5 Strategic Ways to Use Summary Blocks in Squarespace
Easy to overlook, Squarespace summary content blocks are a great addition to many areas of your Squarespace website. More than just sharing your latest posts, they can provide additional click-through options for products, portfolio items, and testimonials - just to name a few.
Summary blocks can guide your website visitor and can even help keep them on your website longer, decreasing your bounce rate. Better yet, making your best content as easy as possible to find ensures your visitor get the information they need from you, and not somebody else online.
Through this post, we are going to walk you through five strategic ways to use summary blocks on your Squarespace site!
Feature Related Blog Posts
Displaying related blog posts is a great way to encourage readers to check out more posts, see more of your free resources and learn about the topics you cover in your blog. This also means more opportunities to get them on your email list.
To add a related blog post block to your content, you need to have a few things set up beforehand.
Creating blog categories/tags for your posts can help keep things organized and allow you to control which posts are actually “related”.
Categories such as Squarespace, Business or Branding are a few of the favorites we like to use, but you’ll want to come up with categories that make the most sense for your niche.
Once you have created these categories and added them to your blog content, you can create your summary block within your blog post. To create your related blog post feature, select the carousel summary block option.
You can select whatever summary block option you like, but for this particular example, we like the carousel. From there, choose your Blog underneath the Content tab.
Next, you can customize the design and layout in the Layout tab. In the header text window, put Related Blog Posts. Our thumbnail graphics for our blog post are a little extended, so we want to make sure the full graphic displays by setting the aspect ratio to Auto. You can keep the items per row to 3.
After that, go to the Display window and select Show Thumbnail. Since we have our blog post titles within our post graphic, we do not need to select Show Title—this keeps it nice and minimalist. We have deselected Show Excerpt as well.
To make sure that only posts related to our original post category are displayed, under the Category Filter add the category that you want to display.
Share Related Products
Similar to your Related Blog Posts you can to encourage visitors to check out your entire shop and maybe add a few extra things to their cart before checking out. An easy way to do this is to add a Related Products section to your product listings on your shop pages.
To do this, go into the product listing on your Squarespace shop. Go to the Additional Info tab to add in a summary content block. Once again, you can select whatever summary block option you like, but for this one, we are going to use carousel.
Select Shop in the Content tab underneath the Product option. Just like our related blog posts, select Auto for aspect ratio, keep it to 3 items per row. You can also customize the header text to Related Products.
Next, on the Display tab, select what content you want to be displayed. Click Show Thumbnail and Show Title since our thumbnail graphic does not show the product title as clearly as the blog post graphics do. Underneath Category Filter, you can select whatever fits best for the specific product you are working on within your website.
Similarly to blog posts, you will have to create and assign product categories to each of your listings for this step to be applicable. Since for this example we are working with our Squarespace Kits, we will pick that option for the filter.
Hit save, and you are good to go! Your related products will now display at the end of your product listing for potential customers to check out and explore.
Display Testimonials
Another great way to utilize summary blocks is through promoting testimonials from clients and customers. Testimonials can be an extremely powerful way to build credibility for your business through the power of social validation.
Words of praise become even more powerful when presented by real life clients and customers—that information can be the difference between potential customers buying from you or closing out of their browser.
We created ours through a separate blog where each post featured a customer testimonial. A summary block then displays this information as a carousel featuring each post excerpt. See it in action on our Home page.
Promote a Masonry Portfolio
Show off your work through masonry style portfolio gallery. Create a gallery of images, snapshots, etc. that display your work or services. You can feature these items through a wall summary block using the gallery option.
We’ve used this technique to show off our favorite customer website designs. You can also view this in action on our Showcase page.
Create a Sidebar
Want a sidebar on your Squarespace site, but your template doesn’t include one?
This workaround has you covered for any Squarespace template, since the majority of them do not include sidebar functionality by default.
Get the full step-by-step tutorial from our post on Adding a Sidebar to any Squarespace Template here.
These are just a few options for using summary blocks throughout your website to improve your click rates, decrease your bounce rates, and most importantly improve the visitor’s browsing experience.
More than just recent posts, you can get incredibly creative with Squarespace summary blocks—think of ways to best utilize some of these strategies for your business. Can’t wait to see what you create!
Have questions? Let us know in the comments. We are here to help!
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