Creating and Selling Online Courses: Why Squarespace is the Perfect Platform
Squarespace is the perfect platform for creating and selling online courses.
Why?
Because it offers everything you need in one place -an intuitive course builder, stunning design templates, seamless payment processing, and powerful marketing tools. This streamlined process means you don’t have to deal with the problems of juggling multiple apps. Instead, you can focus on sharing your expertise and growing your business, and let Squarespace handle the rest.
If you’re an educator, coach, or entrepreneur, and you need tools to build, host, and monetize your course -without the need for technical skills or third-party integrations, keep reading and we’ll tell you why you should choose Squarespace.
We’ll cover:
- Squarespace courses & reasons why it’s perfect for building your next online course
- Squarespace marketing features & why they’re perfect for selling your online course
Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
About Squarespace Courses
A great course needs more than just strong content. It needs:
- an intuitive creation process,
- a seamless student experience, and
- an efficient way to market and sell your knowledge.
That’s what Squarespace brings to the table.
It allows course creators to create and manage online classes in a straightforward manner. Whether you’re launching a one-time course or a multi-lesson program, you can:
- Upload and host high-quality videos, PDFs, and other course materials on your site.
- Structure learning content into chapters and lessons, to give your students an organized learning experience.
- Offer different pricing models, including subscriptions, one-time payments, and tiered pricing.
- Customize your course pages with beautifully designed templates.
- Ensure mobile-friendly access, allowing students to learn anytime and from anywhere.
Now that you better understand squarespace courses, let’s explore why you should use it.
Why Squarespace is The Perfect Course-Building Platform
Here’s why you should start building courses with Squarespace.
1. Beautiful, customizable course templates and layouts
First impressions matter in everything, and it definitely does in a course product. With Squarespace’s sleek, customizable templates, you can build a polished, professional-looking course page that will boost your credibility as an expert and keep students engaged.
Squarespace also gives you two course layouts to choose from, giving you the flexibility to craft your course in a design that best represents your brand.
Here’s how to get started with these templates and layouts:
- Inside Squarespace, click on “website” and then click on the + sign next to the “Not Linked” section.
- Select “Course” under collections and you’ll be given the option to choose from two pre-designed layouts. Pick a layout that matches your brand and course type.
Your new course will now appear in the Not Linked section of your website.
Before you start building out your lessons, it’s important to adjust some key settings to ensure your layout looks good. You can do so by clicking on the gear icon to open course settings. Here, you can:
- Change the course name
- Add a summary (visible on your website and to logged-in users)
- Edit the navigation title (how it appears in menus)
- Customize the course URL
- Set a password if you want restricted access
Creator’s tip: If you’re still working on your course, disable the page so that no one can access it until you’re ready to launch.
2. Squarespace has a highly-organized course structure
You might have really great content to put out there, but if you don’t organize it properly, your course will be difficult to follow. You’re also likely to attract negative reviews and possibly issue refunds.
Squarespace prevents all that from happening by keeping your course content organized into chapters and lessons.
Here’s a breakdown of Squarespace’s course organizaiton structure:
- A course is essentially a collection page where all your content is stored.
- Courses are broken down into chapters, which serve as folders for your content.
- Each chapter contains lessons, which are individual learning modules. These can include videos, text, PDFs, and other course materials.
- Each course has a url, and every lesson also gets its own URL, while chapters function more like folders to keep everything organized.
This structure is simple yet powerful as it allows you to create an intuitive learning experience while keeping your course content neatly arranged.
Creator’s tip: If you’re unsure about a lesson, set it as draft instead of deleting it. Deleting a lesson permanently removes it with no way to recover it!
3. Intuitive and easy to use course design tools
One of the biggest roadblocks for course creators is dealing with complex, clunky platforms. With Squarespace, that’s not an issue.
The platform’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to structure your course content, whether you’re organizing lessons, adding videos, or creating downloadable resources.
Further more, font, color and layout customization options give you control over how your course looks and feels. You can customize your course layout by clicking on the paint brush icon on the top right hand side of your screen to open site styles.
There are so many style customization options to choose from, but here’s an overview of how to go about the main ones:
How to customize fonts in Squarespace
- Click on the paintbrush icon in the editor to open the site styles menu.
- Scroll down and select “assign styles”.
- Navigate to the course lesson section, where you can edit:
- Course name font. You can customize the style and size for mobile and desktop.
