Adding a Sidebar to Your Squarespace Website
If you have visited a blog before, it is likely you have seen a space on the blog post itself where there is an archive. This archive section displays previous posts, advertisements, search bars, and whatever other goodies the creator wants to share.
When the archive is appealing (both in design and content), you might find yourself going down the rabbit hole. Reading one post after another. Hoping from one page to the next.
This is brilliant for SEO.
If you are on Squarespace, at first glance you might think this isn’t something that can be done on the blog… think again yall!
With some strategy and some creativity, we can utilize a sidebar strategy that creates the archive feature in a really beautiful way.
Let’s get to ittttttt
Creating the Sidebar
To create your sidebar, you can watch the video below, or simply follow the written steps beneath the video:
Open a new blog post
Write a filler title in like (This is My Blog Title)
Create 3 spacer blocks - drag them next to each other
Make the spacer block on the far right smaller: minimize over 1 tick
Make the spacer block in the middle smaller: make it as small as it will go
Under the left spacer block is where you will add your content: An image block, text blocks, anything else you want included in your blog. It will go here!
The middle spacer block won’t have anything under it. It is simply there to do its thang and hold the space
The right spacer block is where the magic happens: under this spacer block, use the + to add all content you want. If you are on a desktop and not a phone, look to the right of this post and you will see everything included in my sidebar. I like to have…
Intro text
An image
A search bar
A line to seperate
and a summary block for the archive!
Customize the Summary Block:
I recommend clicking through the different design options for the summary block.
The important thing to do, is make sure you select “Blog” as the page the summary block will apply to. That way, it will only pull through blog posts, and not other content that makes more sense in other areas of your website.
I create my sidebar graphics in Canva which includes the title. If you don’t want to do that, you can use a simple image and display the title. You will see that you can choose to display or hide title, date, excerpt, and “read more” button.
Save Yourself Some Time: Important!
You can really expedite the process of writing your blog when you create a blog template for yourself.
In this process, you will simply design how your want your blog to look (with a sidebar) and maybe including any extra elements you may predictably want to use (i.e. image blocks, gallery blocks, different heading options, lines and dividers).
When you have this established, you can simply duplicate this template post anytime you want to share a blog.
This way, you won’t need to redesign your posts everytime, they are already set and ready to go!
