Speed Up Website Development with Squarespace and Square Forge

Whether you’re building your first company site or you’re the designated web whizz for half your client list, time is always tight. You want quality, consistency, and efficiency, but what often arrives is a tangle of repetitive work and avoidable confusion. I’ve been there too. After twenty years and more than five hundred Squarespace sites, I realised that even the best platforms could do with a little extra help. That’s why Square Forge was created as a collection of over 250 starter templates, all built to work natively with Squarespace and help developers, freelancers, and business owners save real hours, not just seconds.

In this article, I’ll lay out hands-on strategies, born out of hard graft and many mugs of builder's tea, to help you avoid wasted effort and produce better websites, faster. You’ll discover the missteps most people make, how to fix them, and how to set yourself up for quicker builds (without sacrificing quality) next time.

Why This Matters

Ask anyone who’s tried to launch a new website under pressure what slows them down. For some, it’s wrestling with layouts or hunting for that one image “that fits.” For others, it’s nothing more complicated than having to start from scratch every single time, building out each section: header, hero, testimonial, pricing, again and again. All this busywork forces you to spend hours on the sort of tasks that ought to be instant. Multiply that across five or ten sites a month, or every time a client pivots direction, and soon your billable time seems to evaporate into thin air.

Worse still, time spent repeating yourself is time you can’t offer to strategy, refinement, or the little touches that turn a standard website into something memorable (and, let’s be honest, worth recommending). For designers and agencies, the cost is clear: slower turnaround, scaling pains, and the sheer frustration of watching competitors sail ahead simply because they embraced a smarter workflow.

Fortunately, most of the slowness can be avoided. If you learn to use Squarespace’s best features in tandem with extensions like Square Forge, you can cut hours from each project, keep quality high, and free yourself to do what actually matters.

Common Pitfalls

Too many people try to outwork, rather than outsmart, the web building process. Here are the most frequent mistakes I see:

• Rebuilding the wheel for every project: Starting each site from nothing, rather than building on a proven foundation.
• Copy-paste chaos: Manually moving sections or retyping content, which instantly multiplies mistakes and saps consistency.
• Ignoring development domains: Sticking with default, meaningless Squarespace URLs, which only leads to confusion when managing multiple sites or handing off projects.
• Neglecting 'Saved Sections': Overlooking one of Squarespace’s quietest time-saving features, meaning layouts must be rebuilt or carefully copied, instead of instantly reinserted anywhere you need them.
• Not duplicating sites: Missing the most powerful shortcut for clients with similar needs, or when rolling out version two of a successful design.

Each of these oversights adds up, and together they can double, sometimes triple, the build time on straightforward projects.

Step-by-Step Fix

Over the past decade, we’ve developed a workflow at Pixelhaze that keeps our designers sane, our clients happy, and our turnaround as brisk as you’d want. Here’s exactly how you can implement it:

1. Start with Square Forge Templates

If you’re the sort who’s built websites using Squarespace’s in-built templates, you know they’re good but generic. Square Forge builds on this by providing over 250 modular starting points. Whether you’re building a lean portfolio, a feature-rich business hub, or a new product showcase, you can mix and match these sections to suit.

How to do it:

• Log in to your Squarespace site.
• Browse your Square Forge library and select a template or section block that matches your planned layout.
• Install the section, then immediately begin customising to pull through your brand style: colours, fonts, imagery, copy.

2. Duplicate Websites with Precision

The ability to duplicate entire Squarespace sites is one of the most underused tools in the platform. For standardised builds, such as for a franchise with twenty branches or for agencies who want to keep a “starter kit” website ready to update, this method is extremely effective.

How to do it:

1. Inside your Squarespace home panel, navigate to Settings.
2. Choose Duplicate Site. You’ll be prompted to confirm; your original site remains untouched.
3. Once duplicated, open the new site. Every page, design element, and section is retained, but the development domain is generic. Time to make it yours.
4. Move through each section and update the text and imagery for the new use-case or client. Typically, this takes a fraction of the time needed to rebuild from the ground up.

