Squarespace Website Maintenance: The Monthly Checklist an Agency Actually Runs

"Squarespace doesn't need maintenance" is half true. You'll never update a plugin, patch a server or restore from a hacked backup. Squarespace does that.

What Squarespace doesn't do is notice that your contact form has been sending enquiries to an address nobody checks since March, or that your domain auto-renew failed, or that the booking embed broke when the vendor changed their script. Those are the things that cost you customers, and nobody at Squarespace is watching for them.

This is the checklist we run for clients on a support plan. You can run it yourself; most items take minutes.

Monthly

Submit every form. Fill in each form on the site with a test entry and confirm it arrives where it should, to a monitored inbox and to the CRM if connected. This is the single most valuable check on the list. We have found forms that had been silently failing for six months on sites with live ad spend. Reasons vary: the notification address was a former employee, Squarespace's email was landing in spam, a Zapier task limit was hit, a field was renamed and the CRM mapping broke.

Place a test order or booking. If you sell or take bookings, run one through with a real card and refund it. Check the confirmation email, the notification, the calendar entry, and that inventory decremented.

Check the domain and email. Log into the registrar and confirm auto-renew is on, the card on file is current, and the expiry date is more than 60 days out. Domains expire because a card expired. Check that email (Google Workspace or Squarespace email) is billing normally.

Check the Squarespace billing page. Same reason. A failed subscription payment gives you a grace period and then takes the site down.

Review analytics for anomalies. Not for insight; for breakage. A page whose traffic dropped to zero may have been unlinked or set to hidden. A spike in 404s in Search Console means something moved. Ten minutes in Squarespace Analytics and Search Console.

Run a broken link check. A crawler (Screaming Frog, or a free online checker for small sites) against the whole site. Fix or redirect every 404. Check outbound links too; partner sites die.

Speed check on three pages. PageSpeed Insights on the home page and the two most-visited landing pages. Compare against last month. A drop usually means someone uploaded a 9 MB image or added a script.

Check third-party embeds. Booking widgets, maps, Instagram feeds, chat, reviews. Load each on desktop and mobile. Vendors change their scripts and don't tell you.

Check the SSL certificate. It's automatic on Squarespace, but if the domain's DNS was changed, it can lapse. A padlock check in the browser is enough.

Look at the site on a phone. Actually scroll through five pages. Fluid Engine mobile layouts drift when content is edited on desktop; a heading that wrapped to three lines now overlaps an image.

Read the Squarespace product updates. Squarespace ships changes monthly. Some affect existing sites: new default behaviours, deprecated blocks, changes to the cookie banner. Knowing what changed saves the "why does this look different" call.

Quarterly

Content audit. Are the team page, the prices, the opening hours, the services list and the footer address still correct? The most embarrassing errors are the ones a visitor sees and nobody at the company has looked at since launch.

SEO settings review. Page titles and descriptions on new pages (editors forget), the SEO report in Squarespace's panel, and the AI Visibility panel if you're on a 7.1 English site. Check for pages accidentally set to "hide from search".

Accessibility spot-check. A quick automated scan and a keyboard pass on any new pages. Editors add grey text and empty alt fields; it's just what happens.

Review integrations and subscriptions. What's still connected, what's still paid for, what's still used. We routinely find clients paying for a Zapier plan feeding a CRM they left a year ago.

Export a backup. Squarespace has no backup feature. Export the site (Settings, then Advanced, then Import/Export) to get an XML of pages and posts, export products and contacts to CSV, and download the images you'd hate to lose. Store it somewhere that isn't Squarespace. It's not a full restore, but it's what you'd rebuild from.

Contributor access review. Remove people who've left. Confirm the owner login is a role account, not a person's personal Gmail. Enable two-factor authentication on every contributor.

Yearly

Domain and email renewals. Confirm, again, and confirm the contact details on the registrar are current so renewal notices reach someone.

Plan review. Are you on the right Squarespace plan? Basic charges 2 percent on sales and doesn't allow custom code; if you've grown, Core pays for itself. Conversely, Advanced's features go unused on many sites.

Legal pages. Privacy notice, terms, cookie disclosure, accessibility statement, imprint (Impressum) where required. Laws change; the pages should reference current processors and current law.

Design refresh decision. After two or three years, decide whether the site still represents the business. Squarespace template updates don't apply to existing sites; you're on the version you launched with until you rebuild.

Performance baseline. A full Lighthouse run on every page, saved, so next year's comparison is real.

What we do that you probably won't

Monitor uptime and form delivery automatically, with alerts, so a failure is caught in hours rather than at the monthly check. Keep a change log of every edit, so "it was fine last week" has an answer. Test Squarespace's own changes on a staging copy of your site before they reach yours, when the change is significant. And handle the edits you don't want to make yourself.

Our plans

Quarterly check: the full checklist above, once a quarter, with a written report and any fixes under an hour included. For sites that don't change much.

Monthly: the checklist monthly, automated form and uptime monitoring, a block of hours for edits and small changes, priority response. For live businesses.

Retainer: the monthly plan plus a larger block of hours at USD 125 per hour, for clients who make regular changes or run campaigns. Unused hours roll over within the quarter.

If you'd rather run the checklist yourself, take it. If you'd rather not think about it, that's what the plans are for.

Questions we get

Does Squarespace back up my site? Squarespace keeps the site running and recoverable at the platform level, but there's no user-facing backup or restore. If an editor deletes a page, it's gone (Squarespace's trash keeps deleted pages for 30 days; content changes within a page aren't versioned). Export quarterly.

What if a Squarespace update changes how my site looks? It happens occasionally, usually a spacing or block behaviour change. Our monthly check catches it; a fix is typically CSS. Read the product update notes when they arrive.

Do I need a maintenance plan if I never change the site? You need the checklist, at minimum quarterly. Forms, domains, embeds and billing fail regardless of whether you edit anything. Whether you pay someone to run it depends on whether you'll actually do it.

Can you take over a site someone else built? Yes. The first month is an audit: what's connected, what's custom, what's broken. Then the normal plan.

Do unused retainer hours roll over? Within a quarter, yes. Beyond that, no, because it makes planning impossible on both sides.

How fast do you respond? Support plan clients: same business day for anything that affects revenue (form down, checkout broken, site unreachable), two business days for everything else.