Squarespace is a great little CMS/web builder, for small sites that want a lot of customisation it's hard to beat, but here are 5 areas I'd love to see some improvement on.
1. File formats
Formats move on, on the web just like old technology. How many of you use a VHS player now?
In an ideal world, I’d use WEBP for almost all images, replacing JPG and PNG. The reason? File size, I’ve tested many images and you can regularly save 70% with little to no image quality reduction.
SVG has been around for ages, but unfortunately, you cannot use these natively in Squarespace. I like to use SVG’s for logos, they are small files, again - think performance. You can also scale an SVG up to the size of a large building wall, and it would still look super crisp with no jaggy edges. I love SVG, and they would be possible to use.
Video is now a critical part of many websites, and I’m not talking about just embedding a YouTube video. As our skills as web designers increase there will be more we want to do with video. For the Arabica Squarespace template site, I needed to get a transparent background video on there for the steam of the coffee. Unfortunately, I couldn’t upload a WEBM or a HVC1 codec .MP4 video file. I got around this by hosting those 2 files within my Amazon S3 bucket and adding custom code, but it would be nice going forward to have the option to keep them natively within Squarespace.
2. X/Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram unare iversal social media option
Another addition I’d like to have is the option to include social posts and images from popular social Networks such as FaceBook, X, Pinterest etc. Nothing too fancy but just take in images and text data from those sites. I appreciate there are plugins to do this for many of the services, but they are all powered by JavaScript and have performance issues. Something native that would work on the server(rather than JavaScript) would be great.
3. Custom views - Large desktop? Tablet?
In Squarespace 7.0 we had a tablet view for when editing pages. I’d like to see that return with a large screen size too. There is a huge difference between a 1200-pixel wide laptop and a 2400-pixel large screen. It would be great to control some aspects of content easier within Fluid Engine. You can of course use custom CSS with media queries but that’s a good bit more work than clicking a button and dragging elements within Fluid Engine.
4. Better Analytics
With the recent GDPR and privacy issues, it’s getting more difficult to get detailed stats on audiences on any platform. The analytics are basic within Squarespace, that’s for sure. It would be great to make segments and see more integration options when dealing with email newsletters.
5. Custom fields
Custom fields were a thing within Squarespace 7.0, they were great for ‘chopping’ up data into their own place on sites and in the Squarespace admin. I’d love to see these return, it would make for much better editing and more customisation of the content. Even if you were limited to 3 custom fields on a site that would be a huge improvement.
So those are my 5 things I’d love to see in Squarespace. What are yours? Hit me up on X/Twitter.