Squarespace SEO Guide: Settings, Redirects and Speed

Squarespace takes care of much of the technical groundwork: sitemaps, SSL, clean URLs and basic structured data are all automatic. That makes it easy to get started, but it also means some settings are hidden or fixed, and a few common mistakes, such as changing a slug without a redirect, can quietly cost you traffic. This Squarespace SEO guide covers every setting that matters, the exact panel names from Squarespace's current help centre, and the limits you need to work around.

Key takeaways

Changing a slug on Squarespace does not create a redirect, so add a 301 in Developer tools URL mappings straight after any slug change.
Squarespace handles sitemaps, SSL and basic structured data automatically, but you cannot edit robots.txt, the sitemap or the built-in schema.
Keep %p and %i in your title formats and give every important page a unique, hand-written SEO title and description.
Keep pages to 5 MB or less and images under 500 KB each, because Squarespace speed depends mostly on what you put on each page.

What Squarespace does automatically

According to Squarespace's help centre, every site gets:

An automatic sitemap at /sitemap.xml, listing your URLs and image metadata, updated as you publish.
Structured data for six types: blog post, event, local business, organisation, product and website.
Clean, static URLs such as yoursite.com/about.
Primary domain redirects, so secondary domains 301 to your main domain.
Free SSL certificates for connected domains (you still need the SSL setting on Secure).
Mobile-optimised templates and properly tagged headings.

What you do not get is fine control. You cannot edit robots.txt, the sitemap or the built-in structured data. Most of your SEO work on Squarespace is therefore about content, metadata, URLs, redirects and page weight.

Squarespace SEO settings: title formats and descriptions

Site-wide title formats

Your title format decides how page titles appear in search results, browser tabs and social shares. On version 7.1:

Open the SEO/AI Visibility panel and click SEO Settings.
Under Search Appearance, choose the Home, Pages or Items tab.
Edit the SEO Title Format field and click Save.

On version 7.0, use the SEO appearance panel instead. In the Squarespace app, tap More > Marketing > SEO.

The format uses variables:

Variable	Meaning
`%s`	Your site title
`%p`	The page's SEO title (or page title if none is set)
`%i`	The SEO title of a collection item, such as a blog post, product or event

A sensible set-up for most small businesses:

Home:  %s | Wedding Photographer in Brighton
Pages: %p | %s
Items: %i | %s

Do not remove %p or %i. Squarespace warns that leaving them out can hide page and item titles even when a page has its own SEO title.

Site title and description

Squarespace's SEO checklist recommends a site title under 60 characters with your main keyword, and a site description of 50 to 300 characters. In practice, Google usually shows around 150 to 160 characters of a description, so put the important part first.

Page SEO titles and descriptions

For each page:

Open the Pages panel, hover over the page and click the gear icon.
Click the SEO tab.
Fill in SEO Title and SEO Description, then save.

SEO titles have a 100-character limit, but aim for around 60 so they are not truncated. Homepages do not have their own SEO title field; their title comes from the Home title format. Blog posts, products and events each have their own SEO fields in their item settings.

Give every important page a unique, hand-written description. Version 7.1 sites also have an SEO Report tool that scans for missing SEO descriptions and alt text. Check what Google sees with our Meta Tag Checker, which shows the title, description, canonical and robots tags plus a search preview.

URL slugs on Squarespace

To change a page slug, open its settings from the Pages panel and edit the URL slug field. Blog posts use Post URL, events use Event URL, and products are edited under Marketing > SEO and URL in the product editor.

Rules from Squarespace's help centre:

Slugs are converted to lowercase automatically.
Only letters, numbers and dashes are allowed.
Most pages need 3 to 250 characters; blog posts, events and products need 3 to 200.
Reserved slugs such as cart, checkout and api cannot be used.
A collection page's slug reserves its sub-paths, so if your blog lives at /journal, no other page can use /journal/something.

Replace random-character slugs that appear on posts saved without a title, and keep slugs short and descriptive: /journal/brighton-beach-wedding rather than /journal/2026/10/16/our-amazing-weekend-at-the-beach.

Critical: changing a slug does not create a redirect on Squarespace. Anyone following an old link, bookmark or QR code will see a 404, and any rankings the old URL had will be lost unless you add a URL mapping.

Redirects with URL mappings

Squarespace handles redirects in one text field.

Open the Developer tools panel.
Click URL mappings.
Add one redirect per line, then click Save.

The syntax is the old path, an arrow, the new path and the redirect type:

/about -> /team 301
/services/old-package -> /services/wedding-photography 301
/blog/[name] -> /journal/[name] 301

The [name] variable redirects every item in a collection with a single line, which is ideal when you rename a blog or shop page.

Limits and rules:

The field holds up to 400 KB, roughly 2,500 lines. Delete redirects you no longer need.
Rules apply from top to bottom, so put specific redirects above broad ones.
A redirect only works once the source page is deleted or disabled. If the old page still exists, it will keep loading.
You cannot redirect image or file URLs, or the home page.
Use 301 for permanent moves. Errors such as "Not enough parts" usually mean a missing arrow or redirect type.

