Rally Template Squarespace: Features, Limits and Upgrades
Rally is a Squarespace version 7.0 template, and it is a member of the Brine family. That one fact answers most Rally questions. Rally shares its code, its features, its Site Styles options, its class names and its template ID with 46 other templates, so every Brine tutorial applies to a Rally site unchanged — and switching from Rally to another Brine member unlocks nothing at all. Rally is still available, still supported, and has no announced end-of-life.
Should you stay on Rally, restyle it, or move to 7.1?
Rally is a Brine template
Squarespace lists Rally in the Brine family guide alongside 46 others. We confirmed it directly in August 2026: rally-demo.squarespace.com and brine-demo.squarespace.com both report "templateVersion":"7" and the identical template ID 55f0aac0e4b0f0a5b7e0b22e.
Three practical consequences, and they are the reason most people are searching:
Search for "Brine", not "Rally". A search for brine header CSS returns far more usable results than rally header CSS, and the code is the same code. The class names — .Header-branding, .Index-page, .Intro and the rest — are family-level.
A detector tool will call your site "Brine". It is not wrong. templateId identifies the family, not the member, so nothing in the page source distinguishes Rally from Hyde, Mojave or Wav.
Switching within the family is cosmetic. Installing a different Brine template gives you new default fonts, colours, header layout defaults and demo images. Every one of those is a Site Styles value you already control.
The complete Brine family roster of all 47 templates is worth a look if you are trying to work out whether a name you have seen is in the family, and the Squarespace Brine template guide covers the stay-or-move decision for the family as a whole.
What the squarespace rally template does well, and who it suited
Squarespace's own description of Rally is a fair summary of its intent: "Rally empowers your content, streamlining a lot of imagery and text in an alluring way. Its long, scrolling homepage engages visitors by letting you weave various blog post collections with full-bleed banner images."
The live demo bears that out. rally-demo.squarespace.com is a publication: a long scrolling homepage, a blog, a subscribe page, a contact page and site search. Rally suited content publishers, editorial sites, campaigns and personal brands with a lot to say and photography to say it with.
Everything it does well, it does as a Brine template:
Stacked index pages. The long scrolling Rally homepage is an index — layout pages and gallery pages stacked into one page, each section with its own background image and overlay colour. Minimum section heights are set at Site styles → Index: page → Apply minimum height; gallery section layout at Index: gallery.
The intro area. A block-editable region sitting over the banner image, so text blocks, buttons, forms and embeds go directly onto a full-bleed photograph, per page. Squarespace describes it as "a page-specific header area that you can edit with text, images, and other content." No version 7.0 family outside Brine has it. It is not available on layout pages without banners, or on index pages themselves.
The two-part header. Rally splits the header into a top header and a bottom header, with elements — branding, primary navigation, secondary navigation, cart, search, social icons — placed into either. Positions live under Site styles → Header: layout, padding under Header: top and Header: bottom.
Site-wide parallax. Enabled at Site styles → Main: overlay → Enable parallax, with Parallax smart crop in the same section to stop images cropping badly. Brine and the discontinued Marquee family are the only two version 7.0 families with it, and it is site-wide — every banner gets the effect, with no per-page control.
Three navigation menus and an Advanced store. Primary, secondary and footer navigation, plus Advanced store pages if you sell.
What breaks or feels dated on a Rally site in 2026
No Fluid Engine. Version 7.0 editing is the classic block editor — blocks snap to a 12-column grid, elements cannot overlap without CSS, and there is no drag-anywhere canvas. Fluid Engine is 7.1-only and will not come to Rally.
Mobile is one inherited layout. Rally's mobile breakpoint defaults to 640px, adjustable at Site styles → Mobile → Mobile breakpoint. Below it, content stacks in source order, and social icons and taglines stop displaying. Squarespace 7.1 with Fluid Engine keeps a genuinely separate mobile layout per section at a 767px breakpoint. On Rally, "fix it on mobile" usually means a media query.
No header button. Rally, like every Brine template, never shipped a header call-to-action button. The documented workarounds are to put a single link in the secondary navigation and style that menu as a button, or add a button block to the intro area page by page.
No sidebar, and no way to add one. Squarespace's guidance is explicit: "Sidebars aren't supported for Brine. Instead, add extra content to the footer, intro area, and layout pages." The markup is not there, so no CSS produces a real one.
Missing blog features that are now standard: no related posts, no infinite scroll, no author profile block. Blog comments are also off site-wide by default even when enabled on a post — they are switched on at Blog preferences → Comments settings → Enable comments globally.
Features are not portable between version 7.0 templates. A Squarespace forum answer to a Rally user asking for another template's gallery behaviour put it exactly right: the two templates "work entirely differently and so you can't lift a feature from one easily and use it in the other." In version 7.0 the template is the feature set.
