Download our free workbook and get started on your action plan to launch your business
The email you entered is invalid.
Thank you for subscribing.
By entering your email, you indicate that you have read and understood our Privacy Policy and agree to receive marketing from Squarespace.
The path to becoming an entrepreneur—and what entrepreneurship looks like—is different for everyone. But the right tools and support can make a difference on when you launch or how much time you have to spend on developing your next idea.
At Squarespace, we’re creating a future where everyone can be an entrepreneur. Here are some of the exciting new releases from Squarespace Refresh 2023 to help you get your vision off the ground or make your current business even bigger, from new ways to process payments and show off your products to innovative AI tools that make customizing and launching a website easier than ever.
1. Courses
Online courses are a great way to turn your knowledge into income and use your skills to connect with people who are passionate and curious about what you do. For example, if you’re passionate about skincare, you could create a course on building a skincare routine and how to shop for new products.
Squarespace Courses makes it easy to create an online course and sell it, with tools to:
Upload videos and guides
Organize your course into lessons and chapters
Guide students with a progress bar
Customize your online course to match your brand
Set up pricing and payment options
Once you have a course, you can create a newsletter or members-only page for anyone who takes your course so that they can share tips, build community, or keep learning from you.
2. Squarespace Payments
Getting a secure and reliable way to handle your payments is key to turning an idea or side project into a business. Squarespace Payments is a payments solution that fully integrates into your online store, so you can accept and manage all of your payments and payouts through your Squarespace account.
On top of simplifying your payment management, you can give customers a better experience by offering reliable, secure options to pay with major credit and debit cards and other payment methods, like Afterpay and Apple Pay or other mobile payments. With a more flexible and simpler checkout process, customers will be more likely to complete a purchase.
You can also feel confident that all customer transaction information is safe. Squarespace Payments gives you and your customers peace of mind with PCI-compliant servers, payment data encryption, secure checkouts, and instant transaction risk monitoring.
Learn more about Squarespace Payments
3. Client Invoicing
One of the biggest challenges when starting a new business or project is finding your first clients. Client Invoicing streamlines the process of finding customers and managing client work, like a design project or photography package booking, from beginning to end.
Start by adding an intake form to your site to find new leads. The form responses feed into Squarespace, so you can see every potential client in one place. Then, you can start a new project for your client directly from your dashboard, pulling in all of the information from their intake form.
Come back to the dashboard to track project progress, update details, or easily create and send new invoices to your clients. You can customize your invoice design to pull in your branding and match your site aesthetic. Clients can pay directly from the invoice you send and you can track payment deadlines from your Squarespace account.
Once you’ve completed a project, display your work on your website to showcase your offerings to future clients.
Learn more about Client Invoicing
4. Acuity Scheduling
Great scheduling software is invaluable, whether you have a thriving service business or you’re starting to explore booking appointments for the first time. Acuity Scheduling can help you succeed with features that automate some of your administrative work and help you keep track of meetings and client details.
With Acuity Scheduling, your clients get an intuitive booking experience, with the ability to self-schedule time on your calendar and cancel or reschedule their own appointments.
Acuity recently introduced new tools to make your life even easier.
An updated dashboard to manage appointments a breeze
Mobile payment options for simple transactions
Clear payment tracking like payment notifications and appointment receipts
Mobile app analytics so you can monitor your business (Coming soon)
5. Commerce tools
If you already have an online store set up or have an idea of what you’d want to sell, updates to Squarespace commerce tools can make it easier to sell physical products in your online store.
Customer experience is important for closing an online sale—the easier it is to browse your store, add to cart, and pay, the more likely someone is to become a customer.
On Squarespace websites, you can:
Set different fulfillment options, like shipping, local pickup, or both, for individual products.
Add variant buttons to product pages to show different sizes or versions of a product, so shoppers can easily see their options and decide what they want.
Allow customers to add to cart from your store page so they can shop more quickly.
Optimize your checkout so customers can finish a purchase in fewer steps.
Learn more about Commerce tools
6. Email marketing
No matter what you use your website for, email marketing can help you reach more people and connect with your most interested website visitors. If you have a personal or portfolio website, for example, you can send updates about your latest projects to anyone on your email list.
