When starting a business online, it would be great to have a platform with easy-to-use tools to help you design and build your website with secure hosting. Squarespace is an excellent Content Management System that allows you to customize your website with simple drag and drop functionalities, themes, eCommerce features, etc. Though, there are a few features missing to enhance your website’s performance. WordPress is exactly such a one-stop solution that supports over 45.8% of the web. With over 20 billion monthly views and 70 million posts, WordPress is an immensely popular website-building platform for creating and managing business websites, blogs, eCommerce stores, portfolios, forums, and more.
Using the Squarespace WordPress Integration, you can keep using your Squarespace website with the added functionality of WordPress on a new subdomain. This allows you to use the same domain name to design a WordPress website and customize it using the WordPress themes and Plugins. In this article, you will learn how to effortlessly set up the Squarespace WordPress Integration for your Squarespace website.
What is Squarespace?
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Squarespace is an easy-to-use Software as a Service (SaaS) application for hosting, designing, and managing websites. Launched in 2004, Squarespace started out as a platform for creating brochure-style websites with no requirement for web development skills. Over the years, Squarespace has evolved into a popular website creation tool offering SEO tools, GSuite & PayPal Integrations, eCommerce functionalities, and even assists you in running Email Marketing Campaigns.
With more than 140 Squarespace Templates and access to Unsplash’s Image library containing royalty-free images, you can design a professional website in just a few clicks. Using the Video Backgrounds feature you can also embed a Youtube or Vimeo URL to create a looped video background for your website. To manage your website on the fly, you can also use the 3 IOS or Androids apps namely the Squarespace, Schedule Admin, and Scheduling Client.
What is WordPress?
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WordPress is a Content Management System(CMS) i.e a Website Creation Platform with a user-friendly interface that makes it super easy to build and manage websites. It is an Open-Source software meaning it comes under the GNU General Public License, thereby making it freely available for anyone to download and modify. Since its initial release in 2003 as a Blogging Platform, WordPress has continuously evolved allowing you to create Online Portfolios, eCommerce Stores, Business Sites, forums, etc.
WordPress uses a database to store and organize everything from post and page content to user accounts and website URLs., thereby making it a very fast, reliable, and powerful tool for online publishing. WordPress was designed with Performance, Security, and Search Engine optimization (SEO) in mind. These are important factors for virtually any website, regardless of size or focus. WordPress offers thousands of themes that you can use to personalize the look and feel of your website in minutes. You can also improve the functionality of your site by installing WordPress plugins.
Why do you need a Squarespace WordPress Integration?
Squarespace is an excellent choice if you want to create a simple website with minimum effort and don’t require additional features and complete ownership of your content. WordPress offers a complete set of Plugins and Functionalities that cater to all your needs. At the same time, it is not necessary to completely switch to WordPress from Squarespace for just a few additional features. You can easily set up the Squarespace WordPress Integration via a Subdomain. Here are a few use cases where you may require a Squarespace WordPress Integration:
- Compared to Squarespace, WordPress provides a vast sea of plugins for everything you can think of such as Social Media Share Buttons, Advertisement Management, etc.
- For eCommerce stores, Squarespace has a limited number of payment gateways namely Stripe, PayPal, and Apple Pay as compared to the huge list of WordPress Payment Gateways. Plus, by using the Squarespace WordPress Integration you can take full advantage of tons of plugins purely focused on eCommerce stores on WordPress.
- In comparison to WordPress, Squarespace charges 2-3% transaction fee on top of credit card processing fees that you can easily avoid by setting the eCommerce store page on the WordPress subdomain via the Squarespace WordPress Integration.
- Lastly, WordPress gives you 100% ownership of your content and files whereas Squarespace limits you in exporting Product Pages, Index Pages, Event Pages, Drafts, Product Blocks, Custom CSS, etc.
Steps to Set up Squarespace WordPress Integration
You can easily set up the Squarespace WordPress Connection on the same domain name by creating a subdomain for WordPress. For instance, if your Squarespace website looks like “mysamplewebsite.com”, then to add a blogging page via WordPress you can get a subdomain that looks like “blog.mysamplewebsite.com”. Both of these will be considered 2 separate websites i.e. one for Squarespace and one for WordPress. Although, your visitors won’t experience any difference between them as they can smoothly navigate through both of them.
To seamlessly set up your Squarespace WordPress Integration, follow these steps given below:
Step 1: Buy WordPress Hosting
Squarespace provides free hosting, although to run your WordPress Website, you need a suitable host. You can do an in-depth analysis to select the hosting service according to your budget, user reviews, and the features it offers. To get an overview of the several hosting services available, check out this article listing out the Best WordPress Hosting Service Providers. While selecting the host, remember to look for a reputable hosting company with good security and some ability to scale.
Step 2: Create your Subdomain
After purchasing the hosting service for the Squarespace WordPress Integration, you can now transfer your Squarespace domain name to your new hosting service provider. Before doing that, ensure that your domain is unlocked if not done already. To do the same, log in to your Squarespace account and navigate to Menu > Settings > Domains. Scroll down and uncheck the Lock Domain option.
