7 Squarespace Hacks to Transform Your Church’s Squarespace Website

It pretty much goes without saying that Squarespace is a very popular website platform for churches. It’s not very hard to figure out why. Squarespace is affordable, powerful, versatile, and generally pretty easy to make look great and professional.

However, one of the challenges for churches is that Squarespace isn’t built specifically with churches in mind. So while Squarespace is still a great option for churches, you do have to work a little harder to get all the functionality churches typically need.

But how do you get a drag and drop platform like Squarespace to add the features your church needs? The answer: plugins. Plugins, if you’re unfamiliar, is a generic term for a software component that adds a custom feature to a website using some kind of code. Squarespace allows you to add all kinds of plugins to change the design and functionality. They are usually pretty easy to use and don’t require extensive coding experience. The challenge is to know where to find these plugins.

This is why we put together this post, to point you toward the best plugins and plugin developing companies to help take your church Squarespace website to the next level. If you do not yet have a Squarespace website, go ahead and click here to start one today!

1. Countless design enhancements with Ghost Plugin

To kick things off I’d like to send you over to Ghost Plugins. I can’t say enough great things about these guys as they offer by far the most helpful and affordable plugins for Squarespace.

They offer a wide range of design options from simple free plugins to add a unique design element to your website (expanding buttons, casting a shadow on your images, enhanced summary block designs, etc). They also offer a number of “super plugins”, which is what they call their enhanced paid plugins. Among these are real game-changing plugins that have the potential to transform your church website into something truly unique.

Want to buy a template so you don’t have to start from scratch? They sell those as well for around $200, which for the time this could save you building from scratch is a great value. Use the coupon code “CLEARPATHCHURCH” and get 10% off anything in their store. Check them out! 

2. Embed Planning Center with The Church Co

We all know Planning Center is an incredible tool for churches to use to improve their communications in a multitude of ways. Planning Center allows you to create Small Groups in the “Groups” app and Events in the “Registrations” app, both of which come with tons of cool features. All the groups and events you create in Planning Center show up on “Church Center,” which is the web app and mobile app where your people can access both their groups and upcoming events through their own accounts.

Unfortunately,  when it comes time to get all this great Planning Center content on your website, you are forced to either also recreate these items on your web builder and link to Church Center OR you can simply link directly to Church Center as your groups and events page. Both options work fine, but one is a lot of extra work and the other can be a confusing user experience.

This is why The Church Co. created their Planning Center Integration which will embed directly into your Squarespace website (and most other platforms as well). Click one of the links for an example of this integration on a Squarespace website with Groups and Registrations/Events.

Once it’s up and running, all you have to do is update Planning Center and all your groups and events will update automatically! It will cost you a little bit of money for the integration-only subscription, but it’s well worth it in the time and energy it will save you updating just one system instead of two! Check them out here!

3. Worship Service Countdown Timer with Squarepaste

Squarepaste is another one of my go-to plugin websites because of the relevance of their plugins for Church websites. 

One of those really helpful plugins is a countdown timer. Churches often love to place a countdown on different parts of their website in order to create excitement about an upcoming service or event, but Squarespace doesn’t have a built-in tool for this. 

The countdown timer from Squarepaste is easy to install and can be adjusted over and over again for new upcoming events.

4. Sermon Archive Sorting with Squarepaste 

Another one of Squarepaste’s offerings is its summary filter plugin. If you don’t konw, the best way to organize your sermon archive in Squarespace is to create a blog page and then use categories and tags to organize your sermons by series and subject.

However, the built-in search and filtering tools in Squarespace could stand for some visual and functional improvements. The Squarepaste summary filter creates filters for all of the ways you could organize your blog summary blocks and with the click of a button, sorts and pinpoints the sermon you’re looking for. It’s quick, smooth, and totally worth it.

5. Content Accordion with Squarepaste

Another one of Squarepaste’s plugins I’ve used many times is their accordion-style dropdown plugin. This helps churches place the quantity of content they want on every page without having it all visible at once. So if you have a section on vision, mission, and values, you can have one section with three accordion dropdowns that allow people to click on which one they want to see.

This feature makes your website design much cleaner and also more interactive.

6. Admin UI Tweaks with Squarewebsites

This one is not as exciting but believe me, it’s important if you find yourself editing your website a lot. The SquareWebsites UI (user interface) Tweaks plugin is crazy simple to install and in a nutshell, makes everything in the Squarespace user interface better.

It makes quick links to frequently used developer pages for quicker editing, makes the blogs easier to categorize and tag, and a long list of other enhancements. 

But the really clutch feature that I couldn’t do without for churches is it brings back the gallery summary blocks to Squarespace 7.1. So if you’ve built your church website in Squarespace in the 2-3 years, odds are you built it on 7.1. I think 7.1 is an improvement on the Squarespace platform in many ways, but one thing they decided to leave off the upgrade are gallery blocks.

If you’re unfamiliar, gallery blocks are a lot like summary blocks, and while summary blocks are to “summarize” block posts in a block anywhere on your website, a “gallery” block does the same for your photo galleries. I use this feature a lot on church websites to create a simple place to put sermon art for sermon series or staff pages. Gallery blocks are helpful for these features because whenever you add a new series or a staff person, you need to easily rearrange their order, which is much harder to do with individual image blocks.  

Anyway, this plugin brings it back like it never left. Love it!

7. Lazy Summaries with Squarewebsites

Another really helpful offering from SquareWebsites is their “Lazy Summaries” plugin. Like the UI Tweak plugin, this one alters the user interface of all of the summary blocks to add a lot more functionality. It allows you to add a lot more posts to any given block, tweak the size and design of the block to be mobile responsive (different settings for desktop, tablet, and mobile). It just generally gives you a lot more control. So when you’re adding a summary block of sermon posts, you can do so much more with them.