Squarespace Marquee Template: The Whole Family Is Discontinued
Marquee is a Squarespace version 7.0 template, and every one of the seven templates in its family was discontinued in June 2017. Marquee, Adversary, Alex, Eamon, Ginger, Mint and Shift. Your site still works. But two things follow that no other 7.0 family faces at once: the version update tool will not run on a discontinued template, so you must switch away before you can move to 7.1 — and uninstalling Marquee is irreversible, so you must switch without uninstalling.
The one rule that matters most
Switch away from Marquee. Do not uninstall it.
Squarespace's own wording on discontinued templates: "Your site will stay online, and you can continue to use and edit the template as you've always been able to," and "you can switch to a different template, and switch back to the discontinued template as long as you don't uninstall it."
Installing a second template and setting it live is reversible. Clicking Uninstall on Marquee is not. Once a discontinued template is uninstalled from a site, it cannot be reinstalled — it is no longer offered anywhere in the template picker. That is the single most expensive mistake available to a Marquee owner, and it takes two clicks.
What Marquee owners should do, by situation
Who is in the Squarespace Marquee family
Squarespace's guide names seven and states the position plainly: "The Marquee template family (Marquee, Adversary, Alex, Eamon, Ginger, Mint, and Shift) has been discontinued."
We verified the shared codebase in August 2026:
All seven report "templateVersion":"7" and the template ID 515c7bd0e4b054dae3fcf003. Three of the seven demos now sit behind Squarespace's password lock screen, which is itself a signal — nobody is maintaining these demo sites. Note that the lock page still emits the template ID, so the family membership is confirmed even where the demo itself is not reachable.
We also compared the compiled stylesheets from the four reachable demos. Shift's is 3,342 distinct selectors long, and Adversary, Alex and Eamon have selector lists identical to it — zero differences. Between 144 and 201 declarations differ per template, every one a colour, a font stack or a spacing value. Marquee family templates are the same product with different paint, exactly like every other 7.0 family.
Practical consequence: search for "Marquee", not for your template name, and be sceptical of anything written for another family. A Squarespace Forum thread captures this exactly — a user followed a footer-banner tutorial and it did nothing, and the answer was "The guide you posted is for the Brine template of familes, Marquee is not a member, it is its own family" and "Squarespace 7.0 template families are very unique from each other and if code is specific for one template family it will not work for another." That is the correct diagnosis and it is worth internalising before you paste any CSS.
The list of Squarespace 7.0 templates covers all 121 templates across the 22 families.
What the Squarespace Marquee template was for, and what it did well
Squarespace launched Marquee on 12 July 2013, describing it as a way to "amplify the narrative of your website and give your visitors a memorable viewing experience through stunning, full-screen imagery." That is still an accurate description of who a Marquee site suits.
Parallax scrolling — and this is the headline. Squarespace's family guide: "The Marquee family's full-width banner images and videos set the tone for your pages' content. Parallax scrolling moves the banners more slowly than the rest of the page, creating an illusion of depth and immersion." Turn it on or off with the Parallax scrolling tweak. Parallax exists in exactly two version 7.0 families: Brine and Marquee. Nowhere else, and no CSS reproduces it properly.
A stacked index with navigation circles. Marquee index pages stack layout-page sections vertically into one scrolling page, and Squarespace notes that "Navigation circles and text appear on Index banners" — the dot navigation down the side of the page that dates a Marquee site instantly, and that a lot of people still like.
A fixed header. The site header "can stay fixed at the top as you scroll using the Fixed position tweak." Main navigation displays on the right and "in narrow browsers, collapses to a ☰ icon."
Full-width banner images and video banners, with a colour filter added through the Image overlay tweak.
A list-style blog page with two layout options, a unique events page, album pages, standard gallery pages, a Classic store page and footer navigation.
What breaks or feels dated on a Marquee site in 2026
No Fluid Engine. Version 7.0 editing is the classic block editor — a 12-column grid, no overlapping elements without CSS, no drag-anywhere canvas. Fluid Engine is 7.1-only and is certainly not coming to a template retired in 2017.
No sidebar. Squarespace lists it directly: "Sidebars: Not supported." Neither a site sidebar nor a blog sidebar exists in the Marquee family.
A Classic store, capped at 200 products per page. Brine, Farro, Skye, Tremont and York have the Advanced store page. Marquee does not.
The index accepts layout pages only. Like Bedford, and unlike Brine or York, a Marquee stacked index takes layout pages and nothing else.
Parallax on mobile behaves oddly. Squarespace: "If parallax scrolling is enabled, banner images remain fixed and the content scrolls over them." On a small screen that reads as a bug to visitors even though it is intended behaviour, and it is one reason many Marquee owners disable parallax entirely — at which point the main reason for being on Marquee has gone.
Marquee is missing from Squarespace's own comparison charts. All six charts in the Help Center's "Template comparison charts" article omit the family entirely, which is why almost every third-party comparison chart omits it too. If you have ever tried to look up a Marquee feature and found nothing, that is why.
