10 tips when upgrading your Squarespace 7.0 website to 7.1
When upgrading your old Squarespace 7.0 website to the new Squarespace 7.1 template system, it is like recreating your website again. This means it is the perfect opportunity to take stock, analyse how your current website works and doesn’t work hard enough for you and evolve your online business to be even more effective and useful for potential customers.
Redesigning your website can be a lot of work, but it is worth it as it is the perfect opportunity to benchmark against your competitors, improve and evolve. The digital design world moves very fast, and I often advise clients that they need to consider redesigning the look of their website every 2-3 years at a minimum to keep up with trends and competitors.
Here are some tips to consider before upgrading your Squarespace 7.0 website to 7.1 and redesigning your website:-
Tip 1: Take a look at your website analytics
Analyse what is and isn’t working on your website. For example:-
Which pages do customers visit most frequently
Are your calls to action (contact your business or buying a product) easy to find and use?
Are there any pages on your website which customers are not finding which you would like to make more prominent on the new Squarespace 7.1 website?
Tip 2: Write a list of what you do and don’t like about your current website
Asking colleagues or your customers directly can be a great way of getting website improvement feedback. This will stop you making assumptions about your customers and help build a new website that solves your customer’s problems and enables them to get in touch with you easily. Online customer experience is really vital to converting potential leads.
Tip 3: Write some updated copy for your website - take the opportunity to enhance the SEO effectiveness of your new website.
You can analyse your website for SEO improvements by using free SEO tools like Neil Patel SEO. What are your dream customers searching for? What are the search trends you need to optimise your new website for?
Tip 4: What features does your website need? A contact form? Email Marketing? Membership functionality? Would it benefit from appointment scheduling? Do you want to see new products?
Write a list and prioritise which route is the most important to point your customers to.
Tip 5: Think about colours and fonts
The new Squarespace 7.1 system makes it easy to set a colour scheme and font scheme so that the website looks sleek and consistent on every page. Experient with the fonts and colours and make this choice first to match your brand before you begin building the rest of the new Squarespace website.
Tip 6: Pick a 7.1 starter template that matches your new vision for your business’s website
Save a bit of building time and pick an initial 7.1 starter template that reflects your vision.
Tip 7: Consider the use of the new Portfolios functionality
This is a great way to showcase case studies for your business or past work.
Tip 8: Import your products from your 7.0 website
If you run an e-commerce website and sell products on your Squarespace version 7.0 website site, you can export your products to a .csv, then import them to your 7.1 website.
Tip 9: Copy your content from your current website
Copy the text from your website in a document, but take this opportunity to optimise it for SEO and improve it to target your customers, and solve their problems. (i.e. how you can help them).
Tip 10: Structure your pages using page sections. So that your website is very flexible to update
Use page sections to build your website pages as this will help keep your website flexible and easy to update.
Some of the section’s options include:-
the width of the section - small, medium, large, even a custom width
the height of the section - small, medium, large, even a custom height
the alignment of the content
you can set a background image or colour to be full width or inset
By using sections you can also easily re-order the sections on your page up and down, which is very handy.
Squarespace support have created a helpful overview on how to upgrade to 7.1 (watch below)
Finally, don’t forget to keep your version 7.0 website active until your new 7.1 website is ready to launch.
That way your customers have a website to visit and you can easily copy the content from the old website to the new 7.1 version.
I hope some of these Squarespace 7.1 upgrade tips are useful.
Don’t have time to do this yourself and need professional friendly help with creating your new 7.1 Squarespace with my site migration service?