- Chapter name font. It’s set to “header” by default, but you can select “custom” to adjust to your preferred font.
- Lesson name font. Adjust it to ensure consistency across lessons.
If you want a unique font, select “browse all fonts” and apply a completely new style.
Creator’s tip: Keep fonts professional and easy to read to improve the learning experience.
How to adjust colors in Squarespace courses
- Navigate to colors under site styles.
- Click on the pencil icon next to the color theme for the section you want to change. For example, for lessons, click on the pencil icon next to the course’s color theme.
So for instance below, the color theme is “lightest 1”, so to customize, click on “lightest 1” in the site styles menu.
3. From there, you can change:
- Background Color
- Progress Bar Color
- Lesson Button Colors
Alternatively, if you only want to change the color of a specific section, navigate to that section. For example, if you want to only make changes to the course lessons, navigate to course lessons in the edit theme panel and select a new color.
That’s how easy it is! Save changes to apply them across all lessons.
Creator’s tip: Keep colors consistent across your course. If you have a website and social media presence, choose “on brand” colors.
How to customize spacing in Squarespace courses
Although you could still customize spacing from the site styles menu, there’s another way to do it:
- Click Edit Layout within your course.
2. Navigate to the design tab and adjust vertical spacing, top and bottom spacing, header spacing, and button spacing.
Creator’s tip: Keep your layout clean and minimal for a distraction-free learning experience.
4. Built-in multimedia support
Gone are the days of dry, text-heavy courses. With Squarespace, you can easily integrate high-quality videos, images, and audio files to create an immersive learning experience.
Lessons are built to contain video, but if you want a text-only course, you can toggle off the video option.
That said, video is important in course delivery, and Squarespace gives you multiple options for adding video content either by uploading it, selecting from the library, or embedding from YouTube or Vimeo.
Plus, Squarespace’s video hosting means you don’t have to rely on external platforms like YouTube or Vimeo, because everything stays neatly within your website.
Creator’s tip: The space below your lesson’s hero video is customizable. Use it to add images, descriptions, FAQs, PDFs, or to promote products you mention in your lessons.
5. Mobile experience for learning on-the-go
Your students aren’t always sitting at a desk—they’re learning on their phones, tablets, and laptops. Squarespace ensures your course is mobile-responsive, meaning it looks great and functions perfectly no matter what device your students are using.
This provides a seamless learning experience without awkward scrolling and frustrating navigation.
Mobile customization options are available in the course settings and site styles menu, or next to the paint brush icon. Be sure to use any of these optiosn to give your students a great learning experience on mobile.
6. Cohort-based learning and membership models
Want to build a true learning community? With Squarespace’s membership and cohort-based features, you can create an interactive experience where students progress together.
This feature is great if you’re building a structured learning program that requires engagement, accountability, and interaction, -such as coaching programs, language courses, or business mentorships.
Creator’s tip: Drip course content by setting the publish status to “scheduled”.
Now that we’ve covered the course creation process, let’s talk about selling your courses. After all, knowledge is power—but only if people know where to find it.
Selling Courses With Squarespace
Creating a great course is only half the equation. Selling it effectively is just as important. Squarespace equips you with powerful tools to attract students, convert leads, and maximize sales, with the following features:
- E-commerce integration: Sell courses with a smooth, built-in checkout process and accept payments via credit cards, PayPal, and more.
- SEO: Get your courses discovered with Squarespace’s built-in SEO tools, including meta tags, structured data, and fast-loading pages.
- Email marketing: Use Squarespace Email Campaigns to send targeted promotions, welcome sequences, and course updates.
- Analytics: Monitor sales performance, student engagement, and traffic sources to optimize your marketing strategy.
- Social media connectivity: Promote courses effortlessly with integrations for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.
With these features, you can transform your course from a simple offering into a thriving business, helping you attract, convert, and retain students.
Why Squarespace Is Perfect For Selling Your Online Courses
You now have a complete, professional-looking course. Now you need to sell it.
Squarespace is the perfect course-selling platform, and here’s why:
1. Smooth checkout process
One of the biggest challenges in selling online courses is ensuring that the checkout process is smooth and hassle-free. Squarespace simplifies this with built-in payment processing that allows customers to pay using credit cards, PayPal, or Stripe.
Unlike platforms that require endless integrations to handle payments, Squarespace keeps everything under one roof.
