An a childcare website the enrolment enquiry form is the conversion point, and it is the part templates get least right. A Squarespace form block connects to your account login email by default, which is often the wrong inbox after handover.

Squarespace is an excellent website for a small independent school, a tutoring centre, a music or language academy, or a learning centre with under about a dozen staff. It is the wrong tool for a school that needs a staff directory of eighty people,

A preschool website is not a daycare website with different photographs. A parent choosing a daycare is buying safe, reliable care. A parent choosing a preschool is buying an early education, and they will judge you on your curriculum,

A childcare website has one job before every other job, which is to make a nervous parent feel safe enough to book a visit. That means the site has to answer four questions above the fold and five more before the enquiry form

An online course is sold from a long single page with roughly nine distinct section types, and most Squarespace templates ship three of them. Judge a template on whether its section library can carry a curriculum breakdown,

A course business on Squarespace is four separate things, and a template only supplies one of them. You need a sales page, a checkout, a delivery mechanism, and an email capture route. The template gives you the sales page and the email capture.

There is no best Squarespace template, only the best template for a specific page architecture. Squarespace's ~200 free templates handle brochure sites well and cost nothing extra.

Yes, but you cannot keep it. Squarespace templates and third-party premium templates arrive filled with demo images and placeholder copy for context only. Squarespace states you have no licence to use sample images on a live site.

Squarespace has no first-party plugin marketplace, so a "plugin" here is third-party code you paste into your own site. When a template advertises "plugins included", it almost always means custom code blocks bundled into the design

Yes, if your business already earns money and your time is worth more than about $15 an hour. A $249 premium Squarespace template buys 20 to 40 hours of finished layout work — not extra features.

Squarespace's own templates cost nothing — around 200 are included with every subscription. Third-party premium templates typically cost $50 to $300 as a one-off, with the wider market running from about $47 to $595.

Squarespace has no "install template" button, so installation is human work. There are two routes — a new trial site built and handed to you, which is included, or a manual install onto your existing live site,

Premium Squarespace templates are almost never refundable, so the live demo is the entire purchase decision. Run seven tests on it — mobile at 766px, images degraded, sections counted, page list checked against your own site map,

Every Squarespace 7.1 site runs the same software, so a premium template is not a different or better version of Squarespace. What you buy is a pre-built arrangement — sections, pages, style settings and demo content already assembled

Start from what your website has to do, not from what it looks like. In Squarespace 7.1 every template shares the same features — Squarespace states that all 7.1 sites are in one template family with identical capabilities

Almost every Squarespace design template looks good in a thumbnail, because a thumbnail hides the two things that decide quality: hierarchy and how the design behaves with worse photographs than the demo.

Squarespace's own templates are included with a plan, at no extra cost, and there is no Squarespace store selling third-party designs. Every paid Squarespace template comes from an independent designer or shop,

Premium Squarespace templates cluster between $95 and $400, and the shops separate on three things — catalogue size, whether they install the template for you, and how long support lasts.

"Wedding template" means three unrelated things. A wedding planner needs service and package pages with a qualifying enquiry form. A venue needs a serious gallery, capacity figures and a date-availability path.

Squarespace 7.1 has no landing page type. Cover pages were a version 7.0 feature and are not available in 7.1 — a landing page in 7.1 is an ordinary page with the header and footer hidden.