Documented bugs that will not be fixed. Squarespace's troubleshooting notes for Marquee include "My banner image shifts as the page loads" and "My parallax index banner image has gray space above or below it." Its stated position: "if any bugs or issues arise in discontinued templates, fixing them is a lower priority for us while we focus on our current templates."
Switching from Marquee to Brine
Squarespace recommends this move explicitly — "For a more modern template with similar features to Marquee, we recommend switching to Brine" — and publishes a dedicated guide for it. Brine is the only other version 7.0 family with parallax, has 47 members, a two-part configurable header, an intro area and an Advanced store.
The switch is not automatic. What actually changes:
The sequence: document your site styles first, then Design → Install new template, choose your Brine member, restyle, duplicate pages to separate banners from content, rebuild banner text in the Brine intro area, adjust album, blog, events, gallery and store pages, and finally Set as live template. You can revert to Marquee at any point during this to check a design detail — as long as you never uninstall it.
The Squarespace Brine family templates guide lists all 47 Brine members, and the Brine template alternative for 7.1 covers what to do if you would rather skip Brine and go straight to 7.1.
Moving a Squarespace Marquee site to version 7.1
You cannot start here. Squarespace's first preparation step for the update tool is unambiguous: ensure your site is not using a discontinued 7.0 template, and if it is, switch to another template before starting the update. Every Marquee family site is in that category. So the order is: switch to a supported 7.0 template first (Brine), keep Marquee installed, then run Design → Update to Version 7.1.
Correcting a claim you will see elsewhere: several ranking pages say discontinued templates like Marquee have "no upgrade path". That is false. There is an upgrade path. It has one extra step.
Once you are on Brine and running the tool:
It is permanent. "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 Developer Platform code disappears when you disable it.
Custom CSS survives commented out. Remove the comment tags in the CSS editor and save.
What happens to the parts a Marquee site is built from:
Audit before you press the button. Screenshot every site styles panel while you are still on Marquee — that data is gone the moment you set Brine live. Export every index sub-page's navigation title, SEO title and description. Enable every disabled sub-page. Count pages and products, and export the Custom CSS.
And the expensive one: changing a page slug on Squarespace creates no automatic 301 redirect, ever. A Marquee stacked index flattening into a layout page will orphan every sub-page URL. Add those by hand in Settings → Advanced → URL Mappings using the /old -> /new 301 format.
The screen-by-screen version is in the Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1 guide, and the Squarespace 7.0 template comparison chart is the only comparison chart we know of that includes Marquee at all.
So: what should a Marquee owner actually do?
If the site works and you have no plans, do nothing — and make sure nobody with account access ever clicks Uninstall. A discontinued template is not a broken template. Squarespace 5, launched in 2008, is still online and supported, and version 7.0 has no announced end-of-life.
If you want anything new — Fluid Engine, courses, video pages, a store past 200 products per page, an editable mobile layout — the route is fixed: switch to Brine, keep Marquee installed, then run the update tool. Two steps, in that order, and the second one will not start until the first is done.
If parallax is your site, understand what you are trading. Squarespace 7.1 has no site-wide parallax, only a per-section background effect. That is a real loss and you should see it on a staging site before you commit.
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. A nine-year-discontinued template family is a long way outside the mainstream now.
Most Marquee sites we are sent are doing the Brine switch and the version update as one project, because doing them separately means restyling twice. The genuinely difficult case is the Marquee site whose whole identity is the parallax banner sequence, where migration is a redesign in disguise: there, starting from a premium Squarespace template built for 7.1 and Fluid Engine usually costs less than reverse-engineering a 2013 effect. The table near the top of this page settles the rest without spending anything.
FAQ
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Yes. All seven Marquee family templates — Marquee, Adversary, Alex, Eamon, Ginger, Mint and Shift — were discontinued in June 2017. Existing sites keep running and remain editable. You cannot install Marquee on a new site, and once you uninstall it from an existing site it cannot be reinstalled.
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Seven: Marquee, Adversary, Alex, Eamon, Ginger, Mint and Shift. All share the template ID 515c7bd0e4b054dae3fcf003 and identical code — comparing the reachable demos' stylesheets in August 2026, the selector lists were identical and only colour, font and spacing values differed. Every Marquee guide applies to all seven.
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Yes, but not directly. The version update tool refuses to run on a discontinued 7.0 template, so you must switch to a supported template first — Squarespace recommends Brine — and then run Design → Update to Version 7.1. Do not uninstall Marquee while you do it; uninstalling is permanent.
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It is gone for good. Squarespace's rule is that you can switch to a different template and switch back to the discontinued one as long as you don't uninstall it. Uninstalling removes the only copy you have access to, and discontinued templates are not offered for reinstallation.
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Yes, and it is Marquee's defining feature. Parallax moves banners more slowly than the rest of the page, and it is controlled by the Parallax scrolling tweak. Only two Squarespace 7.0 families have it: Brine and Marquee. Squarespace 7.1 has no site-wide parallax, only a per-section background image effect.
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Because Marquee is its own family with its own class names. Squarespace 7.0 template families use different markup, so CSS written for Brine, Bedford or York will silently do nothing on Marquee. Search for "Marquee" specifically, and check that any snippet names your family before you paste it.
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.
