Can You Edit a Published Squarespace Site?
Yes, you can make edits to your Squarespace site after it has been published. Making small edits to your published Squarespace site is very simple, and making large edits that make take more than one sitting to accomplish is also possible, although it can involve more work depending on how major the edits are.
Making Minor Edits
Editing Page Content
To make edits to the page content, click the “Edit” button in the upper lefthand corner of the page content frame. This will allow you to add, delete, and update the page content.
Once you are finished making edits, click “Save.” This will automatically publish your updated content to the web.
Click “Edit” to make edits to page content.
Click “Save” once you are finished making edits.
Editing Page Settings
You can also make edits to page settings after your Squarespace site has been published.
General settings include:
Page Title
Navigation Title
URL Slug
Whether the page is Enabled or not
If the page is Password-protected, or not
SEO Settings include:
SEO Title (optional)
SEO Description (optional)
Whether the page is hidden from search results
Social Image Settings include:
Alternate Social Image, which is the image used if a page is shared on social media platforms
Advanced Settings include:
Page Header Code Injection, which is where you can inject custom code into the header of a single page
Click the gear icon of a page to open the Settings modal.
Edit page settings such as page title, URL slug, and more.
Making Extensive Edits
Redesigning a Single Page
There are two ways to redesign a page. You can duplicate a page, or you can create a new page. Then, once you are finished making edits, delete the old page and set the URL of the new page to the URL of the page you just deleted.
Duplicate the Page
Duplicating a page is ideal if most of your content will be the same, but you just want to move some things around.
If you open a page’s settings by clicking the gear icon, you will find the option “Duplicate Page.” This will create a carbon copy of the page that you can make edits to. Make sure that “Enable Page” is toggled off, because you don’t want anyone to access it yet.
Once you are finished modifying the page, you can replace the old page by deleting it, and then setting the URL of the new page to the URL of the page you just deleted.
Create an Entirely New Page
If your new page design will be vastly different than the old one, you can just create a new one from scratch by clicking the “+” button next to Main Navigation or Not Linked
If you open a page’s settings by clicking the gear icon, you will find the option “Duplicate Page.” This will create a carbon copy of the page that you can make edits to. Make sure that “Enable Page” is toggled off, because you don’t want anyone to access it yet.
Once you are finished modifying the page, you can replace the old page by deleting it, and then setting the URL of the new page to the URL of the page you just deleted.
Redesigning an Entire Site
There are a few different ways to redesign an entire website. Here are the ways I find are most helpful and the pros and cons of each:
Duplicate a Website, or Create a New Website - Then Move Your Domain to the New Site
This method is ideal if you are making tons of edits to your site, but it does require some technical experience in moving domains between Squarespace sites and editing DNS settings.
First, either duplicate your current site or create a new site in your Squarespace account. You can edit this site for free using the 14-day trial, but if your edits take longer than 14 days, you will eventually need to purchase the new site.
When you are finished with the new sites, follow Squarespace’s instructions on Moving a domain to another Squarespace site. Once that process is completely finished, cancel your website subscription to the old site and purchase the subscription for the new site if you haven’t done that already.
According to Squarespace, all of your DNS records will automatically be transferred to your new Squarespace site so long as your domain was hosted in Squarespace and not a third party, but please don’t just rely on this blog post before making a decision - read the entire Guide from Squarespace so that you can make sure you are comfortable dealing with DNS records, especially if you have Google Workspace subscription attached to your domain.
Design New Pages in the Current Site, Delete the Old Pages, and Then Give the New Pages the Old Page URLs
If you’d rather not worry about the technical details required in the above method, you can try doing what is described in the previous section, Redesigning a Single Page. This method may take longer to publish the changes depending on how many pages you are editing because you would have to delete the old page, set the URL of the new page to the old page’s URL, and then publish the new page multiple times, but it tends to be much simpler than method 1.
Make Edits to Your Current Pages and Display “Website is Under Construction” in the Announcement Bar
If you’re confident your website edits won’t take longer than a few days, you could just make the edits on the current published pages and create an announcement bar that says something like “Sorry if things may look a little weird - we’re under construction.”
Making Sure Search Engines Recognize Your Edits
So long as your website has already been discovered by Google and other search engines, SEO crawlers will eventually notice the changes on your website. However, if your website is new or even if it is an aged domain and website, you can manually notify Google of your changes by submitting the URL for inspection using the Google Search Console. Submitting the URL of a page you’ve just edited will add the URL to Google’s priority queue.
Here’s how to submit a single URL for inspection:
Copy the secure (HTTPS) URL of the page you’ve just edited.
Paste it into the URL Inspection input field at the top of the page.
Select “Request Indexing.”
If you have made edits to a large number of pages on your site, you can submit a sitemap instead of individually requesting every URL be crawled. Here’s how to submit a sitemap of a Squarespace site:
Obtain your sitemap URL. It should be your domain name with “/sitemap.xml” appended to it.
https://exampledomain.com/sitemap.xml
In Google Search Console, navigate to “Sitemaps” in the side navigation and submit your sitemap using your site’s sitemap URL.
