Whether you’re looking to build a business website from scratch or your current website needs to drive more sales, Squarespace’s latest website-building tools are packed with shiny new features. Do they live up to the hype? Let’s find out.

For any business owner or entrepreneur, your website is your shop window. It’s your moment to show your unique brand personality, convert new customers and keep your existing clientele coming back for more… and more… and more!

While it’s nice to have a website that ‘just works’, there are always ways to make it work harder for you. That’s the thinking behind the latest tools offered by Squarespace, the website building and hosting platform renowned for its award-winning design templates and a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor even your most tech-allergic relative can master.

New tools like the Layout Switcher, where you can change layouts with one click, and an AI writer to help generate SEO-friendly copy, promise to remove friction when building, managing and updating a website. We put them to the test.

1. Design Intelligence: Make your website stand out from the crowd

Mixing automation, generative AI and one-click design options, Squarespace’s Design Intelligence suite of tools act as a design brain to help guide you from idea to execution. Or to take that metaphor a step further, they’re like the bumpers in a tenpin bowling alley – helping you avoid the gutters and setting you up for more strikes.

Visually, the Site Themes feature lets you quickly view your site content through curated design styles. If you select Restaurant, you’ll get a bunch of styles tailored to restaurants. If you select Local Business, you’ll get a whole lot of templates to suit your product or service you’re selling.

Select a theme and you’ll get designer-created colour palettes, font packs and button styles – you can mix and match these into 1000s of combinations or just let them do the work. We created a sample homepage to put that into action:

So far, so simple. It’s a clean-looking site that ticks all the boxes.

Next up, Layout Switcher is another design tool to explore. With one click, you can rearrange your entire layout. You’ll have edited your site using the drag-and-drop editor, Fluid Engine, which lets you add, remove or edit blocks on the page. So, let’s say you’ve got a special offer for new visitors to the site or have a sale you want to bump to the top of the page, it’s done in an instant. Handy.

We should also mention AI Section Backgrounds, which generates design or images behind your content to match your brand vibe. A helpful tool that shows your customers you’re on top of the details not just in the foreground, but the background too.

2. Use AI to sharpen your brand

Having a brand identity crisis? Squarespace AI-driven Brand Identity service takes the raw material of your ideas and moulds them into a personalised style with a distinct tone of voice that makes your site communications feel more consistent and professional.

Simply enter your business, your industry and your desired tone with an ‘ad lib’ – we adapted Squarespace’s AI prompt  suggestion below from this:

We are ‘So Fetch’. We are a fashion house for dogs, offering high couture dog clothes and accessories. Adjectives that folks would use to describe us are chic, high end and avant garde. When we talk, we sound like Anna Wintour after coffee. A celebrity we are most similar to or could represent our brand is Julia Fox. When people interact with us, we want them to feel like they have Paris Fashion Week curled at the foot of their bed.

And here’s what we got. Looks pretty, doesn’t it? Think we’ll sell out of doggy turtlenecks?

3. Speed up mundane tasks with the AI SEO writer

You can immediately tell if a website is amateur from its copy. Using a tool like Squarespace’s AI Website Copy can help elevate your website to the next level – and most importantly, get it seen by more people on search engines.

The AI writer function is probably of best use for the fiddly SEO tasks you often forget about until the very last minute – but they’re dealbreakers for discoverability online. AI Product Descriptions can bundle up all the things you know and love about your product into the powerful details that prompt customers to buy.

See AI Product Descriptions at work in this example we made:

Yes, we fully expect ‘Fur on Fur’ to be a sellout once it hits the search engines.

Also, if you’ve got videos on your website showing your mastery at work, AI Video Descriptions can summarise your videos for you so you save time and keep them consistent.

4. Remove payment roadblocks

What if your site functionality is stopping you from winning business? Small business owners have enough to worry about, so making sure it’s as easy as possible to accept payments and invoice quickly and professionally cannot be understated.

Squarespace Payments bundles everything up in one place, which is exactly what a busy eCommerce or service provider needs. There’s a seamless, secure checkout experience that offers flexible payments and optimised checkouts with popular payment methods like Apple Pay – making it easier for customers to hand over their cash.

There’s also payment data encryption so people can feel safe doing business with you. And, on top of that, you can manage your payment workflows from a single dashboard for managing transactions. Less room for human error, more ‘just get it done’.

Squarespace Invoicing adds extra polish to your professional invoices and documents. You can generate invoices and payouts, and track them from a centralised payment dashboard – instead of via multiple platforms or, even worse, your overflowing email inbox.

So those are the latest new features we had a play with. There are other tools small businesses may be interested in, like Courses, for anyone who’s putting together an online learning course; and Acuity Scheduling, an online booking platform for clients to book, cancel or reschedule appointments, embedded in your Squarespace website.

Overall, the Squarespace website-building tools we’ve talked about in this article should take a lot of the grunt work out of building and managing your website. You won’t know until give you them a fair go… or fur go?

SPECIAL OFFER: Want to create a better website with Squarespace? Business Builders readers, get 10% off with this exclusive code: BIZ10. Sign up and get started here!

This article is brought to you by Business Builders in partnership with Squarespace.

Written by Adam Bub and Will McKinnon

Feature image: Squarespace.