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Now, you can start creating the subdomain for your WordPress website. The subdomain will allow you to build completely new websites without creating a separate domain. For example, you can install WordPress on the blog subdomain “blog.mysamplewebsite.com” as mentioned above. Though you can take assistance from your host to understand the process of running 2 websites on the same domain name. Typically, the process for creating a subdomain is the same across all the hosting providers. Follow the path below to complete the Subdomain creation step in the Squarespace WordPress Integration process:
- Step 1: Log in to your Web host’s Dashboard and navigate to the cPanel. Click on the Subdomain option.
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- Step 2: Type in the name for your Subdomain such as shop, store, blog, support, etc., that resonates with the site’s purpose.
- Step 3: Choose your “Parent” domain from the drop-down menu and finally, click on the Create button. This completes the subdomain creation step in your Squarespace WordPress Integration process.
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Step 3: Installing WordPress on your Subdomain
Most web hosts offer a one-click Install WordPress button for seamlessly installing it on your subdomain. After you click on this button available on the cPanel Admin area of your host, you will be asked to fill in details such as site name, username, and email address. Ensure that you correctly enter the Subdomain name and complete the WordPress installing step of the Squarespace WordPress Integration process
You can also follow the Installing WordPress article to manually add it to your subdomain.
Step 4: Design your WordPress Website
Now that you completed the technical parts of the Squarespace WordPress Integration, you can start customizing your WordPress website. To make the transition from Squarespace to your WordPress Subdomain page smooth, choose a WordPress Theme similar to the one used in Squarespace. To add a theme follow these simple steps:
- Step 1: Log in to your subdomain “blog.mysamplewebsite.com/admin”.
- Step 2: Navigate to Appearances > Themes. Click on the Add New Theme button and you will see a list of themes from the WordPress Theme library.
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- Step 3: Hover over themes and click on the Install button and then the Activate button. You can also upload a theme from your computer by clicking on the Upload Theme button.
After you have customised your WordPress Website, you can now move towards setting up the seamless Squarespace WordPress Connection.
Step 5: Complete the Squarespace WordPress Websites Connection
Making your Navigation Menus for both sites identical can make both the pages seem the same. You also have to link your navigation menus to the desired pages so that visitors can smoothly move back and forth between these two sites. To Link pages to the Squarespace Navigation Menu follow these steps:
- Step 1: Log in to your Squarespace admin area and navigate to the Pages section of your Dashboard.
- Step 2: Click on the Top Navigation option and then click on the Link option.
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- Step 3: Type in a suitable title and link to the WordPress page of your choosing. Click on the Save button. Repeat the process for all the other WordPress Pages as well.
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- Step 4: You also have to add the Squarespace links on the WordPress Navigation Menu. Navigate to Appearances > Menus to get started. Refer to Add Navigation Menu to WordPress article if you have not yet created it. After the Menu is set up, navigate to the Pages meta box on the left side of your screen. Using the default option, you can add all the WordPress pages to the Menu. Select all your pages and click on the Add to Menu button.
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- Step 5: To add Squarespace links to the WordPress Navigation menu, ensure that the Custom Links box is checked by clicking on the Screen Options tab available on the top right of your screen.
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- Step 6: Now, click on the Custom Links option available on the left of your screen under the Add Menu Items heading. Type in the suitable Squarespace page titles and enter the URL. Click on the Add to Menu button and repeat the process for all the Squarespace pages. This completes the Squarespace WordPress Integration process.
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Conclusion
In this article, you have learned how to effectively set up the Squarespace WordPress Integration. Squarespace provides an easy-to-use platform for designing and managing a professional website. As discussed above, it has some limitations which you can easily remedy by using a WordPress subdomain. WordPress’s plethora of Themes and Plugins allow you to enhance the functionality of your website effortlessly. Squarespace WordPress Integration allows you to run two different websites on the same domain name with smooth navigation among them.
In addition to WordPress, you would be using a wide variety of applications across your business for Marketing, Accounting, Customer Relationship Management, Human Resources, etc. To understand the financial health and performance of your firm, you need to integrate data from all these applications and perform in-depth business analysis. To efficiently process this astronomical amount of data, you need to invest a portion of your engineering bandwidth to Integrate, Cleanse, Transform, and Load your data into your data warehouse or a destination of your choice. All of these challenges can be effectively solved with a Cloud-Based ETL tool like Hevo Data.
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Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline can help you transfer and integrate your data from a vast sea of Data Sources such as WordPress into a Data Warehouse or a Destination of your choice. It is a fully automated and secure platform that doesn’t require you to write any code!
If you are using eCommerce platforms such as WooCommerce, WordPress, REST APIs, etc in your business and searching for a Stree-Free alternative to Manual Data Integration, then Hevo can comfortably automate this for you. Hevo with its strong integration with 100+ sources & BI tools (Including 40+ Free Sources) allows you to not only export data from your desired data sources & load it to the destination of your choice, but also transform & enrich your data to make it analysis-ready so that you can focus on your key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools.
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Share with us your experience of setting up the Squarespace WordPress Integration. Let us know in the comments section below!
Sanchit Agarwal is an Engineer turned Data Analyst with a passion for data, software architecture and AI. He leverages his diverse technical background and 2+ years of experience to write content. He has penned over 200 articles on data integration and infrastructures, driven by a desire to empower data practitioners with practical solutions for their everyday challenges.
