Choosing a Squarespace Template for Your Website

Why This Matters

Let’s set the stage: you’ve spent a chunk of time mapping out your website. Maybe you scribbled a brief that actually makes sense. You’ve produced those rough wireframes and pinned down what pages you need. If you followed our training at Pixelhaze Academy, you might even have a sitemap where the lines aren’t just haphazard zig-zags. You know what you’re building.

Now you face the Squarespace template gallery. The temptation is to pick whatever looks prettiest and get on with your day. Most folks do. But here’s what you need to know: the wrong template can cost you hours or days of lost time. Even worse, it puts unnecessary pressure on your content, squashes your brand, or buries your best work inside features you can’t change. I’ve seen business owners burn a weekend transforming their homepage into something that almost, but never quite, feels right—only to realise the template just doesn’t fit how they work.

You get one shot at a first impression online. Your template is the scaffolding. If you pick it carefully now, you’ll save yourself from endless backtracking, repetitive design tweaks, or eruptive hair-loss months down the line. If you choose carelessly, you’ll spend more time fighting with the platform than promoting your business.

Common Pitfalls

The biggest mistake I see is that people chase ‘style’ over ‘structure’. A crisp bakery homepage with sweeping photos looks stunning, but try running a tech blog through it and you’ll soon find you’ve inherited the world’s most irritating sidebar and nowhere for your articles to sit comfortably.

Another howler arises when people ignore the assets available. If you only have a couple of decent photos and some text, a portfolio-heavy template turns into a minefield of grey boxes and apologetic placeholders.

Picking the template your mate’s cousin said was “trendy” usually leads to trouble. If it doesn’t bend how your business needs it to, you’ll be redesigning before launch day. A template’s homepage demo is never the full story.

Step-by-Step Fix

1. Start With the End in Mind: Pin Down What You’re Actually Building

Treat template hunting like you would hiring a shopfront builder. Before you even scroll, side-eye your own plans. What needs to live on your website? Shop? Booking calendar? Blog? A photo gallery that actually behaves?

For example, if your brief includes a members-only area or multiple portfolios, make sure your template family supports these natively. Otherwise, be ready to wrangle workarounds and duct-tape solutions.

2. Triangulate Your Industry With Squarespace’s Categories

Don’t ignore Squarespace’s industry catalogues. They might not be perfect, but they shave hours off your search. Click into your sector: Restaurants, Portfolios, Events, Stores, Personal Sites, and so on. At first, it seems ridiculous to suggest this, but time after time, I’ve seen designers hunt for hours through every last template, only to circle back to what Squarespace suggested in the first place.

Say you’re opening a Pilates studio. Squarespace will direct you to templates equipped with class schedules, testimonials, and simple online booking. If you skip those, you’ll be spending your evenings adding big chunks of code to pages that were never meant to take bookings at all.

If you still aren’t sure where your business fits, look past the names. A “Photography” template might suit your artisan coffee brand if you focus on rich visuals. A “Portfolio” template can work for a consultancy with the right tweaks.

3. Know Your Assets: Build For What You Actually Have

I’ve lost count of projects that stall because the template expects assets you simply don’t have. Those hero banners with panoramic, magazine-quality photography? Great if there’s a seasoned pro on your payroll, but disastrous if your entire photo library is grainy iPhone snaps. On the flip side, if you do have three strong images and a logo, let the template bring those forward.

Gather your logo files, your five best images (don’t lie: many folks only have a handful), brand colours, preferred fonts, and some sample body text. Be honest about their quality. Templates with huge image backgrounds can turn a decent photo into a pixelated mess. Fixed, narrow content blocks hide a multitude of photographic sins.

4. Match Your Wireframe: Don’t Let the Demo Trick You

This step separates the professionals from the enthusiastic hobbyists. Every brief, no matter how rough, points towards a certain structure: “I need three callouts under the banner.” “A gallery needs to sit next to a contact form.” “We must have testimonials front and centre.”

Don’t trust a template just because its demo homepage looks sophisticated. Instead, look for evidence that it can handle your essential layouts without spinning plates. Find templates that suit your wireframe, not the other way around.

For instance, I once worked with a creative agency intent on using a blog-heavy template for their service-driven business. They spent weeks trying to wrangle service sections onto a layout that resisted every attempt. Pick a template where your pages fall into place naturally.

