How adding code can benefit a Squarespace website, and how code can break your website.

Squarespace websites can do most things out of the box. You can change the colours, the fonts, the spacings, you can edit your images add amazing scheduling diaries, events, videos, full width banners. You can also embed external plugin type applications.

There are some things though that 7.1 doesn’t offer out of the box and you’ll need some CSS code to achieve it. It’s worth mentioning at the outset that Squarespace won’t offer you any support or help if you have a website with code in it.

It’s also worth mentioning that as a designer the only way to get a lot of the cool things we expect from websites is to add some code. To name a few things: you may want to import a font, apply a particular functionally one of the pages, take the underline off a hyperlink, remove the hyphenation that looks odd naturally on a mobile view. Lots of things. There are Squarespace forums all over the world that will give you code and also many that will sell you code to achieve specific functionally.

We use code in pretty much every Squarespace we design. We love code.

Adding code both CSS and in the Header and Footer can also break your website. We often find we when we’ve been asked to redesign or improve a website the problems stem from too much code fighting against itself creating problems. It’s often surprising that by just removing the code all of the problems go away. We’ve seen websites with over 3000 lines of code added by over enthusiastic owners or other website designers. Most bits of code run to about 5-10 lines.

Code can also seriously slow the speed of a website loading. Google likes fast loading websites. Too much code can ruin all that SEO work. Overnight you can find your ranking on Google drops from page 2 to to page 55 because you’ve added some code.