The Squarespace Designer's Toolkit: What's Actually Worth Paying For
Professional designers working with Squarespace use a toolkit of software and tools. Some are expensive and essential. Some cost a few quid a month and save hours. Some are completely free but might be overlooked. I want to walk through what actually matters and what's worth your money.
This isn't about working faster for the sake of speed. It's about working smarter and building sustainable business practices that scale.
Design and Prototyping
If you're designing anything beyond simple tweaks, you need a proper design tool. Figma has become the standard, and for good reason. It's collaborative, it's cloud-based, and it's the tool most designers and developers understand.
Cost: Figma's professional plan is about £12 per month. Is it worth it? Absolutely. If you're building client sites, you need to design before building. Figma beats the alternatives decisively. I know some designers who design directly in Squarespace, and I genuinely don't understand how. You're constrained by what Squarespace can do, you can't iterate quickly, and you're wasting client time.
Design first. Then build. Figma is the right tool for design first. The cost is negligible compared to the time it saves and the quality it enables.
Sketch is still used by some, but Figma is the future. Adobe XD exists. I've never met a designer who preferred it to Figma. Penpot is free and open-source if you want an alternative, but it's not as polished.
Code Editors and Development Tools
You're going to write CSS and JavaScript for Squarespace sites. You need a good code editor. VS Code is free. It's excellent. Use it.
Beyond VS Code, consider what actually helps your workflow. GitHub is free for public repositories and essential for version control. This is non-negotiable if you're writing code professionally. Even if you're not sharing your code, version control lets you track changes and recover from mistakes.
What about CSS preprocessors like SCSS? Squarespace doesn't support them natively, so you'd need a build process. This adds complexity without solving a real problem on Squarespace. Skip them. Write straight CSS.
Cost: VS Code and GitHub are free. This is the floor. Version control is essential. Tools beyond this are optional and usually overkill for Squarespace work.
Browser Extensions and Inspection Tools
Chrome DevTools is free and excellent. It's your debugging workhorse. Use it constantly.
Beyond DevTools, there are useful extensions. Wunderbucket (formerly Squareheadtech) extensions exist for Squarespace work. Some are genuinely useful. Some are gimmicks.
The Squarehead Chrome Extension is worth considering. It backs up all your custom code automatically, so you're never in a position where hours of CSS work disappears. It also makes inspecting other Squarespace sites straightforward, which is useful for learning from how other designers structure their code or auditing competitor sites.
Cost: Most browser extensions are free, including the Squarehead Extension. The value is in what you preserve or learn, not in the extension cost.
SEOSpace is a browser extension for SEO auditing. It's not Squarespace-specific, but it's useful for checking meta descriptions, heading structure, and basic SEO hygiene on any site. Free version is solid. Paid upgrades exist if you need more detail.
Analytics and SEO Tools
Google Analytics is free and essential. You need to understand how your client's site is performing. Install it on every project.
Google Search Console is free. Use it. Submit sitemaps, monitor crawl errors, see search performance data, identify technical issues. This is basic SEO hygiene, and it costs nothing.
Beyond Google's tools, what else matters? Ahrefs is comprehensive but expensive (around £99 per month). Great for competitive analysis and understanding backlinks. Not essential for small Squarespace projects, but valuable if you're doing serious SEO work.
SEMrush is similar pricing and similar value. Choose one or neither, depending on whether SEO is a core part of your business.
Moz is less expensive than Ahrefs or SEMrush but still not cheap. It's solid, but I'd start with free Google tools and only upgrade if you're doing serious SEO work regularly.
Cost: Free with Google. Paid tools are £50 to £100 per month if you need deeper analysis. Most small agencies can survive without them.
Project Management and Client Communication
This isn't Squarespace-specific, but it's crucial. How do you manage projects and communicate with clients?
Basecamp is excellent for client collaboration. It's about £99 per month. Projects, messages, files, and scheduling all in one place. Clients understand it intuitively. Worth the cost if you're managing multiple projects.
Slack is standard for team communication. It's free for small teams, paid for larger ones. Essential if you're working with anyone else.
