Hidden Pages to Include on Your Squarespace Website
Your website should include the typical - and some necessary - pages for visitors to peruse, like a home page (duh!), services, about, contact, et al.
And there are also a handful of other live, crawl-able pages that help search engines decide how valuable your entire website is, but don’t necessarily need to hog valuable real estate in your main navigation menu. Heads up: this is not legal advice, just tips for maximizing opportunities to be helpful to your audience and customers.
Consider creating these ‘hidden’ pages listed below to enhance SEO and better serve your audience:
1. FAQ page
An FAQ page could definitely be included in your main navigation, especially if you are selling physical or digital services. Just about any website can benefit from at least a handful of FAQs - surely you get questions about whatever it is you’re offering? Get ahead of the eight-ball and answer your most commonly asked questions right on the website, linking out to topics already covered. Add a contact form for specific inquires not already on the site. And pack those Q&As with keywords that you’re trying to rank for.
Check out Girlington Garage’s FAQ. Yes it deserves to be in the main navigation because they get TONS of the same questions asked over and over, so its helpful to reduce phone calls while the shop is in full swing.
2. Terms & Conditions or Privacy Policy page
This is not only recommended - its basically required these days. You want to give your site visitors confidence that the information you collect isn’t being sold or shared, or used for nefarious reasons. Nevermind complying with global GDPR rules - especially if you’re selling goods to the EU. Its all but expected if you are accepting payments for goods or services online anywhere on the planet. A Privacy Policy link can be located in the footer of your website, and should define who you are as a business, what you do with any information you collect from visitors as they browse your website, sign up for something, or buy something from your website.
Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy can be one and the same document/page.
Here’s an actionable How To Write a Privacy Policy on Mailchimp’s website.
3. 404 Error page becomes opportunity
All CMS websites (Squarespace, Wordpress, et al) have a default 404 ‘Page Not Found’ template right out of the box. If you’re using Squarespace, you have an easy opportunity to customize it and keep your site visitors engaged while also helping them find what they’re looking for.
A 404 page might display for site visitors that had a typo in a link they followed (from within your site?! - better fix that), simple typing mistakes, or maybe an old bookmarked page that no longer exists. Capitalize on any of the above by customizing and branding your 404 page with a quick menu of popular pages, and brief FAQ, search field, contact form, calls-to-action for your home page, store, etc.
You could make your very brief ‘oops, error page’ copy humorous, or at least interesting to the lost soul that ended up in your website’s abyss.
For inspiration, go to websites in your industry and find their 404 page to see what‘s good, boring, or useful for your audience. Then tweak and customize the message for your own site.
Here’s how:
Enter a website’s url into your browser, then enter a slash, then some gobbledegook, enter. Such as:
Here’s the Deep Dish Creative 404 page: deepdishcreative.com/ksjhfj
How to Customize Squarespace 404 pages
Already on Squarespace? How to create your custom 404 page:
Create a 404 page in the “Not Linked” section of your Squarespace site Pages menu
After you’ve created the page to be used as your 404 page, navigate to Pages → Utilities/System Pages → 404
Select the custom 404 page you just created from the dropdown list
Tah Dah!! You now have a custom 404 page that will be so much more helpful than the default.
I used Midjourney to create that image.