Rally bugs Squarespace documents and is not going to fix
Squarespace maintains a Troubleshooting Brine article. Because Rally is Brine, every item applies to Rally. The ones we are asked about most:
Banners are also unsupported on individual blog post, product and event detail pages, and on cover pages — by design, not a fault in your setup, and a recurring source of confusion on index-led Rally homepages.
Squarespace's own framing: "fixing bugs or issues is a lower priority for us while we focus on version 7.1." Rally is supported. It is not being improved.
Is the Rally template still available?
Yes, on an existing version 7.0 site. Rally is not discontinued and can be installed from Design → Template → Install new template. Two of the 47 Brine templates are discontinued — Lincoln and Custom Template — and Rally is not one of them.
You cannot start a new site on Rally. The live template gallery at squarespace.com/templates returned 198 templates in August 2026, every one of them version 7.1. Rally, Brine, Bedford and the rest of version 7.0 are absent, and the old squarespace.com/templates/rally-demo URL now serves that generic gallery — which is why links to a "Rally demo" in older posts land somewhere unrecognisable. Squarespace's demo site, rally-demo.squarespace.com, is still up.
Version 7.0 has no announced end-of-life, and updating is officially optional. Squarespace 5, released in 2008, is still online and supported.
One rule worth knowing even though it does not apply to Rally directly: uninstalling a discontinued template is permanent — it cannot be reinstalled. Encore, Lincoln, Bryler and Taylor cannot be switched to at all, though you can switch away from them. Whether old Squarespace templates are still supported covers the support position in full.
Moving a Rally site to Squarespace 7.1
The tool is at Design → Update to Version 7.1. Before you touch it:
It is permanent. Squarespace states: "you can't revert to version 7.0."
It is capped at 150 pages and errors above 200 products on a store page.
Custom CSS survives commented out. Remove the comment tags in the CSS editor and save. Selectors written for Brine class names will mostly not match 7.1 markup, so expect to rewrite.
What happens to the parts a Rally site is built from:
Audit before you press the button. Count the pages and the products on your largest store page. List every index, album and cover page. Export the Custom CSS to a text file. Screenshot the Header: layout settings, because the arrangement is not recoverable from the converted site.
And the expensive one: changing a page slug on Squarespace creates no automatic 301 redirect, ever. Rally sites are usually index-led, and index sub-pages have real URLs — if the move changes them, you write the redirects.
The screen-by-screen version is in the Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1 guide, and reproducing Brine's capabilities in 7.1 works through the intro area, the two-part header and the parallax replacement one at a time. For how Rally's family compares with the other 21, the Squarespace 7.0 template comparison chart has it.
So: stay on Rally, or move?
Stay if the Rally site does its job, the content is stable, and nothing on your list requires 7.1. It is not a liability.
Restyle if the objection is aesthetic — fonts, colours, header layout, banner treatment and spacing are all Site Styles values. Do not switch to another Brine template expecting anything to change; it will not.
Move if you need Fluid Engine, courses, video pages, a store past 200 products, or separately editable mobile layouts. Move deliberately rather than through the tool alone if your homepage is a large index, your Custom CSS is extensive, or you rely on album and cover pages.
For scale: across 54 Squareko-built client sites measured in August 2026 (Playwright/Chromium lab test, cloud datacenter, unthrottled, single run per site), 53 of 54 run Squarespace 7.1. Version 7.0 is now the minority case, but a working Rally site is not an emergency.
Most Rally sites we are sent do not need a rebuild — they need an afternoon in Site Styles and a written decision to stay. The exception is the Rally site whose entire homepage is a deep index with years of Custom CSS layered over it: there, the update tool leaves you repairing a structure that has to be rebuilt anyway, and starting from a premium Squarespace template built for 7.1 and Fluid Engine is usually the shorter path. The table at the top of this page settles it for most people without spending anything.
FAQ
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Yes. Rally is one of the 47 templates in the Squarespace Brine family and reports the same template ID, 55f0aac0e4b0f0a5b7e0b22e. It shares its code, features, Site Styles options and class names with every other Brine template, so any Brine tutorial or CSS snippet works on a Rally site unchanged.
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Yes, on an existing version 7.0 site, via Design → Template → Install new template. Rally is not discontinued. You cannot start a new site on Rally — the live template gallery returns 198 templates and all of them are version 7.1.
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Version 7.0. A Rally site reports "templateVersion":"7" in its page source — not "7.0", which is what trips people up when they check. It also reports the Brine family template ID rather than anything identifying Rally specifically.
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Yes. Rally inherits it from Brine, and Brine and the discontinued Marquee family are the only two version 7.0 families with parallax. Enable it at Site styles → Main: overlay → Enable parallax. It applies site-wide to every banner, with no per-page control.
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Rally has no dedicated header button. The two documented workarounds are to leave a single link in the secondary navigation and style that menu as a button, or to add a button block to the intro area on a page-by-page basis.
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Default fonts, colours, header layout defaults and demo content. Nothing else. Rally and Brine run identical code, so switching between them unlocks no features — every difference is a Site Styles value you can change yourself in minutes.
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.
