Squarespace Five Template: Sidebars, Limits and the 7.1 Path
The Squarespace Five template is a version 7.0 template, and it is not Squarespace 5. Squarespace 5 is the separate 2008 platform, still online and still in use. Five is a flexible business template that heads its own single-member version 7.0 family, and its defining feature is two block-editable sidebars. Five is still installable, has no announced end-of-life, and is one of the more straightforward 7.0 templates to move to 7.1.
Should you stay on Five, restyle it, or move to 7.1?
Five, Squarespace 5, and "five templates" are three different things
This is the reason most searches for the Squarespace Five template land on the wrong page.
Squarespace 5 is a platform, launched in 2008. Squarespace's own versions explainer is blunt about it: "As of today, there are three Squarespace platforms in use: Squarespace version 7.1, Squarespace version 7.0, and Squarespace version 5." Version 7.0 arrived in 2014 and version 7.1 in 2020. The quickest identifier Squarespace gives: "If you can log into your site with your Squarespace account name, you're using version 5."
The Five template is a template inside version 7.0. A Five site reports "templateVersion":"7" in its page source — not "5", and not "7.0", which is what trips people up when they check.
"Five templates" is a roundup phrase. The Squarespace Newsroom post that frequently outranks everything else for this keyword announces five magazine-style templates — Haute, Farro, Tudor, Skye and Foundry — and has nothing to do with the Five template at all.
If you are on Squarespace 5 rather than the Five template, none of the rest of this page applies to you; version 5 has no template families, no site styles panel and no 7.1 update tool.
The Squarespace Five template is a family of one
Version 7.0 organises its 121 templates into 22 families that share code, features and a template ID. Five is one of those 22 families, and Five is its only member.
We confirmed it directly in August 2026: five-demo.squarespace.com reports "templateVersion":"7" and template ID 503ba86de4b04953d0f49846, an ID no other template returns.
Two practical consequences:
There is no lateral move. On Brine you can install any of 46 siblings and keep every feature. On Five, every switch is a switch to a different feature set — different index behaviour, different gallery type, different sidebar rules. The list of Squarespace 7.0 templates shows what your alternatives actually are.
Search for "Five", not the family. Family-level searching is what makes Brine tutorials easy to find. With Five you are searching for one template, which is part of why the results are thin.
Five also sits outside Squarespace's non-English template list. Only the Montauk, Pacific, Bedford, Brine and York families support other site languages, so a non-English site cannot switch to Five without changing its site language to English first.
What the Squarespace Five template does well
Squarespace describes Five as "a flexible business template with a wide variety of options for styling your site," whose special features are "a versatile header layout and two customizable sidebars." The demo bears that out — five-demo.squarespace.com is a small inn, with room pages, testimonials, a reservations page and a blog.
Two real sidebars, on any page type. This is the thing Five has that almost nothing else on Squarespace has. Open page settings → Advanced → Page layout and choose One sidebar, Split sidebars (one each side), Two sidebars (both on one side) or Full width. Sidebars are edited with blocks, styled in the Sidebar section of site styles, and the content is shared site-wide.
Banners in two layers. Five has page banners, set with a featured image or video URL in page settings, and a site-wide banner set with Header background image under Header. The site-wide banner displays on any page without its own. Page banners support video; the site-wide banner does not. Page thumbnail as banner under Header must stay checked or only the site-wide banner shows.
A genuinely configurable header. You choose where navigation links, branding, tagline and built-in social icons sit, using Top navigation alignment and Top navigation position under Navigation, plus Banner content under Header to decide whether branding or the page title overlays the banner.
Blog density control. Blog list display under Blog offers Full, Header and footer only and Header only — a genuinely useful control that most version 7.0 templates lack.
Full-width or contained canvas. Canvas setting under Site wide switches the content area between browser width and Site width.
What breaks or feels dated on a Five site in 2026
No Fluid Engine. Version 7.0 editing is the classic block editor: blocks snap to a 12-column grid, nothing overlaps without CSS, and there is no drag-anywhere canvas. Fluid Engine is 7.1-only and will not come to Five.
No index pages at all. Five supports album, blog (List), cover, events, gallery (Standard), layout and store (Classic) pages — and no index page. The long stacked scrolling homepage that defines Brine and Pacific is not something a Five site can build natively. You build it with sections of blocks on a layout page instead, which is more work and less consistent.
Sidebars behave badly on small screens. Squarespace documents two thresholds: "If the browser narrower than 1152 pixels, sidebar 2 stacks below sidebar 1", and "On mobile devices, sidebars stack below the page content." On a phone, everything you put in a Five sidebar lands at the very bottom of every page. If your sidebar holds navigation, contact details or a form, mobile visitors reach it last. Squarespace 7.1 with Fluid Engine instead keeps a separately editable mobile layout per section at a 767px breakpoint.
Sidebar content leaks. Squarespace states plainly that "sidebar content populates in search results, even if the sidebars are hidden" and that "sidebar 1 content displays on the checkout page." Both surprise people who thought hiding a sidebar removed it.
