The Squarespace Paloma Template: What It Is, and What It Isn't
Paloma is a Squarespace 7.1 template, not a version 7.0 one. It is a podcast-first design — the demo homepage leads on episodes, and the navigation is About, Episodes, Blog, Contact and Donate. It has never been part of a 7.0 template family, so if you landed here looking for a legacy template to migrate, you are looking at the wrong name. Two unrelated third-party templates are also called Paloma, which is where most of the confusion starts.
Sort out which Paloma you mean before anything else.
Which Paloma are you looking at?
The check takes ten seconds. Load your live site logged out, view source, and search for templateVersion. Version 7.0 sites report "7" — not "7.0", which trips people up. Version 7.1 sites report "7.1". That single string settles which half of the Squarespace world you are in, and therefore whether any of the migration advice in this cluster applies to you at all.
What the Squarespace Paloma template is
Paloma is one of the 198 templates in Squarespace's live template gallery as of August 2026 — and every one of those 198 is version 7.1. It sits at position 74 in the gallery listing.
Paloma has no template family, because version 7.1 does not have families. That is the structural difference people miss. In version 7.0, the template determined the feature set: Brine had parallax and an intro area, Bedford had sidebars, and you could not lift a feature from one to the other. In 7.1 every site runs the same code. The 198 templates are starting designs — a set of pre-built pages, fonts, colours and section layouts — and any 7.1 site can be turned into any other 7.1 site with enough editing. Choosing Paloma over another 7.1 template locks you out of nothing.
Squarespace's live Paloma demo confirms what the design is aimed at. The demo site is a podcast called The Twenty-Flourish Podcast; its homepage is six Fluid Engine sections led by a show description, and the Episodes page is a blog collection rendered in the alternating side-by-side layout. There is a Donate page, a newsletter block, and a minimal cart.
Paloma is free. Like every template in the Squarespace gallery, it costs nothing beyond the Squarespace subscription. Nobody sells you Squarespace's Paloma.
Who the Squarespace Paloma template suits
Paloma is a content template, and it is honest about it.
It suits: podcasters, newsletter writers, personal brands, essayists, and anyone whose homepage should lead with "here is the latest episode or post" rather than "here is what I charge". The episode-first structure means a new listener lands on your most recent work rather than a hero image and a tagline.
It does not suit: service businesses that need a services page, a pricing table and a booking flow, or shops with more than a handful of products. Paloma's commerce is a token cart, not a storefront. You can add all of this — it is 7.1, every feature is available — but you would be rebuilding most of the template's layout to do it, at which point you have chosen the wrong starting design.
One practical caution. Paloma leans hard on photography and generous whitespace. Warm typography over a weak image looks flat rather than editorial. If your image library is thin, a template with more structure and less bleed will carry you further.
And one that applies to every popular template: a Paloma site edited lightly looks like a Paloma site. That is not a defect, but if being visually distinct matters, budget time for a real restyle of fonts, colours and section spacing rather than a swap of the demo photos.
Podcast pages on Squarespace 7.1: what Paloma actually gives you
Worth being precise here, because it is the main reason people search for Paloma.
Squarespace 7.1 generates a podcast RSS feed from a blog collection. That capability belongs to Squarespace 7.1, not to Paloma — any 7.1 template can do it, and the setup is identical whichever starting design you picked:
Add a blog page and choose the slug you intend to keep, because the feed URL is built from it and Squarespace creates no automatic 301 when a slug changes.
Hover the blog page in the Pages panel, click the gear icon, open the Feeds tab, then Podcasting.
Fill the required fields: Title, Author, Description, Cover Art, Type (Episodic or Serial), Length (Standard or Optimized for Podcasting), up to three Categories, and the Explicit Content toggle.
Cover art must be a square .jpg or .png no more than 512 KB, between 1400 × 1400px and 3000 × 3000px, RGB at 72 DPI.
Add an audio block to each episode post. Only the first audio block in a post is treated as the episode, and the first post on the blog page must contain one or Apple Podcasts will reject the feed.
Submit https://yoursitename.squarespace.com/blogname?format=rss to Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Two limits worth knowing before you commit an archive to it: a Squarespace feed carries up to 300 recent episodes in Optimized for Podcasting mode, and 100 in Standard.
What Paloma contributes on top of all that is the layout: an episodes collection styled as an episode list, a show-description homepage, and a design that does not fight audio-first content. That is a genuine head start of a few hours, and it is the correct way to value any 7.1 template — as saved design time, never as saved features.
Note the contrast with version 7.0, where audio was template-dependent. Cover pages with audio layouts existed in 7.0 and are among the things Squarespace's update tool explicitly does not carry over — audio cover-page layouts "are excluded entirely" when a 7.0 site is updated.
Where the Squarespace Paloma template runs out
Paloma is current, so nothing here is a legacy problem. These are the ordinary edges of a content-first Squarespace 7.1 starting design.
The homepage is an argument you have to keep making. Paloma's structure assumes the newest episode or post is the thing worth leading with. That is right for an active show and wrong for one that publishes quarterly, where visitors land on something four months stale. If your publishing cadence is slow, restructure the homepage around the show rather than the feed.
