What to Check on Your Squarespace Website Every Month
A former client messaged me this week asking what she should be keeping an eye on now that her site has been live for a while. Metrics, a monthly maintenance plan, blog posts, the whole thing. It was such a good question that I didn't want her waiting on it, so we wrote this for her. And for you, if you've ever logged into your site, stared at the analytics for a minute and quietly closed the tab.
Cole's notes: you don't need a maintenance plan. You need to look at three things once a month and know what they're telling you.
First, the maintenance plan question
The reality is a well-built website doesn't need someone in there every month, especially on platforms like Squarespace.
I hear the opposite on discovery calls all the time, usually from people on WordPress. One practice owner was paying $340 a month just to keep her site running. That's $4,080 a year! She'd gotten so used to adjusting margins every day that she'd stopped noticing how strange that is.
When a website is built properly, the only time anyone needs to go in there is when you hire someone new, add a service, or change a price. That's the whole list.
Think of it like a house. A well-built house doesn't need a contractor over every month, but you still test the smoke detectors and check the furnace filter, because that's how you catch a small problem before it turns into a big one. That's all this monthly check is. A quick look, not a project.
The three things to check
Everything here lives in the Analytics panel inside Squarespace, so there's nothing new to sign up for. Bear with me, it's less technical than it sounds.
1. Is your website doing its job?
Every website has one main job. For a therapist it's usually an inquiry or a booked consult. For a medspa it's appointments. For a shop it's sales. Whatever that action is for you, it's called a conversion. Fancy word, simple idea. It's the moment a visitor turns into a lead.
This is the number that matters most, and it's the one most people aren't counting. I went back through 14 search reports in our files and only five were tracking conversions at all. Every other one showed a zero, which just meant nobody was counting.
To find yours, go to Analytics, then Engagement, then Form & button conversions. You'll see how many people saw your contact form or booking button and how many used it.
One catch. If your booking or intake form comes from another company and is embedded on your site, Squarespace may only see the button click and not the booking itself. If that's you, count the inquiries in your inbox or scheduler once a month and jot the number down. A note on your phone works fine. Nobody's grading this.
Which number you track is going to be different for every business, and that's okay. Pick one and look at it every month. Does that make sense?
2. Where are people finding you?
Go to Analytics, then Traffic, then Traffic sources. This shows how people landed on your site, whether that's Google, social media, email, another website, or typing in your address.
This one tells you where your time should go. If most of your visitors are typing your name in or coming from referrals, your reputation is doing the heavy lifting and your website's job is to back up what they've already heard about you. If Google is sending a lot of people, your site is out there getting found by strangers. Both are good news! You just want to know which one you are before you spend three hours making Reels.
3. What does Google think you do?
This one needs a quick setup, once. Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that shows which searches your site shows up in and how often people click. Squarespace connects to it from your settings, and once it's hooked up, your Search keywords panel shows you the exact words people typed before they found you.
Read that list once a month. It's weirdly fun. If you're a therapist who stopped offering couples counselling two years ago and that's still what's bringing people to your site, your website is telling Google an old story.
Quick warning. Your Squarespace numbers and your Search Console numbers won't always match, and sometimes they'll even move in opposite directions. We've seen this in our own client reports, usually because tracking only started at launch, so there was never a real before number to compare to. Don't panic over one weird week. Look at which way things are moving over a few months.
What the numbers are telling you
After about three months, you'll start to see a pattern.
If traffic is going up and inquiries aren't, people are finding you and leaving. That usually comes down to the words, the photos, or how easy it is to reach out.
If inquiries are steady but traffic is dropping, your referrals are carrying you and search isn't pulling its weight. That's a visibility problem, and it's very fixable.
If you can't find your inquiry number anywhere, start there. Seriously.
That last one matters more than it sounds. I spoke with a business owner who had paid someone for years to run her marketing, and she couldn't get into her own analytics. The only way she knew how things were going was his word. She had no way to tell if it was working, or if she was being told the truth. Owning your numbers means you never have to take anyone's word for it. Including mine.
If this sounds like the last thing you want to do
Totally fair. Some people love this stuff and most of our clients would rather reorganize their junk drawer. If that's you, our ongoing monthly support is a discounted hourly rate a month for an hour of updates and help, and we also offer to write blogs for clients too, which gives Google more reasons to send the right people your way.
Either way, check in once a month. It's the cheapest thing you can do for your website.
Okay that's that!