5. Play It Safe: Why the Brine Family Is Your Friend

Confused? Starting from scratch? Unless you already know which template family you want, start with Brine. Brine and its kin (Mercer, Maple, Margot, and friends) are famously flexible. They serve everyone from photographers to accountants because they make very few things impossible.

You get full bleed banners, pages that stack vertically, clever index pages, and a range of header and navigation options. Brine supports responsive design, handles mobile layouts, and works well with customisation. Even advanced features like parallax banners and mixed-content pages come as standard.

If you don’t love it, you’ve at least learned what you don’t want, with minimum pain.

6. Know You Can Change (But Understand the Price)

Maybe you’ve already picked a template, spent four hours fighting with it, and are now reading this in quiet despair. Good news: you can change templates at any point.

There is a key trade-off. When you switch, any changes made in the Design tab—header tweaks, colour schemes, spacings—go back to factory settings. You keep your pages and your content, but you start fresh with the style.

This can work for or against you, depending on how you view it. If you treated template-building as an experiment, switching templates is painless. If you spent ages getting the font on your CTA buttons just so, you’ll need to redo that work.

What Most People Miss

Here’s an essential detail: the best template for your business isn’t always the most beautiful. A more suitable choice is the one that makes your content easy to update, keeps you motivated to add news or projects, and doesn’t fight you at every turn. Skip the urge to hunt for the demo site you wish you had. Focus on a setup you will actually use. Templates can look very different with your own content, and sometimes the outcome is less appealing.

Your site’s visitors won’t know which template you picked. What they’ll notice is if your site is clear, simple, and smooth to use. Templates are there to support you.

The Bigger Picture

Getting the right Squarespace template up front takes the grunt out of website launches. It means you’re not forced into workarounds or quick fixes. You can dedicate your energy to your product, your writing, and your customer journey.

From my experience with hundreds of launches, making the right choice at this stage is the difference between a site that struggles and one that grows naturally. You won’t waste hours trawling forums or second-guessing every design choice. You’ll iterate faster, scale more easily, and spend less time apologising for odd quirks in your site’s structure.

A good template lets people see your business for what it is. That’s the goal.

Wrap-Up

Let’s recap:

• Don’t let shiny demos blind you. Work from your brief, not just your gut.
• Use Squarespace’s industry categories as a springboard. They’re more useful than you think.
• Pick a template that fits your assets—content, images, logos, and all.
• The Brine family is almost always a safe bet if you feel lost.
• Don’t panic about making a “forever” choice. You can switch, but remember you’ll need to restyle.
• Above all, make sure your website serves your business—not the other way around.

Want more helpful systems like this? Join Pixelhaze Academy for free at https://www.pixelhaze.academy/membership.

FAQ

How do I choose a Squarespace template that fits my industry?
Start by finding the closest match in the categories provided. Fancy terms aside, most businesses will slot nicely into one or two. If you’re between sectors, look at the page layouts, not just the homepage images.

What if my photos aren’t professional quality?
Use a template with fixed-width or narrower image blocks. This minimises imperfections. Avoid full-screen banners if your photos look a bit like CCTV captures in low light.

Can I change my template after I start building?
Yes. Be ready to redo your style and design settings. Your actual content—pages, posts, and images—remain, but colours and layout choices will reset.

Is there a perfect template family for beginners?
Brine. There’s a reason seasoned designers recommend it. It bends in useful directions and rarely paints you into a corner.

How do I test if a template fits my real content?
Replace demo text and images as early as possible. Sometimes the perfect demo melts away with your actual content. Better to know sooner than later.

Jargon Buster

Squarespace: A user-friendly platform that lets you make a decent website without knowing a single line of code.

Brine Family: A large set of templates on Squarespace that are versatile and easy to customise.

Wireframe: A rough sketch or plan showing where content will go on each page before things get pretty.

Assets: All your images, texts, logos, and graphics—the ingredients of your website.

Responsive Design: Your site automatically looks good whether visitors use a phone, tablet, or desktop.

Further Reading at Pixelhaze

• Why It's Still Important to Fact-Check AI Tools Like ChatGPT
• What Does a UX/UI Designer Do in Web Design?
• Mastering YouTube Thumbnails with Canva: A Practical Guide
• Announcing the Squarespace Designer Power Pack
• Image Compression in Web Design: Why It Still Matters in 2024

Remember, the best websites always begin with clear thinking and a strong template choice. Get those in order, and you’re already halfway home.