Set up your website
About setting up your website
Square Websites offers an all-in-one platform for businesses to create and manage their online presence. It simplifies website building with customizable templates and section-based elements, enabling you to effectively showcase your items, brand design, and story. Your website also seamlessly integrates with Square's payment processor, ensuring all payments are secure and creating trust with your customers.
Square offers this robust online platform that covers your website, items, order fulfillment, customers, and much more. You can even purchase a domain from Square and set up an email address based on that domain.
Before you begin
You can set up your website from Square Dashboard.
For more enhanced features, make sure you have an active paid subscription. If you don’t have an active subscription, sign up to create your website or go to Square Dashboard > Online > Websites (or Online store).
To get the most up-to-date website features from Square, Weebly creators can use this article to transition from the Weebly builder to the Square Websites builder. For non-commerce creators, skip any commerce-related steps.
Step 1: Create and set up items for online selling
When creating your eCommerce website, you'll need to start with building your item catalog.
First, learn how to create and edit items and create and edit item categories to start building your item library. Once you have your item library, learn how to set up items for your website to get them ready for online selling.
Step 2: Set up fulfillment methods
The items you sell online will need to be assigned to specific fulfillment methods so that customers who check out from your site know how they'll receive their items. Choose from available online fulfillment options depending on what you sell. Learn how to:
Step 3: Collect taxes
You can apply taxes to your online sales, and create custom taxes with specific rules. The amount of sales tax charged on an online purchase is determined by applying the tax rate to the total price of taxable items in an order. Depending on business needs, you can include tax in the item price, charge tax on local delivery fees, use in-person tax rates for pickup, local delivery, and QR code orders, and more. Learn how to create and manage sales tax settings.
Step 4: Design your site
When customers open a website for the first time, everything from colors, fonts, and shapes can affect how they respond to its content, including anything you might sell. When getting started, it's best to start designing using the mobile view in the site editor, as most of your traffic will be from mobile devices. Most design features are optional, but the more you showcase your brand, the more memorable your site will be to customers and visitors.
Review these articles to learn how to seamlessly bring your website design and branding together.
Step 5: Add more features to enhance your site (optional)
To expand how visitors interact with your site, you can include additional features to bolster what your website can do.
Create and publish blog posts that readers can share on social platforms to help you create more engagement. Learn how to create a blog for your website.
You can create an image gallery that shows off your entire image portfolio of customers with your items, attendees at your event, completed services, photography prints, and more. Learn how to add image galleries and slideshows to your website.
Host videos on your website by uploading your own files or embedding ones from YouTube to help you create a visually engaging online experience. Learn how to add videos to your website.
You can upload PDF documents to your website for any purpose such as a menu, application, or flier. Learn how to add PDF files to your website.
For further customization, you can add external content to your website with embedded code to set up the kind of online experience your visitors need.
Step 6: Set up checkout
Customers are looking for the easiest ways to find the items they need and check out. To set this up, learn how to manage checkout options for your website and manage payment options for your website.
Step 7: Set up your domain
A domain, often known as a URL or site address, is what helps customers and visitors find your website while browsing the internet. You have several ways to get a domain associated with your website, and Square includes a free option to make setup easy. Learn how to:
You can also purchase a domain from Square and set up an email address based on that domain. Learn how to set up an email address for your website with Google Workspace.
Step 8: Publish your site
When everything is complete, it's time to publish your site. When you publish a website, you're making the edited version of the site go live for people browsing the internet to see. You can also preview any changes you've made to your site before you make them go live. Learn how to publish and unpublish your website.