Experienced Squarespace website owners know: using the tools that are only offered by Squarespace is not enough to create a genuine user experience on a website. Besides updating your site design, optimizing your images, or using SEO techniques, one of the critical points in improving your site’s stats (i.e. time users spend on your website, pages’ bounce rate and ultimately your site conversions) is to put yourself in your site visitors’ shoes and design a pleasant user flow. This can be done with the help of different apps, most of which are free or offer a trial period.
6 Power Tools to improve your Squarespace Website
In this blogpost we’ve selected our favorite power tools that can be integrated with Squarespace, and are worth your attention. Some of them will help you easily detect important details about your website’s performance. For instance, you’ll be able to identify on which pages & sections your users get confused and leave, which content works well and which doesn’t, which buttons have a good click through rate, etc. Keep on reading and let us know which tools you’re already using on your site, which ones drew your attention and you’d like to try in the future!
Messenger customer chat plugin
The Messenger Customer Chat plugin is an extension you can integrate on your site, which allows users to connect and send messages to your business Facebook Messenger account directly from your website.
The Messenger plugin grants your site visitors the possibility to chat with you, on a familiar platform on which they already have an account. In practice, it is very handy because you can answer questions even after the user has left your website. He/she will receive your answer quickly, and without having to do extra actions (check email, log into your website, etc). Additionally, you can integrate it with chat bots & set automated answers. Using this tool adds to your credibility and facilitates better relationships with your future clients.
Chatbot
A chatbot is a “small robot” designed to talk with users online. Chatbots can be integrated within your Messenger Customer Chat, and can do a lot of cool stuff such as: sending predefined welcome messages, triggering answers based on keywords a user types in, showcasing your shop inside the chat window, it can send weekly news to your chat subscribers, or even notify about promos and discounts once they go live.
Chatbots are great when you want to provide your potential customers with fast answers. They can be developed into more powerful marketing tools once you explore all its features and possibilities. If you’re thinking of giving chatbots a go, we’d recommend trying Manychat or Chatfuel, due to their multitude of options and user friendly interface.
Chatbots are still an under-explored field, so why not be the one who innovates in your industry?
Squarewebsites Tools PRO
Squarewebsites offer useful plugins for Squarespace developers that add functionalities missing from the platform, but their Chrome Extension is one of our team’s favourite tools when building Squarespace sites. The main features that we can’t live without include the ability to copy content from 7.0 sites into 7.1 sites, copy sections in 7.1 into different pages, and create layout presets.
It’s a subscription-based extension, with monthly and yearly plans. If you work with 7.1 sites often, is a must tool, and even if you are building your one site, you could subscribe for a month a benefit from doing time-consuming tasks like duplicating sections or recreating pages in seconds.
Update your Squarespace plan
There are a lot of benefits you can gain by upgrading to a Business plan or higher on Squarespace. Once you do that, you’ll access awesome premium features like having an announcement bar, promotional Pop-Ups, using CSS, injecting custom codes, having access to e-commerce features. And with those, you’ll be able to integrate Facebook Pixel, Mailchimp, Zapier that are indispensable for any marketeer & creative business owner.
Google analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you track data from your website, understand your site visitors, where do they come from, what type of content do they like, etc. this consequently will allow you to make informed decision and improve your site’s performance. Compared to Squarespace analytics, the data on website traffic is much more insightful and complex. For instance, Google Analytics gives you data on specific pages of your site, feature unavailable on Squarespace. Google Analytics is perfect for tracking your site’s efficiency: find out the high/low performing pages of your site, analyze your site’s bounce rate. It’s also good for learning more about your customers: check what is the geolocation of your visitors, what language do they speak, what are their interests, even track what do they do on your website (user flow).
Go ahead and create an account, start exploring it step by step, as there’s a lot of information you’ll be surprised to discover about your website. Not sure where to start? There are plenty of resources & tutorials available online. Our sister brand, Flothemes, is also offering an awesome Google Analytics course for Photographers, check it out!
Crazy Egg
A fun tool to experiment with. Crazy Egg records your website’s pages and the way users interact with each. You can then make conclusions and analyze results based on a heat map that shows: what buttons and links are most clicked by your site visitors, where do they get stuck, what images/site sections they look at, etc. With the information you collect through this app, you can optimize various sections on your website and make sure that important information and buttons are placed in the most viewed/clicked areas.
Crazy Egg offers a free 30 days trial period, in which you can experiment and see whether it can benefit your brand.
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