Notion is useful for internal documentation and project planning. It's free for personal use or about £8 per person per month for teams. Powerful but requires setup time.
Asana, Monday.com, and similar project management tools are all fine but unnecessary overkill for freelance design work. Spreadsheets and Basecamp get you 95 per cent of the way there.
Cost: Slack (free to £6 per person), Basecamp (£99 per month), or simpler tools. Total maybe £100 to £200 per month for a small team.
Web Performance and Testing
Lighthouse is free, built into Chrome DevTools. It audits performance, accessibility, and SEO. Use it constantly.
Screaming Frog is useful for crawling your site and identifying technical issues. It's about £99 per year. Worth it if you're managing multiple sites. Not essential for occasional projects.
WebPageTest is free for testing real-world performance. Useful for understanding how your site loads on actual connections and devices.
BrowserStack lets you test across real devices and browsers. It's paid but not expensive. Less critical now that modern browsers are more compatible, but useful for thorough testing.
Cost: Free tools get you 90 per cent of the way. Screaming Frog (£99/year) is the only paid tool I'd recommend here.
Image Optimisation and Management
Squarespace handles image serving well, but you still need to optimise before uploading. ImageOptim (Mac) or FileOptimizer (Windows) are free and excellent for batch optimisation.
Figma does image exports well. Photoshop works but is overkill. GIMP is free if you need an image editor.
For stock images, Unsplash and Pexels are free. Shutterstock and Adobe Stock are paid subscriptions (£20 to £35 per month depending on plan). Only necessary if you need fresh images regularly. Many projects can survive on free stock sites.
Cost: Free to £30 per month if you're using paid stock images regularly.
Content Creation and Writing Tools
Grammarly is about £12 per month for the premium version. Useful for catching writing errors, especially if you're writing a lot of content. Optional but nice to have.
Hemingway Editor is a one-time purchase (about £20). It makes your writing clearer and simpler. Useful for blog content and client-facing writing.
Tools beyond this are unnecessary. Don't buy fancy content management tools or writing software. Squarespace's built-in editor is fine for blog posts.
Cost: Optional tools around £10 to £20 per month.
Building Squarespace Tools and Workflows
If you're regularly doing bulk operations on Squarespace sites, tools matter. Migrating 100 blog posts? Manual upload is days of work. The Squarehead Blog Uploader does it in hours. Uploading 50 portfolio items? The Portfolio Uploader saves you a full day of tedious clicking.
These tools are specifically built to solve Squarespace friction points. The Blog Bulk Editor lets you manage large blogs efficiently. The Chrome Extension backs up your code. These are specialist tools for Squarespace professionals.
Individually, they cost money. But if you're doing work that benefits from them, the return on investment is obvious. You save more in client time than the tool costs. The Squarehead Collection bundles them together at a fixed price, which is better value if you use multiple tools.
Cost: Specialist tools £10 to £50 each, or £50 for the collection.
Building a Lean Toolkit
Here's the reality: most Squarespace projects can be delivered with surprisingly modest tooling. The free tools get you most of the way there. Add good paid tools for the specific parts of your workflow that benefit most from them.
My actual toolkit: Figma (design), VS Code (code), Chrome DevTools (debugging), GitHub (version control), Google Analytics and Search Console (analytics), Basecamp (project management), and Squarehead tools (Squarespace-specific work). That's roughly £12 + £99 = £111 per month for the critical paid tools.
Nothing on this list is frivolous. Everything earns its cost by saving time or enabling better work. The key is not accumulating tools for the sake of it. Choose tools that solve real problems in your workflow.
The designers who struggle aren't those with less tooling. They're the ones trying to use Squarespace's one-at-a-time editors for bulk operations, or designing directly in Squarespace without proper mockups, or managing projects through email threads. Better tooling is an investment in sustainable practices, not a luxury.
Related Reading
If you found this useful, these might be worth your time too:
Tools That Help
The Collection, Chrome Extension, Squarehead Toolkit can help with the workflows discussed in this article.
Want to go deeper? The Squarehead Advanced Course covers these topics and more across 11 structured modules.
