Why I started a travel blog on Squarespace (and how it’s going)

I ignored all the advice saying Squarespace is bad for blogging — and built a successful site anyway.

My Squarespace travel blog gets more than 50,000 monthly visitors — almost 100,000 in the highest traffic month.

It took me less than a year to grow my travel blog to this level.

I started my own site because travel writing is a precarious profession. Having my own travel blog has allowed me to secure a different income stream, while expanding my presence in search.

If you’re thinking about starting a travel blog on Squarespace, I’d love to share my journey with you. Despite what a lot of people say, it’s not only possible to grow a travel blog on Squarespace and make money, but actually relatively easy.

Why Squarespace?

In some Facebook groups, you’ll see most travel bloggers shouting loudly about how Wordpress is the best platform for travel blogging. Some will try to convince you that the only option for a successful travel blog is to run it on Wordpress.

I strongly disagree.

Squarespace is much easier to use and more intuitive than clunky Wordpress.

The template designs in Sqaurespace are also a lot more flexible and unique – I can recognise a Wordpress site a mile away as most bloggers use the same theme and plug ins.

I think Squarespace is beautiful and the templates I see appeal to my design loving brain.

If you have never managed a CMS before and are new to publishing content on websites, I can highly recommend using Squarespace.

Having a simple editor makes all the difference — there are so many other aspects of digital publishing you’ll need to learn, that saving yourself time and energy on getting familiar with the backend system is a godsend.

How I grew my Squarespace travel blog to nearly 100,000 monthly views

For some reason, a lot of people seem to think Squarespace is bad for SEO. My website is proof a Squarespace site can thrive in search.

Tips for Squarespace SEO:

Optimise your images. Resize your images properly and give the image files optimised names. Squarespace won’t stop you from uploading or using large image files, so it’s easy to drop in massive image files which will slow your site down.

Use clear structure. Make the most of the H1/H2/H3 headers (in cascading order)

A few things to note:

There are a few caveats, of course.

I already had a tiny bit of traffic coming in from posts I had published ages ago, on the topic of travel writing

I have experience in SEO and content writing from my professional life

I already had good backlinks pointing to my site, from the freelance writing work I’ve done for publications

These things meant I wasn’t starting from zero, but I truly believe that if you create good content, you will see success in SEO.

The pros and cons of using Squarespace for a travel blog

The blog editor is easy to use.

There are SEO features built into each post.

Some other awesome examples of travel blogs on Squarespace

Where Tara Went

Laura The Explorer

Starting a Squarespace blog

Sign up for a free trial (you have 14 days to play around with templates)

Pick a simple template and start building out content

Start writing and publishing as much as you can. It probably won’t be very good at first, and your blog layouts might not be the best, but the only way to refine your blog is to keep publishing and iterating. It took me almost a year to finally land on a page layout I actually liked, so in the meantime get some posts up so you can start getting some Google traffic.

Thanks for reading this far! I hope this helped you pluck up the courage to start a travel blog on Squarespace. If you have more questions for me, please feel free to get in touch.