Blog layouts are a Site Styles choice, not a Fluid Engine one. Paloma's Episodes list uses the alternating side-by-side blog layout, and blog list and post layouts in Squarespace 7.1 are chosen from a fixed set of presets rather than built section by section. Fluid Engine governs your regular pages; it does not let you free-form a blog index. People expect otherwise and are surprised.
Mobile is genuinely separate, and that cuts both ways. Fluid Engine keeps a distinct mobile layout per section, which is a real improvement on version 7.0. It also means every section you edit on desktop needs checking on mobile, because the two do not stay in sync. The Squarespace 7.1 mobile breakpoint is 767px.
Image weight is the usual performance cost. A photography-led template with full-bleed sections is heavier than a text-led one. Squarespace's CDN serves WebP unconditionally, so format is handled for you, but dimensions are not — upload at 1500–2500px wide, and note that filenames cannot be changed after upload, which matters because the filename is part of how images get found.
Commerce is a stub. The demo carries a cart, not a store. Selling more than a few items means adding and styling product pages that Paloma's design does not anticipate.
The other templates called Paloma
Two third-party products share the name, and neither is Squarespace's.
Studio Founded sells a "Paloma" Squarespace course template aimed at coaches and course creators, built on 7.1 with Fluid Engine, with a page count in the low teens. Certainly Nat sells a "Paloma" photography portfolio template. Both are legitimate products; both are unrelated to each other and to Squarespace's Paloma.
This matters practically in two ways. First, support: if you bought a third-party Paloma, your support route is the shop that sold it, not Squarespace Customer Care. Second, tutorials: a fix written for one Paloma will not apply to the others, because they share nothing but a word.
Template names are not trademarked across the Squarespace ecosystem and reuse is common. When you search for help on any template, check which product the author is writing about before you paste anything into Website → Website Tools → Custom CSS.
If you actually are on a version 7.0 template
If your source reports "templateVersion":"7", you are on one of the 121 version 7.0 templates across 22 families, 32 of which are discontinued. Paloma is not among them. The name you are half-remembering is more likely Pacific, Polaris, Pedro or Palermo, and the fastest way to settle it is the full list of Squarespace 7.0 templates.
Two things worth knowing once you have identified it:
Your templateId names the family, not the template. All 47 Brine templates report 55f0aac0e4b0f0a5b7e0b22e; all four Bedford templates report 52a74dafe4b073a80cd253c5. A detector that says "Brine" when you expected "Sonora" is right.
There is no announced end-of-life for version 7.0. Squarespace's position is that updating is optional; its own wording is that "fixing bugs or issues is a lower priority for us while we focus on version 7.1." Whether old Squarespace templates are still supported covers exactly what that does and does not promise.
If you do decide to move, the update tool at Design → Update to Version 7.1 is permanent, capped at 150 pages and 200 products per store page, and leaves your Custom CSS commented out for you to re-enable. The Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1 guide has the full list of what does and does not carry over, and the Brine template guide is the hub for the whole legacy 7.0 decision if you are on the biggest family.
Should you use Paloma, or something else?
If you are starting a podcast, a newsletter or a personal-brand site on Squarespace 7.1, Paloma is a sensible free starting point and there is no reason to pay for an alternative. Change the fonts, change the colours, replace every demo image — the demo photography is licensed to Squarespace, not to you — and you have a competent site in a day.
Switch starting design if your site needs services, pricing, booking or a real store. Because 7.1 templates are interchangeable, changing your mind later costs you layout work but never features.
And if you came here because you are on a legacy version 7.0 site and thought Paloma was your template: it is not, and the useful next step is identifying the template you are actually on before deciding anything. 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 it is not an emergency.
Where hiring makes sense is narrow: a content site with a real archive — hundreds of posts, an existing podcast feed with subscribers, or URLs that already rank — where a botched move breaks feeds and loses rankings, since changing a slug on Squarespace creates no automatic 301 redirect, ever. If that is your situation, starting from a premium Squarespace template built for 7.1 removes the layout work and leaves you to concentrate on the redirects. Most Paloma sites do not need any of that; they need better photographs.
FAQ
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Paloma is Squarespace 7.1. It appears in the current template gallery and its live demo reports "templateVersion":"7.1" in the page source. Paloma is not on Squarespace's version 7.0 roster of 121 templates, nor on the list of 32 discontinued 7.0 templates.
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None. Version 7.1 has no template families. Families existed in version 7.0, where the template determined the feature set — Brine had parallax, Bedford had sidebars. In 7.1 every site runs the same code, and the template is only a starting design.
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Podcasts, newsletters, blogs and personal brands. The demo leads with an episode list and a show description, with About, Episodes, Blog, Contact and Donate pages. It is not built for service businesses or for stores beyond a token cart.
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Yes. Every template in the Squarespace gallery is included with a Squarespace subscription. If you paid for something called Paloma, you bought a third-party template — Studio Founded and Certainly Nat both sell unrelated templates using that name, and they support them, not Squarespace.
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Yes, but the capability is Squarespace 7.1's, not Paloma's. Any 7.1 site can generate a podcast RSS feed from a blog collection with audio blocks in each post. Paloma just supplies an episode-first layout, which saves a few hours of design work.
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Load your live site logged out, view the page source, and search for templateVersion. Version 7.0 sites report "7" — not "7.0". Version 7.1 sites report "7.1". That single string decides whether any version 7.0 migration advice applies to your site.
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.
