Export Squarespace SEO to HTML

Squarespace SEO is... fine. Not great, not terrible. Depends what you're competing for.

The good stuff first.

Every page gets customizable meta titles and descriptions. URLs can be edited to include keywords. Image alt text is easy to add. XML sitemaps generate automatically. SSL certificates come standard, no http security warnings. Templates are mobile-responsive by default.

Squarespace also handles the invisible technical bits. Canonical URLs prevent duplicate content issues. Header tags follow logical hierarchy. Basic structured data exists for some content types. Pages index in Google without special effort.

For a local restaurant or photography portfolio, that's probably enough. You're not competing with major brands for "best pizza" nationally. You just need to show up for "pizza in [your town]" and have decent on-page content.

Now the problems.

Page speed hurts. Squarespace sites consistently underperform on Google's Core Web Vitals. Heavy JavaScript frameworks load before content renders. Multiple font files add weight. Images often aren't optimized automatically. A "simple" portfolio page can transfer 2MB before anything displays.

Google has explicitly said page speed affects rankings. Not massively, content still matters most, but a slow site loses points against faster competitors. Squarespace sites start at a disadvantage.

Technical SEO is constrained too. You can't edit robots.txt directly. Schema markup options are minimal. Code injection is limited on cheaper plans. Want to add custom structured data for recipes, products, or events? Good luck.

The JavaScript rendering issue is subtle but real. Squarespace pages rely on JS to display content. Google can render JavaScript now, but there's a delay. Static HTML pages get indexed immediately. JS-heavy pages wait in a queue. For competitive keywords, that crawl delay matters.

Here's where static HTML wins.

Export your Squarespace site to HTML. Same content, same design, but delivered as simple files. No JavaScript rendering required. Page size drops from megabytes to kilobytes. Load times improve dramatically. Core Web Vitals scores jump.

You lose the visual editor. SEO changes mean editing HTML. For sites you optimize once and rarely touch, that tradeoff makes sense. For blogs with frequent content updates, maybe not.

Squarespace SEO is adequate for low-competition keywords and local businesses. For anything more competitive, the speed penalty hurts. Export to static HTML if performance matters more than convenience.