How to audit a Squarespace site

Audit a Squarespace site by crawling the live domain and concentrating on the four things the platform lets you change: page titles and descriptions, image sizes, heading structure, and hidden or duplicate pages. Template-level performance and script loading are fixed by the platform, so audits are most valuable for content, metadata and accessibility.

Last updated 2026-07-28

What can you actually change for SEO on Squarespace?

Five things, and they are the five worth auditing: the SEO title and description on each page, the size and weight of the images you upload, the heading levels inside content blocks, the alt text on every image, and whether a page is reachable and indexable at all. Everything on that list is under your control and none of it requires a developer.

Image weight is the one with the largest performance payoff. Squarespace serves resized variants of what you upload, but it cannot rescue a six-megabyte original — the variant is still generated from a file that had no business being that big, and on image-heavy pages this is usually the dominant cost.

• SEO title and description per page, under each page's SEO settings — see the title tag and meta description guides for what to write.
• Image dimensions — compress and resize before upload; Squarespace serves variants but cannot fix a 6MB original.
• Heading levels within blocks, which are frequently chosen for size rather than structure.
• Alt text on every image via the image block settings.
• Whether unlinked or draft pages are indexable.

What is outside your control on Squarespace?

Script loading order, most of the framework CSS and JavaScript payload, and the underlying template markup — none of which you can remove or defer. That places a practical ceiling on performance scores that no amount of tuning will lift, and it is worth explaining to a client at the start of an engagement rather than after a fortnight of chasing green.

robots.txt is similarly managed by the platform and not directly editable; indexing is controlled per page in SEO settings instead. Squarespace also generates and maintains the sitemap itself.

The useful consequence is a change of benchmark. Judge a Squarespace site against comparable Squarespace sites rather than against a hand-built static one, treat the Lighthouse performance score as a baseline to track over time rather than a target to maximise, and put the effort into image weight, content quality and accessibility, where you genuinely do have leverage.

Can unlinked Squarespace pages still show up in Google?

Yes. Pages in the "not linked" section of the pages panel remain publicly accessible at their URL and can be indexed like any other page — being absent from navigation prevents discovery through your own menus, and nothing else.

These accumulate quietly. Old campaign landing pages, duplicate drafts left over from a redesign, a pricing page from two years ago that someone still has bookmarked: all live, all indexable, all invisible to anyone reviewing the site through the navigation.

Crawling the site is how you find them, since a crawler follows every internal link rather than the menu — and anything that has been shared, linked or previously indexed will surface. Whatever should not rank needs to be password-protected or deleted; hiding it from the nav does not count as either.

What should you fix first on a Squarespace site?

Start with images, then metadata, then headings and alt text — in that order, because that is the order of effort-to-impact on this platform. Resizing a handful of oversized uploads usually moves the performance number further than anything else available to you, and it takes an afternoon.

Metadata comes second because it is the highest-leverage thing you control outright. Squarespace will fall back to the page title and site name when the SEO fields are empty, which produces perfectly serviceable but entirely generic titles across the site — the sort of page an answer engine has no particular reason to quote.

Headings and alt text come third: lower immediate impact, but they are the checks that accumulate. They also affect real users of screen readers, which is a better argument for doing them than any ranking consideration.

How should you audit a Squarespace site?

Crawl the live domain and read the SEO and accessibility columns first, because those are where Squarespace sites actually fail and where you can act. Titles, descriptions, heading order and alt text are the findings that convert into work; the performance figure is context.

Audra does this in one pass: it runs Google Lighthouse, axe-core accessibility checks, broken-link detection and its own HTML SEO and answer-engine checks over every crawled page, and combines them into a single Audra Score weighted performance 30%, SEO 30%, accessibility 25%, best practices 15%. The default crawl covers 100 pages and is configurable, with include and exclude path globs.

It runs as a desktop app on macOS (Apple Silicon, signed and notarized) or Windows (64-bit), driving your own installed copy of Chrome rather than bundling one, and nothing leaves the machine — no crawl data, no reports, no telemetry. Because of that it can also audit a site behind a password, which cloud crawlers and PageSpeed Insights cannot. Reports export as self-contained HTML or a print-ready PDF, and it is $19 once with a free 7-day trial, no subscription.

Sites built on Webflow fail in a related but distinct way — more control, and therefore more opportunity to break heading structure — if you are comparing platforms rather than auditing one.