how best to optimise your blog posts for SEO from the start, so you don’t upload a lot of poorly formatted posts you’ll need to edit later.
Squarespace offers a free 14 day trial, and I think in reality it takes at least this two week period to get your travel blog up and running.
A quick pep talk from me
All of this can feel overwhelming, especially once you start realising how much work is really involved in running a blog. So, I have broken down the steps to starting a travel blog on Squarespace to make it more manageable, while still being realistic.
Before I begin, these are some of my best tips for starting a blog on Squarespace:
Just start. You’ll learn by doing, I can guarantee it. You’ll change your mind about your blog layout and style, which is totally okay — it’s all part of developing your unique style. You won’t get everything right from the get go, so let go of wanting perfection and be happy with being 80% there.
You’ll hone your ideal layout, voice, and learn what works by publishing content. There’s only so much learning and thinking you can do — most of the results you see will come from actually doing the thing (and I say this as a chronic overthinker).
Ignore the people who say Squarespace is bad for SEO, monetisation, or whatever else they like to say. A lot of bloggers follow the same templated advice just because that’s what has been kicking around the internet for years. My best tip; test everything yourself.
Save time where you can. It takes forever to learn the many skills you need to start a travel blog, so if you can save yourself time with travel blog templates, go for it.
Step 1: Choose a name (and a domain)
This first step is all about making sure you have a name and a direction.
Choosing a name for your travel blog feels incredibly hard (building a brand from nothing requires a lot of imagination!).
Some things to consider:
Will this name still represent your blog’s direction in one year? In 10?
Is it memorable? There are so many blogs called soandsotravels, or soandsoabroad, or something along those lines.
Your blog name doesn’t even need to be overtly about travel. Mine is just my name.
But, try not to get too hung up on this step.
Once you have a name in mind, you need to check that the domain is available.
You might go back and forth between these actions a couple of times, tweaking your name to suit what domains are available.
Step 2: Map out some of your content
Before signing up to Squarespace (or any blogging platform), I recommend creating a rough content plan for your website.
For this website, I wrote down the titles of 20 possible blog posts, so I could be sure I had enough possible content to justify investing in a second site.
I wrote three rough drafts for posts in Google docs, so I had some content to copy and paste when I signed up for a trial site.
Squarespace gives you 14 days to play around with a website before you need to decide whether you want to commit.
In my experience, most of that time will be spent fussing over the layout, so having some content you can drop into your template can give you more time to think about the design and come to grips with using the platform.
Also; you can figure out for yourself — is writing this kind of content enjoyable for you? Could you write 100 more posts?
Publishing content to my own website has been amazing for me in a number of different ways (building my brand, landing writing opportunities, and making money off ads), but it also takes a lot of hard work.
Step 3: Pick a template
If you’re signing up to Squarespace in 2024, you’ll be on the more modern Squarespace 7.1.
This means there are no differences in terms of capabilities between templates — there are just the visual design differences.
Although most Squarespace templates will have a blog page somewhere, most templates are geared more towards photography or visual portfolios rather than written content.
My advice; pick a basic template.
You’re probably going to change so much of it a simple template will do the trick.
Step 4: Map out your URLs
Squarespace will create default URLs for you in some instances, so make sure you like them before you hit publish.
For example; on my main travel site, I use /posts/ instead of /blogs/ because I like the way it looks and sounds better. But, Squarespace uses /blogs/ as a default, so I published a whole bunch of pages and eventually had to go back and set up redirects to get the URLs looking like I wanted.
Another tip; double check all your URLs before hitting publish, as Squarespace will add random default titles. If you don’t edit them, you’ll end up with weird URLs getting indexed (I did this and almost immediately had to add redirects!).
A few mistakes to avoid right from the start:
Resize your images before uploading them. Images that are larger than around 300kbs are going to slow down your site, so if you’re taking images from Unsplash or other sites, make sure you’re resizing and renaming the image file before uploading.
Make sure your heading structure cascades (eg only one H1 at the top of the page, followed by H2s, and H3s for any sub paragraphs within your H2 paragraphs. If you don’t like the way they look you can adjust them under site styles, but don’t use all H4s on a page because you like the way they look.
Step 5: Set up your core pages
When you’re just launching a new site, you don’t need to worry about getting everything live at once.
I would focus on a small number of core pages:
Home page
About page
Blog pages
Privacy policy
Contact page
There are more core site pages you’re going to need, but when you first launch a site, it’s going to take a while for all of your pages to be indexed.
Your blog posts are going to be the first ones to start getting traffic in Google, so I would focus on getting those up and come back to the rest of your site pages a little later.
Once your site is live
Connect your domain to Google Search Console
Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console
Set up a project on Ahrefs — you can do this for free and you’ll be able to see once you start gaining organic keywords and backlinks.
It will probably take around a month before you see anything of interest in GSC.
Thanks for reading this far! I hope this helped you pluck up the courage to start a travel blog on Squarespace. If you have more questions for me, please feel free to get in touch.
If you’re interested in learning more about launching a travel blog on Squarespace, you might also find these articles helpful:
