Changing Templates in Squarespace: What Happens to Your Content
Content survives; presentation does not. Changing templates in Squarespace 7.0 moves every page, blog post, product, event, gallery image and block into the new template untouched, along with your page settings, URLs, SEO titles, logo and code injection. What resets is the layer on top: site styles, Custom CSS, sidebars, footers, per-page headers, banner images, background images and navigation order. Two page types — the info page and the project page — are the only real exceptions.
This applies to Squarespace 7.0, and sits under the complete guide to changing your Squarespace template. On Squarespace 7.1 there is nothing to change: every 7.1 site belongs to the same template family, so template switching does not exist and no content question arises.
What happens to each content type
The organising principle behind that table is worth stating plainly, because it predicts the answer for anything not listed: content is stored against the site, presentation is stored against the template. Squarespace calls the second group "template-specific". Anything template-specific lives on the template you set it on and is waiting there if you switch back.
Blog posts, categories and URLs
Blog posts are site-level. Every post, its body content, its categories, its tags, its author, its publish date and its URL move across unchanged. Comments move with them.
What changes is the blog list design — the layout of the summary page, whether excerpts show, how featured images crop. Each template family renders blog collections differently and exposes different style tweaks for them, so expect to redesign the listing page even though every post is intact.
Two details worth checking after a switch:
Featured image cropping. Templates use different aspect ratios for blog thumbnails, and Squarespace crops from the image's focal point. Images that looked right in one template can crop badly in another. Reset focal points where it matters.
Blog post URLs are unaffected by the template, but they are affected by the blog page's slug. The blog post URL is /blog-page-slug/post-slug. If you rename the blog page during a redesign, every post URL changes and Squarespace creates no automatic redirect, ever. Add one line at Developer tools → URL mappings using the collection variable: /blog/[name] -> /posts/[name] 301.
Products, orders and store pages
Products, product images, variants, inventory, orders, customer data and subscriptions are all site-level and survive a Squarespace template change without intervention. Checkout is not template-driven.
What resets is the store page's presentation: grid columns, image aspect ratio, product title placement, add-to-cart button styling. These are site-styles values, so they are gone with the rest of your styling.
One trap: product URLs on version 7.1 include /p/ before the product slug, and on 7.0 they do not. That difference only matters if a version update is in your plans — the redirect form is /store/p/[name] -> /buy/p/[name] 301. A straight 7.0 template switch does not change product URLs.
Galleries: images stay, design resets
This is the content type people most often assume they will lose, and the answer splits in two.
Gallery images carry over. They are site-level content. Nothing is deleted.
The gallery page's design does not. Gallery pages are a template feature, and families implement them differently — slideshow, grid, stacked, carousel, with different style controls behind each. After switching you re-choose the layout and re-set the options.
There is a second consideration specific to switching away from the York family: project pages convert to gallery pages. The images survive the conversion, but the project page's structure does not, and switching back to York does not convert them back. You rebuild the project page and move the images into it.
If gallery-page behaviour is the reason you are switching at all, a gallery block on an ordinary layout page is often the better answer — gallery blocks work on every template, so you stop being hostage to which family you are on.
Custom CSS, code blocks and code injection behave differently
Three kinds of code, three different outcomes, and conflating them causes most of the panic.
Custom CSS is template-specific. Install a new template and the CSS Editor is blank. Your stylesheet is not deleted — it is still attached to the old template and returns if you set that template live again — but you cannot read it while another template is live. Copy the panel into a text file before installing anything. Expect to rewrite selectors rather than paste them: template families use different class names and different markup, so a rule written for Brine will often match nothing in Bedford.
Code injection is not template-specific. Site-wide header and footer injection, and per-page code injection, carry over untouched. That is convenient and occasionally dangerous — injected CSS or JavaScript that targeted the old template's markup keeps running against markup that no longer matches, producing dead rules at best and broken layouts at worst. Audit it after the switch.
Code blocks are page content, so they move with the page. What changes around them is the layout context — column widths, container max-widths, padding — so an embed that fitted the old template can overflow in the new one. Note that Squarespace disables script-bearing code blocks while you are logged in and editing, showing "This block contains embedded scripts. Embedded scripts are disabled while you're logged in and editing your site." That message is not a symptom of the template change; check code blocks logged out.
