The Squarespace Bedford Template: What to Do With It in 2026
Bedford is a Squarespace version 7.0 template family with four members, and it is still available and still supported. Its distinguishing feature is the one that makes migration awkward: Bedford is one of the few version 7.0 families with both a content sidebar and a navigation sidebar, and Squarespace 7.1 has no sidebar at all. Everything else about the Bedford template transfers reasonably well. The sidebar is the decision.
Should you stay on the Bedford template, restyle it, or move?
What the Squarespace Bedford template is
Bedford is a family, not a single template. Squarespace's Bedford family guide lists four members: Anya, Bedford, Bryant and Hayden. All four run the same code and report the same template ID — we read 52a74dafe4b073a80cd253c5 off the page source of all four Squarespace demo sites in August 2026, alongside "templateVersion":"7".
That last point catches people. Hayden shares Bedford's template ID, so a detector tool will tell a Hayden site it is "Bedford" and be correct — the identifier names the family, not the member. The same is true of Anya and Bryant.
What separates the four is demo content and default styling, nothing else. Squarespace's own demos make the intended range obvious: Bedford's demo is an advocacy organisation (What We Do, Projects, Partners, Take Action, News), Hayden's is a small agency (About, Blog, Hire Us), Anya's is a wedding site (Location, RSVP, Gifts) and Bryant's is a property portfolio with a page per listing. Same template, four businesses.
Bedford sits in a version 7.0 landscape of 22 families and 121 templates, 32 of which are discontinued. None of the four Bedford templates is discontinued. The full list of Squarespace 7.0 templates has the complete inventory, and the Squarespace 7.0 template comparison chart shows how Bedford's feature set sits against the other 21 families — including Brine, the 47-template family that most 7.0 sites are actually on.
What the Bedford template did well, and who it suited
Bedford suited content-heavy organisations — nonprofits, schools, membership bodies, agencies with a real blog — where a visitor needs a way to move sideways through a lot of pages. Everything good about it follows from that.
Two kinds of sidebar. Bedford is one of only ten version 7.0 families with a content sidebar, and one of only five with a navigation sidebar. The navigation sidebar appears on store pages, on pages inside dropdowns, in member sites and inside indexes; on store pages it lists product categories so visitors can filter. Nothing in Squarespace 7.1 does this natively.
A blog built for reading. Bedford blog pages use the List layout: posts stacked vertically, each individual post showing its featured image as a banner. The five most recent featured posts automatically become a slideshow banner on the blog landing page, controlled from the Blog section of Site Styles.
Stacked index pages with a fixed header. A Bedford index turns several pages into stacked sections, and the site title and main navigation stay fixed once you scroll past the first section. Index sections support anchor links, and visiting a sub-page by its own URL gives you the sidebar navigation.
Banners on almost everything. Full-bleed image and video banners work on layout, album, blog, events and store pages, with slideshow banners on layout and blog pages. The overlay text formatting is a convention rather than a control panel: bold text renders as the heading, regular text as body, and a link on the final line renders as a button.
A navigation button. Bedford can promote the last item in the main navigation to a styled button, set in the Site navigation section — a small thing Brine, the far larger family, never had.
What feels dated about the Bedford template in 2026
No Fluid Engine, and no route to it. Version 7.0 editing is the classic block editor: blocks snap to a 12-column grid, you cannot overlap elements without CSS, and there is no drag-anywhere canvas. Fluid Engine is 7.1-only and is not coming to Bedford.
One layout, inherited by mobile. Bedford has no separately editable mobile layout. Below the breakpoint, content stacks in source order and taglines do not display in the header at all. Squarespace 7.1 with Fluid Engine maintains a genuinely separate mobile layout per section at a 767px breakpoint. On Bedford, "fix it on mobile" usually means writing a media query.
The navigation collapses without warning. This is Bedford's most-reported quirk and it is by design: if the main navigation has too many items to fit the maximum header width, Bedford switches to a hamburger menu on desktop. As one Squarespace Forum answer puts it, "if too many items, causing the nav to exceed the maximum width, the burger menu will appear." The fix is fewer top-level items or shorter labels, not CSS.
A Classic store. Bedford supports Classic store pages only, which means no Advanced product merchandising. Squarespace 7.1 commerce is substantially further ahead.
The sidebar is all-or-nothing per context. You can hide it — Site styles → Sidebar → Hide Blog Sidebar removes it from every blog page — but you cannot vary it page by page without code.
Bug fixes are not coming. Squarespace's stated position on version 7.0 is that "fixing bugs or issues is a lower priority for us while we focus on version 7.1." Bedford is supported. It is not being improved.
The status of the Bedford template in 2026
All four Bedford templates are available, installable on an existing version 7.0 site through Design → Template → Install new template. None of them is on Squarespace's list of 32 discontinued version 7.0 templates.
