If you have had a WordPress website, you may have heard of the Yoast Plugin. Yoast is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress websites. It is designed to make search engine optimization (SEO) easier. Yoast analyzes WordPress website content to deliver ratings and recommendations for SEO improvements.    

Its popularity leaves many Squarespace users wondering if there’s a plugin like Yoast for Squarespace websites. Many users of SquareSpace are surprised to find that there is no need for a Yoast plugin because Squarespace does not need Yoast for SEO!  

In this blog, I’ll explain why Yoast, or any additional plugin, is not necessary for your Squarespace website. We’ll also review additional solutions available to enhance your SquareSpace website SEO.  

Squarespace Standard SEO Features

The features listed here come standard on your Squarespace website, but WordPress requires a plugin to be installed to improve the SEO.  

SEO is a process. It takes research, creative copy, and website functionality that communicates with search engines. With Squarespace, the functionality is already part of your platform. Specifically, some data that optimizes your website with search engines such as sitemap, robots.txt file, and automatically gives you the ability to edit the metadata.  

After we review this list, we will look at alternatives for the additional SEO items you want to optimize for your Squarespace website. 

Sitemap

Without an SEO plugin, WordPress does not automatically create a sitemap

The greatest advantages to having a sitemap for your website are that it makes your website much more searchable for search engines and helps to deliver the best match search results to their users. Sitemaps serve as a signal to search engines that this website is ready to be crawled and indexed by them. Sitemaps are a fundamental piece of your SEO strategy and should not be overlooked. 

WordPress websites do not automatically create a sitemap for their users without a Yoast SEO plugin.  

Squarespace’s SEO features make it convenient to automatically create sitemaps. With their sitemap, there is a list of URLs for all pages on the website and image metadata for SEO-friendly indexing. The data is kept updated with automatic changes to the sitemap when there are any pages added or removed.  

Robots.txt file

WordPress does not automatically create a robots.txt file without adding a plugin

A robots. txt file is another SEO file that communicates to the search engine crawlers which pages (or files) are public and private. An example of pages that should be kept private (no-follow) are duplicate pages or broken pages. Pages that do not function as seamlessly as main pages will cause users to leave the page immediately. When search engines come across pages that do not hold users’ attention then the page is deemed unhelpful. Therefore, it is important to update the robots.txt file with pages that do not need to be indexed.  

To create or edit a robots.txt file, WordPress users must go through the Yoast SEO plugin. On the other hand, Squarespace users conveniently have this feature as part of their website.  

Squarespace automatically tells search engines like Google not to crawl a list of pages. This is an editable list, so if you prefer to add or remove pages from it, you can anytime.  

Metadata

WordPress does not automatically give you easy access to edit Metadata

Metadata is code that tells Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, (or anywhere else you share your website content) what is on that page. Having clear and precise meta descriptions that contain chosen keywords is an essential part of assuring great SEO.  

WordPress does not make it easy to locate or edit metadata on the website. The easiest way to access or have control of the metadata for a WordPress site is to install an SEO plugin, like Yoast, to help manage it.  

Squarespace gives you access to your website’s metadata and makes it extremely simple to edit this information on each page. Squarespace has options for editing metadata. Users can make changes in collection item editors, such as the blog post editor or product editor. The editor makes it easy to design and style the way it appears in search results. 

Conclusion

WordPress is not out of the box SEO friendly. It requires an extra step.

Your WordPress website will require extra steps and additional work with the Yoast plugin to have it optimized for SEO.  

More Squarespace SEO Benefits we love!

One of the many reasons we are fans of the Squarespace website platform is all the SEO benefits they offer. We reviewed a few of the right out-of-the-box features above. Here are more SEO Benefits SquareSpace offers that are worth mentioning here.  

• Free SSL certificates  

• Clean HTML Markup  

• Automatic Tagging  

• Clean URLs  

• Automatic Redirects  

• Page Descriptions  

• AMP  

• Built-in mobile optimization  

• Search Engine Analytics  

• And much more…   

I certainly hope this helps explain why you do not need a Yoast plugin for your Squarespace website. Keep in mind, that although SEO features are built into Squarespace, the optimization process takes some work to be sure it is accurate and working properly.  

If you are ready to switch to a new Squarespace website, contact us. We’re here to help your website and business reach more of your ideal customers.