How to Delete a Page in Sqarespace and Prevent Issues

Squarespace UI is intuitive and easy to work with, so you should not have any difficulties deleting pages. However, after deleting a page, you might get issues you want to avoid.

To delete a page in Squarespace, navigate to Website > Pages, hover over a page item, click the left-hand Bin icon, and confirm the deletion. This instruction applies to regular pages and can also be used to delete all pages within a Collection page group. To delete an individual page within a collection, navigate to its index page, click on the target page options (dots button), click the DELETE option, and confirm the action.

Let’s dive into details to do everything properly.

How to Delete a Regular Page

You must always ask yourself how changes you make to your website impact users, especially if you are about to delete or hide a page.

Suppose you have a live website and want to delete a page that has been available for a while for users. It would be a good idea to set up redirects or make the Not Found page look better and unique.

It doesn’t matter if the page has been public or private. Why? As soon as you delete the page, anyone who has its URL (a bookmark, an email link, a social media post link, a Google search results link, etc.) will land on the 404 page. Read this section if you want manage it properly.

Follow these 6 steps to delete a page:

1. Navigate to the Dashboard and select your website
2. Click on Website
3. Hover over the page you want to delete and click on the gear icon
4. Navigate to the General page settings
5. Delete the page
6. Confirm deletion

How to Delete Collection Pages

Squarespace provides options to delete the entire collection (all pages at once) or an individual page of a collection.

How to Delete All Pages of a Collection

The decision to delete the entire page collection, especially if it has many pages, might hurt your website and bring confusion to the website users. Hopefully you know what do.

If you’re not about to do so, go through the instruction to see how to avoid making this mistake:

1. Navigate to the Dashboard and select your website
2. Click on Website
3. Hover over the collection page you want to delete and click on the gear icon
4. Navigate to the General page settings
5. Delete the page including all child pages
6. Confirm deletion

How to Delete an Individual Page of a Collection

Follow these 5 steps to delete an individual page of a collection:

1. Navigate to the Dashboard and select your website
2. Click on Website
3. Navigate to the collection index page
4. Delete a target individual collection page
5. Confirm deletion

How to Restore a Page after Deletion

Like many other platforms, Squarespace supports Trash that keeps deleted pages for 30 days before complete deletion. During this time, you can easily restore any page you need.

Here’s how to do this:

1. Navigate to the Dashboard and select your website
2. Click on Website and scroll down to the very bottom
3. Navigate to Trash of deleted pages
4. Hover over the target page and click RESTORE
5. Confirm action

Set Up Redirects and Customize 404 Page After Deleting a Page

301 and 302 Redirects

After you delete a page, it becomes inaccessible to visitors. That brings a negative user experience, which should be smoothed out.

There are two main redirect codes: 301 and 302. 302 is more suitable if you want to hide a page because most likely it’s a temporary change and you will make it public back at some point. When it comes to a page deletion, the 301 code is a better choice, because it’s a permanent change.

Try to find a page with similar content to one you want to delete and do URL mappings.

Custom 404 page

What to do if you can’t find a page to redirect to? Well, the only option in this case is to redirect to homepage or the 404 page.

If homepage is not an option, consider customizing the 404 page if you haven’t yet.

The default Squarespace 404 page doesn’t look good. We can make it better by adding a search bar, listing top articles, or any other content that might be interesting to your website visitors.

Read this post to learn how to improve the Not Found page - Creating a Custom 404 Page in Squarespace. Best Practices

How the Page Disabling Impacts SEO

As soon as a page gets deleted, neither users nor search engines can access it.

Same thing as before - if the page has been live and publicly accessible for a while, most likely Google has indexed it. The next time the search engine bot tries to access the page, it will get a 404 error, which is not good.

You can fix it by setting up redirects as described above or you can delete the page from search engines as well.

Read this post to learn how to properly do this - Squarespace SEO. 3 Ways to Hide a Page from Google.

Summary

Deleting a page in Squarespace takes a few minutes of work. The process is slightly different for regular and collection pages, but still easy to do.

However, if you delete a page, you might get issues related to user experience or SEO, but that’s still manageable and doesn’t take too much time and effort.