Brent_Dickens

23 minutes ago, covers said:

I have been researching this specific topic and have reached out to live chat support as well to confirm my findings. I am attempting to control account creation without having to use the Member Areas add-on, which is not secure and limited in scope for my needs. 

My conclusion is that there does not seem to be any way to manually add customers (and, I would imagine, to subsequently add any orders)

Can you use Zappier at all?

6 minutes ago, EscapeOutdoors said:

It's nice that it performs nice in actuality, but the fact that it's not ranked well on Google is pretty unacceptable. It's like having a well built business, but it's in a remote forest instead of downtown. Doesn't matter if it's good if people can't find it.

Is there ANY way users can fix this? If not, it's financially worth it for me to jump ship to a platform that actually takes this seriously as I have a business in a competitive field that depends highly on SEO for customers (construction).

I would make sure that every other part of your site is optimised. Do you have well written content that works for your customers. Is your site structure easy to follow and use? All of this will increase engagement, and time on site plus reduce drop offs. This is all important to Google. 

This is a great resource from Google to: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide

• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide#knowyourreaders

Should you switch platforms?
You can look at other platforms but they all have their pit falls. I used to do Wordpress sites but I got sick of the headaches around security and plugins.  Plus you don't have much of a niche as everyone builds sites on Wordpress so it is hard to stand out from the crowd.

You can still get good results
https://www.google.com/search?q=accommodation+mataia
The top site is a Squarespace site for example. It is content focused and optimised for a good User Experience.

Hope this all helps 🙂

12 hours ago, HenryPurchase said:

Yes, Squarespace doesn't have good core web vitals, and a lot of work needs to be done to ensure a Squarespace website is fully SEO-friendly (both from Squarespace and Squarespace users).

This doesn't mean a Squarespace website cannot rank well on Google, rank above websites built on WordPress/Wix/Webflow etc. and generate a serious amount of organic traffic.

Core web vitals and page loading speed are just one ranking factor; there are many others that Google considers, such as backlinks, keyword optimization, internal linking, time spent on pages by users etc.

If you like the Squarespace UX and love how anyone can get started on a SS site (which can't be said for many of the other platforms!), then this is just a compromise for now - hopefully, the messages above show that Squarespace is doing something about this.

Our Squarespace SEO plugin also has a lot on our roadmap to help here - WordPress has Yoast/EWWW image optimizer/Jetpack/WP Cache, which help users at a basic level which we will expand far beyond.

Totally agree!

I have several sites that rank in the top 5 on Google within their respective market. A big part is getting all of your content, page descriptions etc SEO focused and creating a site that is a good user experience for your customers.

I experienced this recently migrating a client from an old site to a new site. 
We paid for the new site then once it was launched turned the old site off and emailed support for a refund. They promptly sent through a refund for the old site. Worked perfectly!   

Wix are taking this subject VERY seriously with some good looking solutions: https://www.wix.com/performance

I like how you get a Site Speed dashboard.

This Google tool is useful for technology comparisons: https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/55bc8fad-44c2-4280-aa0b-5f3f0cd3d2be/page/M6ZPC?s=lIkQgAX3SIs&params={"df35":"include%EE%80%800%EE%80%80GTE%EE%80%80","df18":"include%EE%80%800%EE%80%80PT%EE%80%80CMS","df48":"include%EE%80%800%EE%80%80IN%EE%80%80Wix","df44":"include%EE%80%800%EE%80%80IN%EE%80%80Squarespace%EE%80%80Wix%EE%80%80Webflow","df33":"include%EE%80%800%EE%80%80IN%EE%80%80United%20States%20of%20America"}

Shows some good improvement by Squarespace 🙂

On 8/16/2022 at 6:13 AM, PSW said:

Hey all,

We just moved our site from WordPress to SquareSpace. To say I was a little shocked is an understatement. I legit copied my one page word for word and did not change the hyperlink at all, however a ton of my keywords were lost.  

Has anyone come across any solutions to help with this?

What do you mean by lost? Was there some meta data in the page text or missing image file names and titles?

7 hours ago, Naomi_ said:

My 7.0 website: every single page (desktop) fails. Even pages with minimal text and no photos.

Does anyone know if 7.1 is any better?

Hmmm it is a little bit better I believe but definitely not impressive. Desktop will do ok but mobile always fails.

5 hours ago, bayrumblues said:

Anyone? No updates or interest or outrage over this? I am surprised as we are all paying good money for a pretty poorly performing service here. Squarespace has known about this for at least two years and have seemingly done nothing to rectify it. Google is most certainly punishing our collective SEOs.

I am extremely interested in any site improvements we can get.
I have mentioned it a few times in the past but it does not seem to go past this level within Circle as far as I am aware. 

I am also unaware of any sort of Squarespace public roadmap so I am unsure if this is being looked into by the development team or not.  

Anyone else got any updates?

