What We Keep Finding When We Audit Squarespace Websites
Nobody books an audit for a website that's obviously broken. Broken sites get fixed. The Squarespace sites we're asked to look at usually seem fine to the people who run them, and that's the trouble. A site can look perfectly respectable while its contact form emails someone who left the business two years ago and its phone layout pushes the booking button below the point where people stop scrolling.
We've built more than 650 Squarespace sites since 2014, and a Squarespace website audit is one of the most revealing jobs we do. What follows is a tour of the problems that come up again and again, split into design and functionality, with a note on which ones you can sort yourself and which to hand over.
A Squarespace website audit is a structured review of a live site against the things that decide whether it performs: design hierarchy, mobile layout, page speed, accessibility, SEO settings, and the mechanics behind forms, redirects and tracking code. We work through the pages that get the most traffic, check them on a phone as well as a laptop, and write down what is costing the business enquiries, in the order we would fix it. Some of what turns up is cosmetic. Plenty of it isn't. A contact form quietly emailing a former colleague, images ten times heavier than Squarespace recommends, a redesign that dropped a page Google had been sending people to for three years: none of that shows up when you look at your own homepage on a big monitor. The point of an audit is to turn a vague sense that the site could be better into a list you can work through at your own pace.
Why a site that looks fine can still cost you
You see your website from the inside. You know where everything lives, you arrive on the homepage from a bookmark, and you probably check it on a laptop.
Visitors don't get that luxury. Plenty of them land on an inner page from a search result, on a phone, and decide within seconds whether you deserve another tap. An audit means looking at the site the way they do and writing down everything that gets in their way.
The design problems
Nothing tells people where to look
Hierarchy is the big one. When every heading is shouting and every section has its own button, visitors stop reading and start hunting for the back button. When the main heading and a minor subheading are the same size, people are left guessing what the page is for.
Fonts and colours that multiplied over time
Squarespace makes it easy to change the font on one block, then another, then another. A few years and a few editors later, a site can end up with a handful of typefaces and a dozen slightly different greys. Nobody chose that look. It accumulated.
The fix mostly happens in Site Styles rather than page by page, which is why it tends to be quicker than people expect.
Text you can't read outdoors
Pale grey text on white looks elegant on a big monitor and disappears on a phone in daylight. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines ask for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text, or 3:1 for large text, and plenty of "minimal" palettes fall short. This is the most common accessibility problem on the web rather than a niche one. WebAIM's 2026 scan of a million home pages found low-contrast text on 83.9% of them, at an average of 34 separate instances per page, and detected WCAG failures on 95.9% of home pages overall, averaging 56.1 errors each. Both numbers got worse compared with 2025. Squarespace's accessibility guidance suggests choosing colours in the Colors panel that meet the guidelines, which is the quickest place to start, and we offer a free accessibility audit if you want the full picture.
A mobile layout that hasn't been checked since launch
Fluid Engine, the editor in Squarespace 7.1, keeps a separate layout for phones. Squarespace's Help Center says you can arrange the mobile layout without affecting desktop, and it recommends reviewing mobile as you make changes. That second bit gets skipped.
Blocks added on desktop months after launch are slotted into the phone view automatically, placed "as similarly to the desktop layout as possible". It works more often than you'd expect. When it doesn't, you get a button stranded under a tall image, or a paragraph squeezed into a column two words wide.
The functionality problems
Forms that email the wrong person
If you only check one thing on this list, make it this.
By default, a Squarespace form block sends submissions to the account email of whoever added the form. If a freelancer or a former colleague built your contact page, your enquiries may still be landing in their inbox. Each form connects to one email address, and the setting sits inside the block itself (the Email Notification field on the Content tab), so it's easy to miss for years.
The test takes a minute. Fill in your own form and see where it lands. If nothing turns up, check your spam folder for messages from form-submission@squarespace.info before assuming the worst.
Tracking code from a different era
Code Injection is where old scripts go to retire without anyone telling them. Universal Analytics, for example, stopped processing data on 1 July 2023, yet its tags still turn up on live sites. Abandoned chat widgets and pixels from long-finished ad campaigns behave the same way: they add weight and do nothing.
Site-wide code lives under Website Tools in the Pages panel, and individual pages can carry their own code in page settings, so check both.
Custom CSS that grew by accident
Custom CSS is brilliant right up until it becomes archaeology. Each fix gets layered on top of the last, often by different people, and some rules end up quietly fighting each other. On one project, the stylesheet controlling a site's summary blocks went from roughly 640 lines to 336, and the pages looked exactly the same afterwards. Less code also means fewer surprises the next time anyone edits the site.
