Squarespace 7.0 vs. 7.1: Should You Switch?

Today, we’re going to be talking about one of the questions I get asked all the time. What’s the difference between Squarespace 7 and 7.1? And should you make the switch?

Now, I’m not gonna lie. When Squarespace first came out with 7.1 and I tried the platform I absolutely hated it. I started building a site and realized, I didn’t know where anything was. I wasn’t sure how to make all of the changes that I was so very used to, but eventually I got over it.

I built a couple of sites and now I am in love with a lot of the changes that they’ve made with the new platform.

By no means is Squarespace 7.1 perfect. I’ll talk about some of the cons later on in this video, but they did add so many, much needed features that Squarespace 7.0 is simply lacking.

One of my favorite things about the new version is that all of the templates have the exact same features and functionality. You no longer have to ask; am I part of the Brine template family and my part of a different template family? Does my template have these features? Can my template look like this?

Because the answer is always, yes on 7.1. All of the sites, all of the templates have the exact same functionality, and you could build the same exact site on each one. You’re just choosing a base style to get started with.

The next big change I want to mention is with the design settings.

If you’re used to Squarespace 7.0, this might make you want to pull your hair out, but it’s really worth getting used to because it’s going to speed up your workflows.

You can now create a custom color palette for your website and that way you set all the colors upfront. You can always customize them later, but it’s really nice to have a base color palette to work from as you’re designing the rest of your site. If you are a fan of the Brine template family on Squarespace 7.0, you’re most likely familiar with creating index pages with multiple page sections. The most frustrating part about that was that you couldn’t easily change the background in text colors from one section to the next, without knowing custom CSS.

Every single page on Squarespace 7.1, not just index pages every page has the ability to have multiple sections that can be customized independently. Each section could have its own section theme, and you can customize those in your design settings.

If you want one page section to have a dark background in light text, you can do that. If you want one to have light background and dark texts, you can do that as well. You can also still add a videos and images as backgrounds to these individual sections.

In my opinion, this was the best feature they added with Squarespace 7.1, because I’m creating a lot of longer form pages. And I was using index pages to do this. Every time I wanted to duplicate an index page, I actually had to duplicate every sub page within that index and then redo all the custom CSS to get the same styling.

Now everything is built into one page. You can change the colors really easily and you can duplicate it with one click.

Another thing they added is an additional heading style and three new paragraph styles. So you can have a heading one, two, three, and four, as well as paragraph one, two and three, which can all have different sizes.

The bad news is if you want to change the font style for one of your headings, you have to do that with a little bit of custom CSS, but it’s pretty easy to set up.

One of the things they got rid of in Squarespace 7.1 is gallery blocks. I know a lot of you are probably familiar with gallery blocks and you relied on them quite heavily. They’ve now been replaced with gallery section. So instead of adding a block to a page, you now add an entire section for your galleries, which can be seen as a pro or con depending on how you look at it.

I personally miss a little bit of the flexibility with gallery blocks, but I’ve been able to make do with the new gallery sections.

In 7.1, they standardized the blog layout. So, you have a few different options to choose from, but none of them have a sidebar. You can still hack it together or use a little bit of third-party code to make it work for you. But there’s nothing out of the box.

So, keep that in mind. If you’re looking to switch.

All in all, the sites I built on 7.1 are mobile friendly, load quickly, and were really fun to work on.

I personally have no regrets about making the switch to 7.1 and I highly recommend the platform, but there’s a few things I want you to think about first.

Before you go looking for that magic button, that’s going to upgrade your site. You should know it doesn’t exist.

If you want your site on Squarespace 7.1, you actually have to start from scratch and take your existing site and copy and images and move those over to the new platform.

I actually offer Squarespace migrations as a service to help people make the switch, because it is such a daunting process, but there are some third-party tools out there that you can use to do it yourself.

You want to be sure that when you’re moving your domain from Squarespace 7.0 to your new 7.1 website, that you’re not breaking any links, cause that could have really damage your SEO and your website’s relationship with Google.

If you have any questions about making the switch, I have a blog post all about it, or you can reach out to me and my team to get the process started.

Make sure to like and subscribe if you learned something in this video and let me know in the comments, if you’re going to be making the switch to 7.1, or if you’re going to stay where you are and stick with 7.0. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next one.