Or use email marketing to build relationships with your site visitors and keep you or your products top-of-mind. You can create automated emails that send every time someone takes a specific action on your website, like signing up for your mailing list or buying something. That way you stay in touch without manually sending every message.
You can even use automations to target specific groups of customers, like people who bought a certain product. That can earn you repeat customers if you set up automated product recommendations.
Pre-designed templates will help you pull together a polished email quickly. Use seasonal templates to keep up with holidays or customize a discount template to kick off a sale.
7. AI tools
Strong writing takes time, but an AI generation tool can help you finish your copy faster. With Squarespace AI, you can draft copy for your website, products, and emails, or use it to help you set up a new website more quickly.
Squarespace Blueprint AI and Squarespace AI work together like your own creative agency, helping you build a completely personalized website template based on a few basic design and content choices.
When you start a website with Squarespace Blueprint AI you can share a simple summary about your website with Squarespace AI, and select the tone for your copy. Once you generate your website's framework, you’ll see sample copy and helpful prompts across pages to help you finalize the content faster.
You can also use Squarespace AI separately to draft or edit any copy on your website. Use the tool in the website editor, to draft product descriptions, or in Email Campaigns to compose outbound messages.
In the not-so-distant-future, Squarespace AI will help you instantly generate even more personalized content across your website and other key brand touchpoints.
Learn more about Squarespace AI
8. Bio Sites
You can start or extend your brand on social media with a link in bio on Bio Sites. Bio Sites collects your most important links and houses them under one mobile-friendly, shareable URL. Use the new web editor from any device to choose a template and customize it to your style.
Once you choose a design, you can add links to other social media profiles and your work or products or use different features to monetize the links you share. Bio Sites offers more customization options, unlimited sections to show off more of what you care about, a mailing list sign-up, and more.
9. Design and usability tools
A website design that expresses who you are will help you stand out among your online peers. Squarespace websites are fully customizable, so you can easily create a look that’s unique to you.
There are even more features to improve your site’s look and user experience, including:
Customizable section dividers that add nuance to section breaks on a page
The option to freeze website content so part of a page stays static when visitors scroll
New presets and styling options for forms
Style previews for templates to explore combinations before you start
As you experiment with options, think about how you want your audience or customers to feel and use that to guide your decision-making.
Learn more about designing your site
10. Custom website domains
Your website domain is the URL you enter into your web browser to reach your site. A custom domain makes your website easier to find and remember, and ties together your brand.
If you get a domain through Squarespace Domains, you get a full set of tools to keep your website and personal details secure and manage your custom domains. Every Squarespace domain comes with the option to:
Connect your URL to your Squarespace site or point it to another website
Create a custom domain email and forward messages from that address to any inbox
Create multiple aliases for your email domain (like help@ or hello@) to keep messages organized
Free SSL, WHOIS, and a spam-free parking page for security
Squarespace also has a domain name generator to help brainstorm unique domain ideas for your business. Whether you own one domain or 100, you can use the refreshed Domains dashboard to manage all of your domains in one place. That way, you can keep track of upcoming renewals and other details.
11. Extensions
Extensions are third-party tools that help you to manage and optimize your business. There are a variety of Extensions for Squarespace, including tools to open new revenue streams, help you organize your finances, or even support eco-friendly actions.
A few of the newest additions include:
Avalara: Simplify your tax returns
Xero by Amaka and MYOB by Amaka: Automate reporting of sales, payment, and tax information to your accounting software
soona: Get professional product photo packages
Sprout: Plant a tree for every product you sell or order you complete
Swyft Filings: Incorporate your business
More ways to scale
There are even more tools and features to support you as your brand and business grows.
If your full-time staff grows, consider an Enterprise account to support how your team builds websites. Get access to website drafting tools, robust website and page-level security options, one-on-one Account Manager support, and more.
Are you in the restaurant or hospitality industry? Tock has all of the essential tools and technology to help you drive revenue, increase covers, and keep guests coming back. Offer reservations, experiences, event ticketing, and takeout, all in one place.
Want to see more ways to sell and stand out online?