Key Benefits:
- With one-Click payments, customers can check out quickly, reducing cart abandonment rates.
- Squarespace automatically manages transactions, so you don’t have to manually process payments.
- If you offer a subscription-based course, Squarespace will handle payments automatically, and revoke access if a student cancels.
Perfect right?
You don’t have to go off-platform to start figuring out your sales strategy.
2. Multiple pricing models and paywall protection
Squarespace gives you complete control over how you charge for your courses. Instead of relying on third-party payment processors, you can set up pricing plans directly within the platform. Here’s what you can do:
- Set a one-time payment for lifetime access to your course.
- Allow students to access your course through recurring weekly, monthly, or yearly payments.
- If you want to offer a lead magnet or introductory content, you can create a free pricing plan.
- Bundle multiple courses together as a package, giving your customers more value while increasing your revenue potential.
Content bundling is especially useful when you want to upsell additional content. Consider creating a premium bundle with exclusive lessons or downloadable resources.
An additional advantage of pricing plans is that they place your course content behind a paywall, ensuring that only paying students can access your lessons.
- You can restrict access so that students only gain access to specific course pages only after purchase.
- You can also offer exclusive member-only content that is available only to those who have an active pricing plan
Using a teaser lesson as a free preview is a great way to entice potential students to sign up for the full course.
3. You can increase conversions with an optimized sales page
Your course sales page is where potential students decide whether or not to buy your course. Squarespace makes it easy to create a high-converting sales page with customizable templates and built-in marketing tools.
What to Include on Your Sales Page:
- Course overview: Clearly explain what students will learn.
- Customer testimonials & reviews: Build trust with social proof.
- Course previews: Offer a sneak peek at lesson content.
- Call-to-action buttons: Make it easy for students to enroll.
With Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor, you can design a sales page that looks professional without needing any coding knowledge.
4. Integrated marketing tools to attract more students
Squarespace isn’t just a course platform—it’s also a marketing powerhouse. With its built-in tools, you can promote your course without needing expensive third-party software.
Marketing Features:
- Email campaigns: Send newsletters, promotions, and follow-up emails directly from Squarespace.
- SEO: Optimize page titles, descriptions, and meta tags with keywords to rank higher in search engines.
- Social media integration: Easily share your course on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
- Analytics: Track sales, customer behavior, and conversion rates.
There are may ways to take advantage of these features. For instance, you could run a limited-time promotion or offer early-bird discounts to create urgency and boost sales.
5. Customer analytics
Selling courses isn’t just about getting people to sign up—it’s about understanding your audience and refining your approach. Squarespace’s analytics tools let you track:
- Where your students are coming from
- Which courses are performing best
- When potential students are dropping off before completing a purchase
With these insights, you can tweak your pricing, improve your sales page, and adjust your marketing efforts for better conversions.
6. A Professional, branded course experience
With Squarespace, you’re not just selling a course. You’re building a brand.
Unlike course platforms that limit customization, Squarespace allows you to design a course page that aligns with your brand identity.
You can customize:
- Brand colors & fonts to match your course pages to your existing website style.
- Custom layouts using Squarespace’s layout editor to create a unique course experience.
- Mobile-friendly design to ensure your courses look great on any device.
A well-branded course not only looks professional but also increases trust and credibility with potential students.
These are all compelling reasons why you should sign up for Squarespace and start monetizing your knowledge. Additional Reasons to consider include:
- Sell More Than Just Courses
Maybe your online course is just one piece of your business. With Squarespace, you can expand your offerings by selling digital downloads, coaching sessions, exclusive webinars, or even physical products. This flexibility allows you to build multiple income streams within a single platform.
- Lower transaction fees
Many course platforms take a hefty percentage of your earnings, cutting into your revenue. Squarespace, on the other hand, offers pricing plans with low (or even 0%) transaction fees, depending on your subscription level. This means more money stays in your pocket as your business scales.
Final Thoughts: Is Squarespace the Perfect Choice for Creating and Selling Your Online Course?
Absolutely Yes!
Squarespace makes it effortless to create, sell, and market online courses, while keeping everything professional, polished, and profitabler.
It removes the technical barriers to launching an online course business, allowing you to focus on:
- Sharing your knowledge
- Engaging with your audience
- Generating revenue
It’s perfect for everyone: Coach, consultant, artist, or entrepreneur, whoever you are, squarespace gives you everything you need to turn your expertise into an evergreen income stream.
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