Secondary domains redirect to your primary domain at the root only, so if you moved from another platform, you also need URL mappings for the old deeper paths. After saving, test old URLs with our Redirect Checker to confirm a single 301 and no chains, then run your key pages through the Broken Link Checker to catch internal links still pointing at old slugs.

Image alt text and file names

Squarespace builds alt text from different fields depending on where the image sits:

Image type	Where alt text comes from
Image block	Image alt text field on the block's Content tab
Product image	Alt text in Edit metadata (up to 200 characters); falls back to the product name
Gallery section	The image's description
Gallery block	The image title, or the description if there is no title

If none is set, Squarespace may fall back to the file name, so rename files before uploading: brighton-pavilion-wedding-portrait.jpg rather than IMG_4821.jpg. Write alt text that describes what the image shows, naturally including the subject and location where relevant.

Squarespace speed tips

Squarespace runs the hosting and CDN, so your speed is mostly determined by what you put on each page. Its help article on reducing page size gives concrete limits:

Item	Squarespace guidance
Page size	5 MB or less (1 MB is safest on mobile data)
Images	Under 500 KB each, 1,500 to 2,500 px wide
Blocks	No more than 60 per page
Galleries	No more than 50 images each
Video embeds	Fewer per page; spread them across pages

Practical steps:

Resize and compress images before upload. A 6 MB photo straight from a camera is the most common cause of slow Squarespace pages.
Use blog excerpts on blog landing pages instead of full posts.
Split long pages that cover several topics.
Limit GIFs, animations and autoplay video, especially in the first screen, where they delay Largest Contentful Paint.
Audit code injection. Chat widgets, pixels and booking scripts added in code injection load on every page.
Keep fonts lean. Two families with a few weights is plenty.

Test a key page in PageSpeed Insights before and after. Our guide to Core Web Vitals explains what the scores mean.

Structured data limits on Squarespace

Squarespace's built-in schema covers the basics, but you cannot edit or remove it. That creates two practical limits:

If you want richer markup, such as FAQPage, Service or a more detailed LocalBusiness with opening hours, you need to add JSON-LD through code injection. Code injection is not available on the Basic or Personal plans, and Squarespace does not support custom code.
Adding your own Organization or Product markup on top of Squarespace's can create duplicates or conflicts. Add types Squarespace does not already output, rather than repeating ones it does.

Squarespace notes that Search Console sometimes shows warnings on Commerce product pages about missing fields such as review or aggregateRating. These warnings do not stop indexing.

Use our Schema Markup Validator to see every JSON-LD block on a page and spot invalid JSON or missing required properties.

Robots.txt, hiding pages and AI crawlers

You cannot edit robots.txt on Squarespace. Instead:

Hide a single page: Pages panel > gear icon > SEO tab > turn on Hide page from search results. This works on all plans and removes the page from the sitemap. Hiding a collection page hides all its items, and homepages and individual items do not have this toggle.
Block search engines site-wide: Settings > Crawlers and tick the option to block search engine crawlers. Only use this on a site that should not appear in Google at all.
Block AI crawlers: Settings > Crawlers > Block known artificial intelligence crawlers. This adds robots.txt rules, which well-behaved bots follow, but does not remove content already collected.

Connecting Google Search Console

Squarespace connects to Search Console through its analytics:

Open the Analytics panel and click Search keywords.
Click Connect, sign in to Google and click Allow.
Wait up to 72 hours for keyword data to appear.

Then, in Search Console itself, go to Sitemaps, enter sitemap.xml and submit. Squarespace generates the sitemap automatically, but submitting it gives you a status report. Verify with Bing Webmaster Tools as well; Squarespace has a separate guide for it.

When everything is set up, run a free website audit to check titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, alt text, the sitemap and structured data across your Squarespace site in one scan.

Frequently asked questions

Is Squarespace good for SEO?

Yes, for most small business sites. It handles sitemaps, SSL, clean URLs and basic structured data automatically and lets you edit titles, descriptions and slugs. The trade-offs are no robots.txt editing, fixed structured data and redirects that must be added manually.

Does Squarespace redirect old URLs automatically when I change a slug?

No. Changing a slug on Squarespace does not create a redirect, so the old URL returns a 404. Add a 301 in Developer tools > URL mappings straight after any slug change.

How many redirects can Squarespace handle?

The URL mappings field has a 400 KB limit, which Squarespace says is usually around 2,500 lines. Use the [name] variable to redirect whole collections in one line.

Can I add custom schema markup to Squarespace?

Yes, by adding JSON-LD through code injection, which is not available on the Basic or Personal plans. Avoid duplicating the types Squarespace already generates automatically.

Where is the sitemap on a Squarespace site?

It is at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml and is generated automatically. The site must be public for it to load.

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Squarespace SEO Guide: Settings, Redirects and Speed

What Squarespace does automatically