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

Squarespace websites can do most things right out of the box. You can easily change the colours, fonts, and spacing, edit your images, and add useful features like scheduling diaries, events, and videos, plus striking full‑width banners. You can also embed external, plugin‑style applications to extend functionality even further.

There are a few features, however, that version 7.1 doesn’t provide out of the box, and you’ll need to add some custom CSS code to achieve them. It’s important to note up front that Squarespace will not provide support or assistance for websites that include custom code.

It’s also worth mentioning that, as a designer, the only practical way to achieve many of the neat, polished features we expect from modern websites is to add a bit of custom code. For example: you might want to import a special font, apply a particular function to one of the pages, remove the underline from a hyperlink, or stop awkward hyphenation that appears on mobile views. There are lots of other tweaks like these. Squarespace forums and communities around the world commonly share snippets of code, and there are also many sellers who will provide or sell custom code to achieve specific functionality.

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

Adding code — both CSS and snippets placed in the Header and Footer — can also break your website. We often find that when we’re asked to redesign or improve a site, the root causes come from too much code conflicting with itself and creating unexpected issues.

It’s often surprising how frequently simply removing unnecessary code makes a large number of problems disappear. We’ve encountered websites with over 3,000 lines of additional code, added by over‑enthusiastic owners or well‑intentioned designers, even though most useful snippets are only about 5–10 lines.

Excess code can also significantly slow page load times, and Google prefers fast-loading websites; too much added code can negate all your SEO work. Overnight, a site’s ranking can drop from page two to page fifty‑five because of a single poorly implemented script or style.