3. Rename Your Development Domains

Websites in progress usually live on a ‘.squarespace.com’ subdomain. Left unchanged, these end up reading like someone’s Wi-Fi password. More importantly, when managing several projects, you quickly lose track of which site is which. Renaming your development domain improves clarity, workflow, and client handovers.

How to do it:

1. Once you’ve duplicated or begun a site, go to the Settings area.
2. Click Domains, then find your ‘built-in’ or development domain (ending in .squarespace.com).
3. Rename it to something meaningful (‘clientname-testing.squarespace.com’, for example).
4. Save your changes and check the new domain in your browser to be sure it works.

4. Use Saved Sections for Fast Page Building

Fluid Engine, released by Squarespace in late 2022, introduced the highly useful 'Saved Sections' feature. This allows you to design a section once, such as a pricing block, a testimonial carousel, or a complex image grid, save it, then drop it into any other page on that site without fuss.

How to do it:

• Design the section as usual in Fluid Engine.
• When ready, click the heart icon in the section control panel to save it.
• To reuse it elsewhere, hit “Add Section” on any page and select from your Saved list.

5. Manage Your Domains for Going Live

When you’re ready to launch, the final professional flourish is to link your custom domain. Clients notice, Google notices, and it's part of how sites build authority. While your work is typically previewed on a Squarespace subdomain in development, moving to a custom web address should be smooth, not stressful.

How to do it:

1. In the Domains settings area, choose to either buy a new domain through Squarespace or connect one you own elsewhere.
2. Follow the on-screen instructions. Squarespace’s guidance is clear; this usually requires just a handful of steps, including DNS changes.
3. Once connected, check your site on the custom domain, update any internal links if needed, and make sure everything appears as it should.

What Most People Miss

There’s an odd but understandable belief among new site builders that efficiency means using the default features and powering through the same checklist for every build. Experienced creators develop a toolkit: a suite of reusable components and a few easy house rules. The time you spend testing, refining, and saving those little elements pays itself back many times over, both in your present workload and in every project that follows.

Squarespace offers a solid foundation for DIY site building, but it will never know your personal workflow as well as you do. Solutions like Square Forge help bridge that gap. They introduce a formal structure for good practice, allowing you to work with purpose rather than improvising each time.

One more detail: efficient site building is about confidence. When you trust your process, you stop second-guessing, and your sites come together more rapidly and with fewer mistakes. That confidence comes from systems: templates, duplication, proper naming, and real-world learning.

The Bigger Picture

A streamlined workflow enables you to take on more types of projects and significantly improves your margins. For freelancers, being able to turn around websites in days, rather than weeks, increases your earning potential and gives you more opportunity to focus on client service or growing your portfolio. In an agency, consistent systems prevent work from being siloed or lost when people leave. For business owners, your online presence can adapt to market changes or new campaigns without needing a full rebuild.

Speeding up your process doesn’t require lowering quality. The less time you spend doing repetitive work, the more attention you can give to the aspects that matter: strategy, copy, image curation, testing on mobile, even those “nice to haves” which often get left behind when projects drag on. And yes, the occasional tea break.

Working efficiently also signals professionalism. Clients, colleagues, and Google value smooth launches, timely updates, and consistent branding. A reputation for reliability isn't easily faked and can be extremely valuable, especially when referrals and positive reviews influence your business growth.

Wrap-Up

From years in the trenches, I can assure you that slow website builds are usually avoidable. Use modular templates from Square Forge, duplicate sites and sections when appropriate, standardise your domain and project naming, and make the most of Squarespace’s built-in features. Your projects will run faster, your quality will rise, and you’ll spend much less time wrestling spreadsheets or searching for that “almost perfect” layout you made six months ago.

If you remember nothing else, keep this in mind: systems do not restrict creativity. They actually support it. The more you automate, organise, and structure your groundwork, the more room you have to craft those touches that clients rave about.

For more helpful systems like this, join Pixelhaze Academy for free at https://www.pixelhaze.academy/membership.