Site URL: https://envelope-engineering-co.squarespace.com/

Hi team,

I need an expert custom coder to help me out on a project.
I need a team page created in a dynamic grid format. It will pull in blog posts and use the data for the profiles. When you click one it will open a modal to show more info.

A previous developer had a lot of it working but has since disappeared on me.

I have the designs and but the time frame is short, only a few weeks.

Happy to get a quote from anyone who can help. 

Thanks

I have come across this platform recently: https://circle.so/

Not sure if it could work in anyway with Squarespace but I would love to hear more from anyone who has used it. In fact any thoughts at all would be helpful.

On 3/11/2022 at 10:48 AM, simon said:

Member areas is a great idea, but still has a few annoying shortcomings, many already raised in the above comments. One of the issues is vetting who can join as a member. I thought I'd share how we worked around this for one client who had a free member area, but wanted to only have invited people join. It's a little clunky, but it works on a small scale for free memberships.

First up, we grabbed the 'join' button html (using the browser inspect tool), then hide the 'join' button in the settings for 'Access Denied Screen' to stop folks signing up at all. Your 'Access Denied' page will now just have a sign in button.

Next create a password protected page, and using the code block add your html 'join' button. This is the page you will use to add new members yourself, since they can't add themselves.

<button class="sqs-editable-button sqs-button-element--primary join-button " onclick="UserAccountApi.joinMemberArea('621abd3953ae2d1f97886268', null, window.location.pathname, false, 'MEMBER_AREA_ACCESS_PAGE')">
            Add new Member
          </button>

As you can't add a new member if you are already logged in as a member, you must sign out first. I added a link to the account to sign out:

/account/member-areas

 I also made that sign out link open in a new tab so I could easily hop back to my sign up page. Attempting to speed up the clunky process 🙂

Create a form on a public page of your site inviting people to apply for membership (or you could just do this with a personal email invite as we did). Anyway, you want to get their full name and email address, and any other details that help you decide to extend a free membership to them. With that info you can simply use your private sign up page (only you have access to), and create a password for them. 

To manage this process, I have spreadsheet with the invitees details, and I make up the password here before I use the sign up form. And moments before I sign them up, I email them their password. The email might look like this:

Hi Jane

You have been given free access to https://www.somewebsite.com/secretmemberarea. 
Use your email address jane@gmailish.com and this password: ABC27619*h

Regards
Simon

Squarespace will automatically send the new member an email as soon as you add them on your sign up page, so send your personal email (above) just before you create their new account. You should also edit the Squarespace email so it makes sense too. That email only has a button link to sign in and no password (that's why you have to personally email them the password). Of course they can reset their password in the sign in box.

While site guests cannot join, they will need a sign in. So we enabled a sign in link in the main site menu (which is just a link to the 'member area home page' you'd already have created).

That's the hack. I do hope Squarespace improve on the current membership system. As a developer, it's just not that hard to do, so I don't know why they haven't done it yet. Hmmm.

P.S. One last shared experience. We tried one of the 'plug in' memberships systems someone was promoting here as a solution. It's easy to setup and use, but it's dead easy to bypass if you want to look at any of your 'hidden' page content using your browser code inspection tool, which reveals all the html and links 😞

Great work around! Thank you for that, super useful 🙂

I am hoping the Squarespace dev team see this and implement some updates based on your workflow and advice. It's also good to hear your thoughts point from a developers point of view.


 

You could try making sure you specify the exact weight (300,500,600 etc) of the custom font. That worked for me on mobile when I had a similar issue. 

5 hours ago, bangank36 said:

I check that both (mobile and desktop display) are the same font

 

Mobile

I know. It only seems to be missing on a real phone? Can you try it on your phone? Maybe it is cached somehow?

7 hours ago, bangank36 said:

Can you take some screenshots of your issues so we can take a look?

Great idea!

I have added two photos to the question. You will see the desktop version loads the full font from Adobe but the mobile is not loading that font so the 'O' is changing to a default font.

Site URL: https://www.trickofthelight.co.nz/merch/p/troll-soundtrack

I am having problems with a custom font loaded from Adobe.

It is not showing the characters on mobile but only on the Merch pages, specifically here: https://www.trickofthelight.co.nz/merch/p/troll-soundtrack

You will notice on a phone the ö in Tröll looks funny, It is not loading the Orpheus font. 
I had to link to the Adobe font as Squarespace does not load the full font so does not include macrons.

Please please does anyone know how to fix this?

Cheers,

Brent

Site URL: https://www.trickofthelight.co.nz/merch

Hi team,

Got another quirky issue with these two pages on mobile:

•  https://www.trickofthelight.co.nz/merch
• https://www.trickofthelight.co.nz/merch/p/troll-soundtrack

We need to use macrons for that special 'O' in Troll which means I had to load the full font from Adobe using their embed code as Squarespace only loads an un-extended version of any font. 

It works perfectly but for some reason it is not loading in the Shop or Merch sections on mobile. It loads on desktop fine.

I would love any suggestions as it is super weird  and the client would love to have it fixed.

