The Freelancer’s Guide to Launching a Website with Squarespace

Published in

Epic Freelancing

3 min readJun 27, 2016

There are many types of do-it-yourself website builders, but for a simple, informational website, we recommend Squarespace — which I use for my personal website — because it:

Emphasizes visuals and automatically optimizes for mobile devices
Features built-in website hosting, blogging, podcast hosting and eCommerce (if you want to sell digital products, or if you want to accept client payments via your website)
Integrates seamlessly with third-party apps like Mailchimp email marketing and Google Drive
Offers Gmail custom domain email addresses

A Squarespace personal website runs $16 per month or $144 per year ($12 per month annualized), while a Squarespace business website costs $26 per month or $216 per year ($18 per month annualized). For a simple, informational website, the personal option will do the job.

Follow these eight steps to launch your website using Squarespace:

1. Go to Squarespace.com and click on “Websites” at the top of the home page.

2. Choose a website template.

My favorite templates include Bedford, Bryant, Hayden, Five and Kent. Filter by “businesses” if you don’t want to browse through all of them.

Here’s how to choose the right template.

3. Sign up and create an account.

It’s free to build your website. You only have to pay when you want to publish it live.

4. Under “Pages,” customize each webpage and add a blog.

For starters, we recommend a home page, an “about” page, a “services” page, a “contact” page and a blog.

5. Under “Design,” add your logo and website title.

6. Buy a domain name using GoDaddy.

If you sign up for an annual purchasing plan on Squarespace, you’ll receive a free custom domain name. If you already own a domain name, proceed to the next step.