Update pages in Squarespace without impacting a live page

Squarespace makes updating pages pretty easy and anyone, regardless of your technical knowledge, can make the changes themselves.

The challenge is when you want to make edits to a live page, but aren’t ready to make those changes public.

For example, if you’re reworking you a product page for a version 2.0 product launch, but the launch isn’t happening for another week, you wouldn’t want to put that new product on your website just yet.

You could simply create a new page in Squarespace and link to that, right? But then you’d have to set up a 301 redirect so that anyone who went to ProductABC before, will now go to ProductABC-2. And what about SEO? Wouldn’t that cause me to start completely over?

How to do you make changes in advance?

Don’t burn the midnight oil the night before a big launch just to get a new page up. I promise you’ll make mistakes and want to keep making changes long past your launch.

Let’s say you have this Women In History page and you want to keep the same URL but want a new page.

Getting started

Copy the page you want to use as a starting point – or start from scratch by creating a new page.

Add -new to the end of your URL. Using the same example as above, the page URL would be /women-in-tech-history-new.

Change the page title to be NEW Women In History so it’s easy to see in your page lists.

You may also want to either select Enable Page so that it becomes disabled and or go to the SEO setting and select Hide Page from Search Results. Just make sure you turn these back on later.

Make updates to /women-in-tech-history-new.

When you’re ready to make the new page live

Change the URL on your original page from /women-in-tech-history to /women-in-tech-history-old.

Make the new page to be /women-in-tech-history instead of /women-in-tech-history-new.

Go to the settings for your now /women-in-tech-history-old and unselect Enable so the page is no longer live.

Test to ensure when you click on the link, you are directed to the new page. This may take a few minutes to work and you may need to clear your cache.

I also like to take all my old pages and move them into a single folder. I prefer not to delete anything just in case I want anything from the old content.

Voila! You’ve updated a live page without feeling rushed and without impacting your SEO.

If you’re concerned about SEO issues like this while making edits to your website, you might consider buying my Website Rescues. I update pages like this and clean up dozens of other problems that impact Squarespace sites.