How to start a travel blog on Squarespace
Here’s the process I followed to build my travel blog on Squarespace
Most guides to starting a blog on Squarespace will walk you through the most basic of steps: sign up, choose a template, and add your content.
In theory, starting a blog on Squarespace is that straightforward (and many people will tell you you can do it in a day).
But, in reality, getting a great blog up and running is a little more complicated than that.
There are some parts of starting a travel blog that can take a lot of time, especially if you’ve never launched a website before:
Choosing and buying a domain name.
Setting up Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Getting the hang of the platform you’re using to publish content.
Understanding how best to optimise your blog posts for SEO from the start, so you don’t upload a lot of poorly formatted posts you’ll need to edit later.
Squarespace offers a free 14 day trial, and I think in reality it takes at least this two week period to get your travel blog up and running.
All of this can feel overwhelming, especially once you start realising how much work is really involved in running a blog. So, I have broken down the steps to starting a travel blog on Squarespace to make it more manageable, while still being realistic.
Before I begin, these are some of my best tips for starting a blog on Squarespace:
Just start. You’ll learn by doing, I can guarantee it. You’ll change your mind about your blog layout and style, which is totally okay — it’s all part of developing your unique style. You won’t get everything right from the get go, so let go of wanting perfection and be happy with being 80% there.
You’ll hone your ideal layout, voice, and learn what works by publishing content. There’s only so much learning and thinking you can do — most of the results you see will come from actually doing the thing (and I say this as a chronic overthinker).
Ignore the people who say Squarespace is bad for SEO, monetisation, or whatever else they like to say. A lot of bloggers follow the same templated advice just because that’s what has been kicking around the internet for years. My best tip; test everything yourself.
Save time where you can. It takes forever to learn the many skills you need to start a travel blog, so if you can save yourself time with travel blog templates, go for it.
Step 1: Map out some of your content
Before signing up to Squarespace (or any blogging platform), I recommend creating a rough content plan for your website.
For this website, I wrote down the titles of 20 possible blog posts, so I could be sure I had enough possible content to justify investing in a second site.
I wrote three rough drafts for posts in Google docs, so I had some content to copy and paste when I signed up for a trial site.
Squarespace gives you 14 days to play around with a website before you need to decide whether you want to commit.
In my experience, most of that time will be spent fussing over the layout, so having some content you can drop into your template can give you more time to think about the design and come to grips with using the platform.
Also; you can figure out for yourself — is writing this kind of content enjoyable for you? Could you write 100 more posts?
Publishing content to my own website has been amazing for me in a number of different ways (building my brand, landing writing opportunities, and making money off ads), but it also takes a lot of hard work.
Step 2: Pick a template
Although most Squarespace templates will have a blog page somewhere, most templates are geared more towards photography or visual portfolios rather than written content.
My advice; pick a basic template.
You’re probably going to change so much of it a simple template will do the trick.
Step 3: Map out your URLs
Squarespace will create default URLs for you in some instances, so make sure you like them before you hit publish.
For example; on my main travel site, I use /posts/ instead of /blogs/ because I like the way it looks and sounds better. But, Squarespace uses /blogs/ as a default, so I published a whole bunch of pages and eventually had to go back and set up redirects to get the URLs looking like I wanted.
Another tip; double check all your URLs before hitting publish, as Squarespace will add random default titles. If you don’t edit them, you’ll end up with weird URLs getting indexed (I did this and almost immediately had to add redirects!).
A few mistakes to avoid right from the start:
Resize your images before uploading them. Images that are larger than around 300kbs are going to slow down your site, so if you’re taking images from Unsplash or other sites, make sure you’re resizing and renaming the image file before uploading.
Make sure your heading structure cascades (eg only one H1 at the top of the page, followed by H2s, and H3s for any sub paragraphs within your H2 paragraphs. If you don’t like the way they look you can adjust them under site styles, but don’t use all H4s on a page because you like the way they look.
Step 3: Set up your core pages
When you’re just launching a new site, you don’t need to worry about getting everything live at once.
I would focus on a small number of core pages:
Home page
About page
Blog pages
There are more core site pages you’re going to need (privacy policy, contact page) but when you first launch a site, it’s going to take a while for all of your pages to be indexed.
Your blog posts are going to be the first ones to start getting traffic in Google, so I would focus on getting those up and come back to the rest of your site pages a little later.
Once your site is live
Connect your domain to Google Search Console
If you found this helpful, you might also like to take a peek at my other tips on blogging on Squarespace:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Petrina Darrah is the founder of High Alpine Creative and a freelance travel writer. After successfully building her own travel blog, she set out to help other day dreamers create their own beautiful blogs on Squarespace — mostly because others said it can’t be done.