Forms, member areas and everything transactional
Forms carry over, including their fields and their storage connections. What resets is their appearance, since form field styling is a site-styles value. Re-test a submission after switching — not because the form breaks, but because a restyled field can end up invisible against a new background colour.
Member areas, courses, digital products and subscriptions are account-level and unaffected by the template. Their pages restyle like anything else.
Cover pages are the one place templates do not apply at all. Cover pages use layouts, and those layouts are available on every Squarespace 7.0 site regardless of which template is live. A cover page looks the same before and after a template change.
Navigation is where content and presentation blur
Your pages are content and they survive. The order they sit in, and whether they are in the Not Linked section, is template-specific and resets. So does the homepage setting.
That surprises people because it feels like structure rather than styling. Practically, it means: screenshot the Pages panel before you switch, including the Not Linked section, and rebuild the order afterwards.
The related irreversible case is the index page. If the new template does not support index pages, the index converts to a dropdown — and if you then switch to a third template that does support them, it stays a dropdown. Sub-pages the new template's index cannot handle remain listed in the Pages panel but stop appearing on the published site; rebuild that content on a layout page.
The nine things to do before changing templates in Squarespace
Copy the entire Custom CSS panel into a text file. It is template-specific and you will not be able to read it afterwards.
Record every hex code and font setting from site styles.
Screenshot the Pages panel, including Not Linked, so you can rebuild navigation order.
Note which pages use banner or background images, and which per-page headers exist.
Copy sidebar and footer content, including block order.
Export a list of page URLs so you can spot any that change and add 301s in URL mappings.
Check whether your current template is discontinued — if it is, never uninstall it, because it cannot be reinstalled.
Check index page support in the new template using the template comparison charts.
Set a non-info-page homepage if you are on the Aviator family, or the preview will fail with "We couldn't find the page you were looking for".
The irreversible items on that list are expanded in switching Squarespace templates: the full risk checklist, and the click-path itself is in how to switch templates on Squarespace safely.
What none of this covers
Everything above assumes a template switch within Squarespace 7.0. Two adjacent moves have different content rules and deserve their own preparation.
Moving from 7.0 to 7.1 is permanent, capped at 150 pages and 200 products per store page, drops album pages entirely, and strips SEO titles and descriptions from sub-pages inside index pages unless you move them out first. It keeps orders, customer data, members, domains and URL mappings intact.
Rebuilding on a new trial keeps nothing automatically. You re-enter content by hand, which is only the right call for small or long-neglected sites.
Content loss in a straightforward 7.0 template switch is close to zero if you never delete a page while previewing. The work is in the rebuild of the presentation layer, and the size of that job is set by how much custom styling the old template carried.
If that stylesheet is several hundred undocumented lines against Brine-family markup, rebuilding it against a different family is a real project rather than an afternoon — which is where our premium Squarespace templates and build service come in. For a site running mostly on site styles, the nine-item checklist above is genuinely all the preparation it needs.
FAQ
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No. Blog posts are site-level content and carry over intact, including body content, categories, tags, authors, publish dates, comments and URLs. What resets is the blog listing page's design, because each template family styles blog collections differently and exposes different style tweaks.
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No. Squarespace states the preview template is visible only to you while logged in, and visitors keep seeing the live template. Other contributors do not see your preview automatically either. Content changes are the exception — those go live immediately, preview or not.
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Click Cancel preview in the bottom bar. Your site returns to the live template and every change you made to the previewed template is saved against it, so you can pick the preview up again later without redoing the work.
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Open Design → Template, hover the old template and set it live. Its site styles, Custom CSS, sidebars, footers and navigation order return exactly as you left them. This only works if you never uninstalled it — uninstalling deletes those settings permanently.
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Set a different template live first, since the live template cannot be uninstalled. Then hover the template in Design → Template and click Uninstall, then Confirm. Check whether the template is discontinued first — discontinued templates cannot be reinstalled once removed.
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The previewed template has no homepage assigned. Open the Pages panel and set a homepage. This happens most often when the old homepage was an info page, which only exists in the Aviator family and will not display in any other template.
Author Bio
I'm Walid Hasan, a Certified Squarespace Expert and Squarespace Circle Platinum Partner with over 12 years of hands-on experience designing and optimizing high-performing websites. Over the years, I've had the privilege of building more than 2,000 Squarespace websites for clients around the world, always focusing on clean design, strong user experience, and conversion-driven results.
