There may be certain elements on your Squarespace website you would prefer not to appear in search results, such as under construction pages or temporary content that shouldn’t appear there. This might include areas of temporary construction or content you do not wish for search engines to index.
Disabling pages through their settings or sitewide can help keep them out of search engines’ indexing algorithms and preserve live sites without impacting visitor experience. Disabling won’t affect live websites directly; rather it will prevent the page from being indexed by search engines and stop its content being seen by them.
Removing Header and Footer
Squarespace’s header and footer navigation is extremely helpful, but sometimes you want to create pages without it – perfect for long-form sales pages, dedicated lead magnet signup pages and more. With some quick CSS skills and copy & paste tricks, it is possible to conceal certain headers and footers on certain pages on your website.
To achieve this, we will follow the same technique used for hiding headers and footers from your homepage – adding a CSS snippet at the top of your theme. To begin this process, log into your Squarespace account and navigate to the page from which you wish to remove its header or footer, clicking its small gear icon near its title to access Advanced mode.
Here you will see a box where you can paste in custom CSS code snippets to customize your website’s appearance. Once copied and pasted in, save changes.
Once completed, click ‘Save and Close’ to save your changes and close out.
Now you will have successfully hidden the header and footer on your page, while still having the option to display them on other pages within your website if desired.
The footer is the bottom section of your website that sits below page content, used for contact details, social media icons, FAQs and more. Depending on your template and page settings feature you use, it may be possible to customize individual page footers by using the ‘Footer’ option in Page Settings; but in certain templates this might not be possible.
If your template doesn’t allow for individual page-by-page editing of footers, there’s still an easy way to hide them from search engines: add a meta robots tag in the header. This will prevent search engines such as Google from indexing it while not restricting visitors from accessing it.
This method is ideal for pages that are designed only to be seen by certain audiences, such as thank you pages or landing pages for ads. Additionally, this approach works great when maintaining an active page but without needing it be found via search, such as course lesson pages. For added privacy and security purposes, password protection or noindex meta robots tag would likely be the optimal solution.
Removing a Section
Have you worked on a website using Squarespace as its content management system? If so, then you may already know there are pages not linked from the navigation and thus “invisible” to visitors – such as titles that might only appear in banner areas (depending on template) or part of page headers.
Squarespace makes it simple and effective to hide pages from search engines by offering page settings. Simply access the page you wish to hide from search engines and click its gear icon; select SEO; scroll to the bottom of the page where there will be an indexing toggle; click that toggle to remove indexing of this page.
For pages under construction, duplicates or thank you pages that shouldn’t appear in Google search results but still need access by certain audiences, using noindex directives in a meta robots tag in HTML head can prevent it from being indexed (learn more).
As mentioned above, Squarespace makes it easy and quick to hide pages by setting them with passwords (learn more). Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of PDF or other files uploaded onto your site that appear in search engine results – for fast removal we suggest giving these passwords as well as uploading with noindex directive (learn more).
Page titles are one of the most essential on-page elements to optimizing SEO on any website, since audiences first see them when viewing search engine results pages or social media feeds, and their appearance determines whether people click or ignore your page. They also become the centerpiece of every page – it is therefore critical that their accuracy and relevancy remain intact.
Page titles like “Services” or “Home” don’t provide enough clarity for audience members to comprehend the purpose of a particular page, so include keywords that potential customers search for in your page titles to ensure greater visibility on search result pages. Also consider placing them nearer the beginning so they are easier to spot by search engines.
Removing a Page
If you need to delete pages on your Squarespace site, the process can be relatively straightforward. Although the specific steps depend on what kind of content is involved – blog posts, products or project pages – the basic idea remains the same: disable your page so that it disappears from both visitors and search engines – an ideal option for under construction pages, seasonal content or landing pages for specific campaigns that should not appear in search results.
Use this technique to hide pages while editing them – an excellent way to protect sensitive or proprietary data while making changes to your website. Simply create a copy and edit that instead; when finished, delete the original page, insert its duplicate into main navigation, and rename and URL it so it matches what it once was.
Consider that when hiding pages on your site, SEO could be affected as Google takes many factors into consideration when ranking search engine results, including whether or not a page should appear in them. To avoid this happening, add a noindex tag to each page’s code in order to prevent Google from indexing it in search engine rankings.
Step one in maintaining the SEO integrity of your site should be optimizing it for SEO before opening to public access.
Before launching your Squarespace site, the last step to ensure its success should be extensive testing. This should include testing all links, buttons and forms as well as any e-commerce functions or third-party integrations you’ve added – plus making sure visitors can easily navigate from page to page without getting lost or hitting dead ends.
If you have followed this guide, your Squarespace website should be ready for launch. Just remember to come back regularly for new guides, tricks, and tips!
