Squarespace SEO: Which Settings Matter?

The settings that matter most are your homepage's SEO site description, a unique SEO title and description on every page, a clean URL slug, a URL Mapping whenever a page's address changes, and the site-visibility toggle that can accidentally hide your whole site. Squarespace generates a sitemap and a handful of structured-data types automatically, and neither needs your attention. Everything else on this list does. Here's exactly where each setting lives, in Squarespace's current menu wording, checked September 2026.

Where do I set my site's overall title and description?

Open the SEO/AI Visibility panel, click SEO Settings, then Search appearance, and use the Home tab to edit the SEO site description, which represents your homepage in search results (Squarespace). Squarespace's own guidance for the description field is to "Keep the text between 50-300 characters," and it notes that "SEO descriptions have a 400-character limit" (same source) — the hard cap is generous, but search engines will still cut off anything long before that limit is reached.

How do I set a title, description and URL slug for one page?

Per-page settings live in a different spot from the site-wide ones. Open the Pages panel, hover over the page title, click to open page settings, and open the SEO tab — that's where the page's own SEO title and SEO description fields are, and Squarespace's guidance here is more specific: "Search engines cut off descriptions around 160 characters" (Squarespace). The same guide is direct that this is a per-page job, not a set-once setting: "Repeat this process for every page on your site" (same source).

The URL slug is a separate field in page settings. You can edit it, with real constraints: "For most pages, URL slugs must be between 3 and 250 characters. Blog post, event, and product URL slugs must be between 3 and 200 characters," slugs are always lowercase, and you can't reuse a slug that's already live on another page or post (Squarespace). Squarespace also reserves a set of slugs (cart, checkout, api, search, and others) that you can't assign to your own pages (same source). If you rename a slug that's already indexed, that old URL now points nowhere unless you also set up a redirect — which is the next section.

How do I redirect a URL that changed?

Open the Developer tools panel and click URL mappings. Each mapping is one line, in the format /old-url -> /new-url 301 — a 301 for a permanent move, 302 for temporary (Squarespace). For a whole set of collection items at once (every post under an old blog path, for example), Squarespace supports a [name] variable: /blog/[name] -> /posts/[name] 301 (same source). Two limits worth knowing before you rely on this for a large migration: "The URL mappings field has a limit of 400 KB, which is usually around 2500 redirect lines," and mappings are evaluated in order: "Your site activates redirects from top to bottom, so higher redirects will take priority over conflicting redirects below them" (same source). Add the mapping before you rename or delete the page it protects, not after — a URL with no mapping and no live page is just a dead link the moment it's gone.

Does Squarespace generate a sitemap for me?

Yes, automatically, at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, with no setup step. Squarespace states that when you add or remove content, "we automatically update your sitemap," and that updates "usually appear within an hour, though can take up to 24 hours." The sitemap excludes disabled pages, password-protected content, and pages you've individually hidden from search — matching what those settings are supposed to do — and Squarespace is direct that "you can't edit the sitemap" by hand (Squarespace). If you need a page excluded, use the per-page visibility setting below rather than looking for a way to edit the sitemap file itself.

Can I accidentally hide my whole site from search engines?

Yes, and it's a single checkbox: open Settings, click Crawlers, and check whether "Block Search engine crawlers" is ticked. Turning it on adds a site-wide Disallow: / to your robots.txt (Squarespace). A single page can also be hidden from search individually (same source). If your site isn't showing up in Google and you've confirmed neither of these is the cause, our dedicated guide on builder sites not showing up on Google covers the Search Console tools that tell you what's actually happening, instead of guessing from a site: search.

What structured data does Squarespace add on its own, and can I add more?

Squarespace generates some structured data (schema.org markup) automatically, and it's explicit that you don't get to touch it: "We use the following schemas, which you can't edit or remove," naming "Blog post, Event, Local business, Organization, Product, Website" (Squarespace). For products specifically, this is what lets Google show price and availability directly in results — Squarespace structures that information for you without any settings panel to configure.

Squarespace's help center doesn't document a dedicated panel for adding your own custom structured data beyond those six automatic types, the way it has a dedicated field for a page's SEO title. The closest general-purpose tool is Code injection, which accepts custom header or page-level code — but it's a plan-gated feature, available "in the Core, Plus, Advanced, and some legacy billing plans," not Squarespace's entry-level Basic plan (Squarespace). If you need a schema type Squarespace doesn't generate automatically, that's the route, and it puts the burden of writing valid JSON-LD on you rather than a form.

What does Squarespace handle for me, and what's on you?

Where does Figment fit in?

It doesn't, directly. Figment publishes Figma designs as sites through its Figma plugin and isn't a CMS with its own SEO settings panel to compare against Squarespace's. If your actual question is whether to stay on Squarespace or move your design workflow elsewhere, how to create a website from Figma and using AI with your Squarespace website are the more relevant next reads; this post is about getting the most out of Squarespace's own SEO tools while you're on the platform.

Bottom line: Squarespace's sitemap and its six automatic structured-data types are genuinely hands-off. Everything that actually shapes how a specific page ranks, its title, its description, its URL slug, a redirect when that slug changes, and whether the page is even visible to a crawler, lives in a specific panel above and needs you to fill it in by hand, one page at a time.