How to Redirect a URL in Squarespace
There are a couple of reasons why you might want to redirect a link on your website:
First, if you changed the URL of a page and want to make sure people can still find it, redirecting the old URL to the new URL is the best way to do that. Google penalizes sites with lots of broken links, so eliminating them by setting up a permanent redirect is a great way to boost your SEO.
Google also rewards sites that have keywords in the page URLs. But that can be bad for user experience. For example, one of the main keywords I target is “Squarespace designer,” so my services page is at the URL http://katescott.co/squarespace-designer. But that’s not very clear for my website visitors (and it certainly doesn’t look good on social media sites), so I forward http://katescott.co/services to http://katescott.co/squarespace-designer, so I can use the clean URL for sharing.
Luckily, Squarespace makes it super easy to redirect any page on your site. But before we get into that, you should know that there are two types of redirects: 301 permanent and 302 temporary. As the names imply, a 301 permanently redirects a page and a 302 temporarily redirects a page.
Why would you want to temporarily redirect a page, you ask? Well, you probably wouldn’t. Almost all redirects are 301s. And the thing is that if you later decide you no longer want to redirect a page, you can always go into your Squarespace settings and just delete the redirect. So there’s really no reason to mess around with 302 redirects.
To redirect a page, you’ll need to login to your Squarespace account, click on your website in the dashboard, and then go to Settings > Advanced > URL Mappings.
You’ll need the URL of the page you’re redirecting and the destination page. Format your redirect like this:
/your-page-url-here -> /destination-page-here 301
You don’t need to include your top-level domain. In the example above, the full URL would be http://yourwebsite.com/your-page-url-here. You only need to include that last part with a slash in front of it. You can add one redirect per line.
Here’s what my URL Mappings panel looks like for reference:
Have any questions, comments, or want to request a specific Squarespace tutorial? Leave a comment below!
