What happened when I moved my website from Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1
I’ve had my website on Squarespace for years and it has transitioned from a personal blog to a confidence coaching website and now to a marketing strategist’s website. Through all these transitions, I kept all the old blogs thinking they were helpful for people and it doesn’t hurt to keep them up… especially since when I stepped back into marketing, I was just dipping my toe in and not jumped in full force.
But as I decided to focus solely on marketing and business consulting, I started to pay closer attention to my website analytics and notice the quality of my overall web traffic wasn’t great… and that’s honestly on me.
I has a few blogs ranking fairly high with search engine but they had nothing to do with business or marketing which meant that when those people were coming to my website and looking around more they were probably extremely confused by my site. They came for a post about not clicking with others but the rest of the site is about… marketing? WTF?!
So I knew it was time to take those down and give my site an overhaul from an SEO perspective but then my question became… Is Squarespace 7.1 better for SEO than 7.0?
Squarespace 7.1 SEO benefits
While I had heard rumblings that Squarespace 7.1 was better for SEO, I wasn’t sure if those were just rumors from people that liked 7.1 better or not so in true marketing strategist-style, I decided to do my own research and digging.
Here’s what I found to be the biggest benefits from an SEO perspective for 7.1:
No more index pages: This was the biggest determining factor for me. Squarespace got rid of index pages in their 7.1 version. All sections within an index page could be indexed by search engines and counted as duplicates which you don’t want… And I had a lottttt of index pages. Now in 7.1 you can still get the look of an index page without this issue.
Less coding needed: There have been a lot of upgrades to Squarespace 7.1 from a design point-of-view. Things I once had to code to get the look I want are now integrated right into Squarespace (section background colors, for example). Having a ton of extra code can slow down your site which is not great for your SEO so this was definitely the second biggest determining factor for me.
Not to mention, that I had a lot of code written that was no longer in use due to the million transitions my site went through and I simply did not want to search for and remove all of that on my 7.0 site.
Header 4: Squarespace added a new header which is also great news for SEO. Now I don’t have to worry as much about confusing search engines with overuse of my H1, H2, H3 solely for aesthetics.
With all the transitions my website has had and the mishmash of content, I knew I needed a fresh start for my SEO so this was the perfect opportunity to make this change.
How was the transition over from Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1?
I didn’t change any of the design so it was actually really easy for me to move everything over and keep it really similar. I had also helped some clients with their 7.1 sites so I was already familiar with how the backend of 7.1 was different which also made it much easier and faster to make the change.
The most time consuming part is transferring over the blog posts. Squarespace doesn’t have the option to migrate blogs over so, because I didn’t have a ton of blogs and I was going to remove a lot of them from my site, I decide to manually move them over by copying and pasting. But I know others have recommended exporting your blogs from 7.0 to Wordpress and then importing them from Wordpress to your 7.1 site.
The results of switching to Squarespace 7.1
As I mentioned earlier, once I decided to go all in on my marketing and consulting business I started to pay a lot more attention to my website analytics. This was the single biggest indicator that I have a whole lot of things wrong with my site and it needed help.
Here are my analytics prior to switching to Squarespace 7.1
Bounce rate: 78%
Avg. Session Duration: 1:15
Pages/Session: 1.58
Number of sessions per user: 1.29
You can see that my bounce rate was really high and my average session duration, pages/session, and number of sessions per user were all pretty low. This was how I came to the conclusion that people were going to my site through those well-ranking but not relevant blog posts, and then getting confused by what my site even is and then leaving shortly after.
Here are my analytics from January 1 - April 30 after switching to Squarespace 7.1:
Bounce rate: 2.7%
Avg. Session Duration: 2:50
Pages/Session: 3.91
Number of sessions per user: 1.75
Now my numbers are all much better because I’m getting more qualified and high-quality traffic to my website. My overall traffic is down because I removed those blogs that were driving a lot of traffic to my site, but I know this will go back up over time as I continue to work on my content and SEO strategy.
So overall I’m really happy I made the change. I know this was the right move in the long run and I’m already seeing much better results within my analytics… and in my bottom line!
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