Why You Can’t Find the Name of Your Squarespace Template in 7.1 [2023]
If you’re planning to use Squarespace to build your website, you might want to imitate a great-looking site that you’ve seen somewhere else. How can you do this? By knowing which template it uses.
It’s never great to copy another site directly, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery as they say, and it’s an inevitable part of the creative process.
Firstly, spoiler alert, I used Squarespace to make this site. While doing so, I tried to find the template I had used to make it, and found it almost impossible. There are multiple guides online showing you how to do this, but they’re all wrong.
I am about to explain what those guides are telling you, why it is wrong, and the truth about finding your Squarespace template in 2023.
Squarespace templates in 7.0 vs 7.1 and your template ID
There was a time when finding the template ID was the key to finding out the template that another Squarespace site was using.
You right-clicked a webpage, went to ‘view source’ and then searched (CTRL + F) for ‘templateID’. The code that you found was the template ID number, and there were dedicated sites with lists showing the different IDs, and what they matched with.
If you’re using 7.0, this method still applies. It looks something like this:
Time has marched forward, 7.1 is in the game, and here is the change - template IDs for 7.1 are all the same. This means, that you cannot find your template name by searching the template ID. Nor can you Google the template ID or anything else, because it just returns the 7.1 ID.
Squarespace used to include the name of the template you had used for your own site in the help drop-down menu, but they don’t do this anymore:
Why do you need to know the Squarespace template name anyway?
This is a valid question. If all templates are from the same basic ID, what it really means is that any template can now be created from the components available within Squarespace. This means any aesthetic, and any combination of styles or designs can be recreated. Here are the reasons why you might still need to know a template name, that I can think of:
You don’t know about the above changes, and think the template ID is relevant to coding, ie if you’re looking for a custom code injection you might think you need this information.
You’ve seen a nice-looking Squarespace site elsewhere, want to emulate it, and want to know what template they started off with to create the initial look. This still seems like a valid reason.
If it’s not one of these reasons, I’m baffled.
Is it actually possible to find out the Squarespace template used for sites made in 7.1?
So, if it’s the second of these points, and you have seen a nice site made with 7.1 that you want to emulate, the question is, is it possible to find out the Squarespace template that they used to make it? The answer is, maybe, but it’s kind of boring.
There is no longer a way to identify different websites from the Template ID code. The only thing you can do is either:
Look at all the different templates on Squarespace and try and visually match them up with the website in question, or
Contact the owner of the website and ask them directly.
There is no other way of doing this. The annoying thing will be if the owner themselves doesn’t know, and if they don’t, they have no way of finding out. Thanks, Squarespace.
So, this is a short post and probably a disappointing answer, but I just wanted to round off this discussion, as people still don’t seem to fully understand the changes in Squarespace templates from 7.0 to 7.1, and why you can no longer discover the template name.
Did you find this helpful? That’s awesome - check out my other articles below. Do you know something exciting about template IDs in Squarespace version 7.1? Leave a comment down below and let’s get into it.