Gallery pages are Standard only. No slideshow gallery page type, no lightbox behaviour beyond what a gallery block gives you.
Page descriptions vanish on phones. Squarespace notes page descriptions "don't display on smartphones" — so banner copy written as a page description is desktop-only.
Five bugs Squarespace documents and is not going to fix
Squarespace maintains a Troubleshooting Five section, prefaced with its actual position on version 7.0: "Although we still support Squarespace version 7.0, fixing bugs or issues is a lower priority for us while we focus on our current platform, version 7.1."
None of these is a fault in your setup. All of them are Five behaving as documented.
Is the Squarespace Five template still available?
Yes, on an existing version 7.0 site. Five is not on Squarespace's discontinued list, and it can be installed from Design → Template → Install new template.
You cannot start a new site on Five. The live gallery at squarespace.com/templates returned 198 templates in August 2026, every one of them version 7.1 — we counted them. Five, Brine, Montauk and the rest of version 7.0 are absent, and the old squarespace.com/templates/five-demo URL now serves that generic gallery, which is why older links to a "Five demo" land somewhere unrecognisable. Squarespace's demo, five-demo.squarespace.com, is still up.
Version 7.0 has no announced end-of-life, and Squarespace's own guide says the move is optional: "Updating your site from version 7.0 to 7.1 is optional." Squarespace 5, from 2008, is still running.
One rule worth knowing even though Five is not affected: uninstalling a discontinued template is permanent. 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 Squarespace Five site to version 7.1
The tool is at Design → Update to Version 7.1. Before you touch it:
It is permanent. Squarespace: "After you click Publish update, your site will update to version 7.1 permanently."
It caps at 150 pages and errors above 200 products on a store page.
Developer mode must be off, and any Developer Platform code disappears when you disable it.
Custom CSS survives commented out. Remove the comment tags in the CSS editor and save. Selectors written against Five's class names will mostly not match 7.1 markup.
What happens to the parts a Five site is built from:
Five migrates more cleanly than most version 7.0 templates for one reason: no index pages. Index sub-pages are where the update tool does its worst damage, losing per-page SEO titles and descriptions. A Five site has none, so its URLs mostly survive intact.
Still audit before you press the button. Count pages and products. List every album and cover page. Export the Custom CSS. Screenshot the Sidebar, Header and Navigation tweaks, and inventory what actually lives in your two sidebars, because that content is the part you will be rebuilding by hand.
And the expensive one: changing a page slug on Squarespace creates no automatic 301 redirect, ever. Any URL you change during the rebuild, you redirect yourself.
The screen-by-screen version is in the Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1 guide, and the Squarespace 7.0 template comparison chart shows how Five's feature set compares with the other 21 families. The Squarespace Brine template guide covers the same stay-or-move decision for the largest 7.0 family.
So: stay on Five, or move?
Stay if the Five site does its job and nothing on your roadmap needs 7.1. It is not a liability, and Five's tweak set is broad enough that a lot of "this looks old" complaints are solved in site styles in an afternoon.
Move if you need Fluid Engine, course or video pages, a store beyond 200 products per page, or a mobile layout you can edit independently. Move deliberately, not just by pressing the button, if your two sidebars carry real content — that is the one part of a Five site with no 7.1 counterpart, and pretending otherwise is how migrations end up half-finished.
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 Five site is not an emergency.
Most Five sites we are sent migrate fine through the tool, because the absence of index pages removes the usual mess. The exception is the Five site whose sidebars are the navigation and the calls to action: there the tool leaves you with an unstructured pile at the bottom of every page, 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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No. Squarespace 5 is a separate platform launched in 2008 and still in use. The Five template is a template inside version 7.0, which launched in 2014. A Five site reports "templateVersion":"7" in its page source. If you log in with a Squarespace account name rather than an email address, you are on version 5.
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Its own. Five is one of version 7.0's 22 template families and its only member, reporting template ID 503ba86de4b04953d0f49846. There are no sibling templates, so unlike Brine or York there is no lateral switch that keeps your features and only changes the styling.
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No. Five supports album, blog, cover, events, gallery, layout and store pages, but not index pages. Long stacked scrolling homepages have to be built as blocks on a layout page instead. The upside is that Five sites avoid the biggest source of damage during a 7.1 migration.
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Open page settings, click the Advanced tab, and set Page layout to Full width. That hides both sidebars on that page only — there is no site-wide switch, so you repeat it per page. Sidebar 1 content still appears on the checkout page and in site search results.
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Nothing carries over. Squarespace 7.1 has no sidebar layout on any page type, and sidebar navigation is listed as unsupported. You rebuild the content as page sections, or as linked text in a text block. Inventory both sidebars before you run the update tool.
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Yes, on an existing version 7.0 site, via Design → Template → Install new template. Five is not discontinued. You cannot start a new site on it — the live template gallery returned 198 templates in August 2026 and all of them are version 7.1.
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.
