How to Add a Footer Navigation to Your Squarespace Website
If you currently have a website on Squarespace or plan on creating one soon, an important consideration for your new online home should be creating a footer navigation for it.
I know this probably isn’t the first and most important thing that comes to mind on your checklist of things to do for your new website, but hear me out – as a Squarespace website designer, I have found footer navigations to be a great feature you can place on a website!
Benefits of footer navigation
Don’t just take my word for it, though – today, I’m going to cover the top benefits of having a footer navigation on your website.
Easy access
First, having a great footer navigation prevents users from having to scroll all the way back up to the top of your website when they need to visit a new page.
This can save them major amounts of time if you have especially long pages (such as a long home page or services page) – and they will appreciate it!
Decrease bounce rate
In addition, once someone reaches the bottom of a page, if nothing else catches their eye, they will likely navigate away from your site (hurting your SEO ranking and bounce rate.)
Having an intriguing footer navigation menu provides visitors with several more options for exploration on your site – keeping them longer.
Best Practices
If you’ve decided to implement a footer navigation menu on your Squarespace website, here some best practices to keep in mind to help you get the most out of it.
Repeat all page links or include “leftover” pages excluded from top navigation
First, you should only be putting your most important pages in your top navigation.
These might be things like home, about, shop, contact, etc.
Other pages (such as privacy policy, social links, etc…) can easily be placed in the footer navigation to help keep your site more organized, but still provide all the links users may need in a menu that doesn’t clutter your header.
However, in your footer navigation you can repeat all pages in the top navigation plus your “leftover” pages that didn’t make the cut.
This is also a place to include “home,” which I typically don’t recommend putting in the top navigation since clicking the logo will take you back to the homepage.
Here’s an example of a footer navigation:
Categorize pages if possible
Speaking of clutter, a super easy way to minimize the amount of tabs you need in your footer is to group similar pages under certain heading topics.
For example, the footer pages for all your different course options could be organized under one header in your footer navigation called “Courses.”
This helps with organization, too.
Always include legal policies
Lastly, make sure you include the pages you absolutely need on your website in your footer!
Pages that protect your site legally are some of the most important here – and they could include your terms of service, privacy policy, cookies policy, and any disclaimers you may need to advertise.
Here’s an example with all the elements mentioned above:
Ensuring these pages are easily accessible by your audience is one of the best things you can do to avoid potential legal issues!
How to add a footer navigation
If you’re ready to add a footer navigation to your Squarespace website but aren’t sure where to start, don’t worry! I’m going to take you along through the steps so you can confidently implement a valuable footer menu on your own website.
There are a couple different ways to do this.
If you’re just adding “leftover” pages…
You can simply click and drag the specific pages into the “footer navigation” section in the backend under “Pages.”
Please note: this is just for certain templates on Squarespace 7.0 (learn the difference between 7.1 and 7.0)
You want to follow the directions here for how to edit so it matches your top navigation.
The footer navigation will automatically use the default settings from the 7.0 templates, so it’s important that you adjust the settings to match your branding. I recommend implementing the same settings from the top navigation.
If you’re adding the full navigation…
1. Click edit and edit footer
2. Use the insert point to add a text box
3. Manually type out the pages with spaces between them
4. Link each piece of text to its actual page
5. Click save on the link popup, and click save on the page
There you have it! That’s how you can add a footer navigation to your website.
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