Thanks in advance,

Brent

15 hours ago, tuanphan said:

Do you still need help on this?

The only way I could fix it was to turn of the global animations which was a real shame 😞

It seems the accordion plugin code was causing it and I had to use the plugin as the built in Squarespace Accordions don't allow for images or any other content.

Site URL: https://www.trickofthelight.co.nz/aboutus

I currently have to clients interested in member areas and both want the ability to self manage members.

I have contacted Squarespace support and they have said: Our development team hasn't indicated whether they'll be making any changes to this, but we do receive requests like this pretty often, and I definitely understand that it'd be helpful and logical to have this option available on our platform. With this being the case, I've already submitted your feedback directly to our development team on your behalf. While we can't guarantee implementation of all requested features, your feedback will genuinely be reviewed by our product managers.

I'm not sure what that means, doesn't sound like it is on the roadmap in any form.

The Support team recommended setting up a password protected page that contains the Member area signup form. My client can then pass this page and password on to new clients for them to signup themselves.

Sounds like it will work but is not ideal. I will have to tell this to both clients and let them know this will probably not be changing. I will also have to suggest we look at Member space as an option.

I hate doing this to clients when I try so hard to sell Squarespace as Everything to sell anything and then have to explain this is not the case.

Site URL: https://www.trickofthelight.co.nz/shows/lysanders-aunty

I am using the Squarestudio Content Accordion plugin for a site: http://demo.squarestud.io/content-accordion
Sadly they are not responding to my help requests.

My clients site is having an issue where if one accordion is open then you click on another it scrolls to the bottom of the page rather than closing the open one and moving to the correct position.

The page is here: https://www.trickofthelight.co.nz/shows/lysanders-aunty

If you scroll to the bottom and  then open the 'Credits' accordion then the media accordion you will see what I mean.
Any help would be appreciated as my client would love to have this one solved.

Source code is below: 

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.2.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
$(document).ready(function(){
init();             //Start the code when the page loads
  
})

function init(){
    $('.sqs-block-markdown').nextUntil('.sqs-block-markdown, .sqs-block-code').slideUp();      //Your code (wrapped in a function)
    $('.sqs-block-markdown').unbind().click(function(){
        $('.sqs-block-markdown').not(this).nextUntil('.sqs-block-markdown, .sqs-block-code').slideUp(),
        $('.sqs-block-markdown').not(this).removeClass('activedrop'),
        $(this).nextUntil('.sqs-block-markdown, .sqs-block-code').slideToggle();
        $(this).toggleClass('activedrop')
    });
  $('.sqs-block-markdown').css('cursor','pointer');;
}

document.addEventListener('pageChange', function(){             //When the change page event fires due to ajax
    init();                                                     //Call the code again
});

/*This stuff listens for an ajax page change*/
window.onload = watch;
function watch(){MutationObserver=window.MutationObserver||window.WebKitMutationObserver;var a=new MutationObserver(function(a){for(var b=0;b<a.length;b++){var c=a[b];if("attributes"===c.type){var d=new Event("pageChange");document.dispatchEvent(d)}}});a.observe(document.body,{attributes:!0,attributeFilter:["id"]})}
</script>
<style>
  .sqs-block-markdown {
    border-bottom: solid 1px #ddd;
    cursor:pointer;
  }
  .sqs-block-markdown .sqs-block-content:before {
    content: "+";
    float: right;
    font-size: 150%;
    line-height: 120%;
    color: #aaa;
    font-weight: 100;
  }
  .activedrop .sqs-block-content:before {
    content: "-" !important;
    float: right;
    font-size: 150%;
    line-height: 100%;
    color: #aaa;
    font-weight: 100;
  }
</style>

4 hours ago, flowgirl said:

Hi everyone -

I just want to add to this. My site is down 47% in organic traffic year to year - which is 60,000 visitors. 47%!!!! And my rankings on keywords where I was #1 is dropping to 8 - 10 or worse. 

I did the Google Search Console thing, and, like all of you, not one of my URLs is showing as "good" anymore - 100% of them are showing as poor.

I've reached out to Squarespace support, but this is obviously concerning that all of us are having such a significant drop in organic traffic, especially with how hard it is to get those high search rankings in the first place.

I will update with any fix I get. 

Please keep us all posted as this is a major ongoing issue and we have not received any feedback from Squarespace on any fixes or even where it is in the pipeline. It may have been put out to pasture in the too hard basket, hard to know.
Great to some recent feedback 🙂

I always spend a lot of time on the typography because I am a bit of a type nerd lol!

So for me it is the typography first then the colour palette.

Did you ever get some code to get this going?

I think images with people can work really well but it is extremely hard to get good ones unles you hire a photographer.

I find it particularly challenging in New Zealand as most stock images are American and you easily tell, we just don't look like that here. I often find Unsplash has a wider international range of photos photos that often feel less stock, the downside is I often see an image and recognise it from Unsplash.