Images far heavier than they need to be
Squarespace recommends a width of 2,500 pixels for most images and suggests keeping files to 500 KB or less. It will happily accept uploads of up to 20 MB, which is how an 8 MB photo straight off a camera ends up as a homepage banner.
On office wifi, nobody notices. Someone on a train notices.
Speed has thresholds you can measure against. Google's Core Web Vitals ask for a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and a Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, judged at the 75th percentile of visits and reported separately for mobile and desktop. The commercial case is older but still quoted: Deloitte's study with Google, published in 2020 using 2019 data from 37 retail and travel brands, found that improving mobile load time by 0.1 seconds lifted retail conversions by 8.4% and average order value by 9.2%. Those figures are six years old now, so treat them as a direction rather than a promise. Compress the images either way.
Broken links after a reshuffle
When pages are renamed or removed, old links break unless someone adds a redirect. In Squarespace that's done with URL mappings under Developer Tools in Settings, one line per redirect, like this: /old-page -> /new-page 301.
A site that tidied its navigation a year ago can still be sending people from old search results straight to a 404 page. It's one of the dullest fixes on this list, and one of the most useful.
Empty SEO descriptions
Lots of pages go live with the SEO description left blank. Squarespace suggests descriptions of 50 to 300 characters. They don't control exactly what Google shows, but they give search engines a clean summary of each page, and Squarespace's own search visibility score counts them.
Still on version 7.0
Some sites we audit are still running Squarespace 7.0. They work, and we haven't seen Squarespace announce an end date. But newer features, Fluid Engine included, are 7.1 only. Squarespace now has a built-in tool that updates a 7.0 site in place, with some catches to understand before you press the button.
What you can fix yourself this afternoon
None of these need code:
Submit every form on the site and confirm where the notification arrives.
Pick up your phone and tap through your five most visited pages.
Open Code Injection and write down every script you can't explain.
Add SEO descriptions to your most important pages.
Add alt text to images that carry meaning, such as product photos and diagrams.
Search Google for site:yourdomain.co.uk, click a few older results and see whether they still work.
What they do need is an uninterrupted hour, which we appreciate is the hardest part.
When to get expert help
The list above is housekeeping. The harder calls are about structure and priority, like whether a page should exist at all or which of the twenty things on your list will make a difference this quarter. That's the point where an outside view helps most.
There are a few ways to get that help, and each suits a different situation.
An audit and review. If you want to know what's wrong before spending money fixing it, start with an independent Squarespace audit. You'll know what's holding the site back and what to tackle first, and you can act on it yourself or hand it to someone else.
Designer for a Day. If you already know what needs changing, Designer for a Day puts an experienced Squarespace designer on your site for the day. You can sit in and learn as the work gets done.
A support plan. If the real issue is that the site has no one looking after it, a monthly support plan makes it someone's job.
A rebuild. Occasionally a site has outgrown its structure and patching won't help. When that's the case we'll say so, and a new website becomes the next conversation.
Made by Dave is a Squarespace Circle Platinum Partner and Squarespace Expert studio based in Watford, just outside London, working with organisations across the UK. If you're not sure which of these fits, tell us what's going on and we'll point you in the right direction, even if the answer is a job you can do yourself.
FAQs
How can I get help improving the design and functionality of my existing Squarespace website?
Start by finding out what's holding the site back, rather than guessing. A Squarespace website audit, such as the audit and review service from Made by Dave, reviews design hierarchy, mobile layout, speed, accessibility, SEO settings, forms and redirects, then sets out what to fix first. From there you have three routes. You can make the smaller changes yourself, since form notification emails, SEO descriptions and alt text need no code. You can book a Designer for a Day, which puts an experienced Squarespace designer on your site for a day while you watch and learn. Or you can put the site on a monthly support plan so the work becomes somebody's job rather than nobody's. Squarespace's Marketplace also lists vetted Squarespace Experts who offer design reviews and site functionality work.
What are the most common problems on Squarespace websites?
Common issues we find in audits include contact forms sending notifications to an old email address, mobile layouts that haven't been checked since launch, oversized images, leftover tracking code in Code Injection, low colour contrast, missing redirects after pages are renamed and blank SEO descriptions.
Can I fix Squarespace design and functionality issues myself?
Many of them, yes. Checking form notification emails, reviewing the mobile layout in Fluid Engine, adding SEO descriptions and alt text, and removing scripts you no longer use can all be done without code. Structural changes, custom CSS clean-up and anything affecting enquiries or sales are usually quicker with a specialist.
Should I improve my Squarespace site or rebuild it?
Most sites can be improved rather than rebuilt. A rebuild makes sense when the structure no longer fits the business, the brand has moved on, or a Squarespace 7.0 site relies on features the 7.1 update tool can't carry over.
