Expanding the Possibilities of Squarespace

In this blog we share one of our favourite Squarespace work arounds: multilingual websites. We’ll also point you in the direction towards some of the companies that offer useful plugins.

Squarespace is an online CMS for creating websites. Since launching, its rise in popularity can be attributed to its beautiful templates and customizability. It’s a favourite among designers for giving us the power to design websites with no coding necessary. rTraction has been using Squarespace over the years and we’ve seen a number of new features added.

Squarespace 7.1 launched recently, making functionality universal across all templates and more like starting points. While Squarespace still has limitations, developers and designers have found ways to push its usefulness further.

A note: Our recommendations may require some level of coding knowledge; but most of the work is simply copying and pasting into the proper sections and changing some variables as needed. To use these work arounds and plugins, the site you’re working on needs to be a business plan or higher in order to access the code injection area.

One of the work arounds we’ve used is making a Squarespace site multilingual. Squarespace’s official way to create multilingual sites is not the most elegant or user friendly. Due to this, people have developed the official unofficial way. In the past, we used a slightly different version but Brad Good’s version (found here) has been updated to work with Squarespace 7.1.

Brad’s solution is fairly easy to follow along. He uses the code to switch between English and Spanish; similarly we would replace Spanish and es in the code snippets with French and fr. An overview of this work around is copying code and pasting it into the code injection and custom CSS areas in the backend. By adding en/ to the beginning of English page URLs, and fr/ to the beginning of French page URLs, the code is able to show the selected language pages in the menu while it hides the others.

There may be some tweaking required to the CSS in order for it to work with your sites’ layout, but overall, if you’re comfortable playing with code this is a great option to expand Squarespace’s features.



There are a number of companies out there that sell Squarespace Plugins. What they really offer are code snippets (like the multilingual example above) and instructions on how to use them. They range from simple animations to adding new ways to short and display blogs and listings. With a little time, you’ll certainly find more companies that offer something similar.

Looking for Plugins? Check out these sites:

https://squarestud.io/

https://www.squarewebsites.org/

While a template may not give you the same flexibility a fully custom website can, you’ll still be able to push the possibilities with work arounds for Squarespace. Still sound complicated? We can definitely help!