You cannot start a new site on Bedford. The live template gallery at squarespace.com/templates returned 198 templates in August 2026, every one of them version 7.1. Bedford, Hayden, Anya and Bryant are all absent from it, and the old squarespace.com/templates/bedford-demo URL now serves that generic gallery — which is why links to a "Bedford demo" in older articles take you somewhere unrecognisable. Squarespace's actual demo site, bedford-demo.squarespace.com, is still up.
There is no announced end-of-life for version 7.0, and updating is officially optional. Squarespace 5, released in 2008, is still online and supported, which is the best available guide to how long "supported but not developed" runs at this company.
The uninstall warning does not apply to Bedford, because none of its four templates is discontinued — but it is worth knowing the rule before you experiment: uninstalling a discontinued template is permanent, and it cannot be reinstalled. Four version 7.0 templates (Encore, Lincoln, Bryler and Taylor) cannot be switched to at all. Whether old Squarespace templates are still supported covers the support position properly.
Moving a Bedford site to Squarespace 7.1
The update tool is at Design → Update to Version 7.1. Three facts 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, and it leaves your Custom CSS commented out, which you re-enable by removing the comment tags in the CSS editor and saving. Selectors written against Bedford's class names will mostly not match 7.1 markup, so budget for a rewrite rather than an uncomment.
What happens to the Bedford-specific parts:
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 Site Styles panels you care about. Then decide whether the tool is doing the job or whether a clean 7.1 build is less work than repairing its output.
And the one that costs money later: changing a page slug on Squarespace creates no automatic 301 redirect, ever. If a URL changes during the move, you write the redirect yourself.
The screen-by-screen version is in the Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1 guide. If you are switching between version 7.0 templates rather than versions, how to change a Squarespace template is the one to read. And if it turns out you are not on Bedford at all — the other common answer is Brine — the Squarespace Brine template guide is the hub for that decision.
Replacing Bedford's sidebar in Squarespace 7.1
There is no native sidebar in Squarespace 7.1, so this is a design problem rather than a settings problem. The three honest options:
Drop it. On most Bedford sites the blog sidebar carries a category list, an about blurb and a search box. Categories can go in a horizontal filter row above the post list, the blurb into the footer, and search into the header. This is what we do most often, and readers do not miss it.
Rebuild it as a two-column section. Fluid Engine lets you place a narrow column beside your content on regular pages. It works well for landing pages and not at all for blog list and post templates, which in 7.1 are chosen from fixed presets rather than built section by section.
Code it. A sidebar can be reconstructed with Custom CSS and a code block, but it is a maintained custom component — it breaks when Squarespace changes blog markup, and it needs testing at the 767px breakpoint every time.
Choose option 1 unless the sidebar is genuinely doing navigational work. If it is — a member site, a knowledge base, a large product catalogue relying on category filtering — that is the case where a Bedford site is better rebuilt than converted.
So: stay, restyle, or move?
Stay if the Bedford site does its job and nothing on your list needs 7.1. It is not a liability, and the update tool is not going anywhere.
Restyle if the objection is how it looks. Fonts, colours, banner treatment and blog styling are all Site Styles values, and switching between Bedford, Hayden, Anya and Bryant unlocks nothing — they are one template in four paint jobs.
Move if you need Fluid Engine, courses, video pages, modern commerce, or genuinely separate mobile layouts — and move deliberately rather than through the tool alone if you are index-heavy, CSS-heavy, or leaning on the sidebar.
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 the minority case now, but a working Bedford site is not an emergency.
The Bedford sites we are actually asked to help with are the ones where the sidebar was doing navigational work and the archive is large — a nonprofit with 400 posts, a school with a deep page tree. Rebuilding those in 7.1 from a premium Squarespace template is usually less work than repairing what the update tool produces, because the structure has to change anyway. If your Bedford site is a straightforward brochure with a blog, the tool plus an afternoon of tidying will do it, and you should not pay anyone.
FAQ
-
Yes. All four Bedford family templates — Anya, Bedford, Bryant and Hayden — can still be installed on an existing version 7.0 site via Design → Template → Install new template. None is discontinued. You cannot start a new site on Bedford; the live template gallery returns 198 templates, all version 7.1.
-
Four: Anya, Bedford, Bryant and Hayden. All four share the template ID 52a74dafe4b073a80cd253c5 and run identical code. They differ only in default fonts, colours and demo content, so any Bedford tutorial or CSS snippet works on all four.
-
Functionally, yes. Hayden is a member of the Bedford family and reports the same template ID, because that identifier names the family rather than the individual template. A detector tool that reports "Bedford" for a Hayden site is correct, not broken.
-
Open the Site styles panel, scroll to Sidebar, and check Hide Blog Sidebar. That removes it from every blog page on the site. Bedford does not offer per-page control over the sidebar without custom code.
-
Because the navigation has more items than fit the maximum header width. Bedford switches to a hamburger menu automatically when that happens. The fix is fewer top-level navigation items or shorter labels, not CSS.
-
No. Squarespace 7.1 has no native sidebar, and the update tool documents that sidebar navigation is unsupported. The practical options are to move the sidebar content into a filter row, the footer or the header, or to rebuild it as a custom component in Custom CSS.
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.
