or How to Put Your WordPress Blog into Your Squarespace Site.
Photo by Andrew Furlan on Unsplash
So…I know it may be hard to believe (not) but I sometimes do really stupid things that make life much harder than it should be.
I started my Squarespace site because of the release of my first book, and I wanted to have a professional website with all my info and whatnot. This was a good idea. I really like the Squarespace site at tristramlowe.com.
Squarespace comes with its own blogging platform, so I migrated my blog over there.
But I was never happy with it as a blog. Some of the things that WordPress does intuitively are cumbersome and time-consuming on Squarespace. Also, there is no built-in community of bloggers like there is on WordPress, which was really disappointing.
So I hung on to my WordPress blog and decided—this is the stupid part—to keep both blogs. Squarespace would have my “professional” posts about my book and related things, and WordPress would be the fun, random thoughts, and “other” posts that I didn’t feel were appropriate for the “professional” page.
But having two author blogs just made me not want to blog at all.
So I didn’t.
I haven’t posted anything since June.
It was really stupid.
I wanted to write. I have things to say, thoughts to share. But then I had to decide which blog it would work best for, and if it was Squarespace, to jump through the hoops there to make it look good. And then sometimes I would post the same thing on both blogs, which must have been annoying to anyone who happened to follow both…sorry.
So I just stopped.
Fast forward to yesterday-ish (I’m a little slow sometimes), when I realized that it didn’t have to be that way.
I only need one blog, my WordPress one, which I prefer to write on.
And I can keep my Squarespace site.
Magically—because magic is the best—I figured out how to merge the two.
I’m writing this down here, in part, so I can recall how to do it if I ever have to again—my memory for technical things is dismal—but also in case it helps anyone else who wants to do the same thing.
In Squarespace:
I added a link in my menu bar that opens my WordPress blog.
Click Pages.
Click Main Navigation.
Click + (plus sign) and then Link.
Enter the name (Journal, in my case) and the URL for the link.
Then I hid the link to my internal Squarespace blog so it would not be public anymore.
Simple.
In WordPress:
WordPress is a little weird because there are two completely different interfaces to edit things and post. I don’t really understand why this is, but it is. There is what I’ll call the simple interface with the blue and white theme, and then there is the WP Admin interface with the charcoal and white theme. They basically do the same things in different ways, so I don’t know why we need them both but here’s what I did.
Simple interface:
Go to Themes and hit the Customize button.
Click on Menus and then Menu.
Click Add Items.
Click Custom Links and add the URL and Link Text (name of your menu link).
Click Add to Menu.
Arrange the order by dragging the menu items on the left to where you want them.
This interface autosaves.
WP Admin interface:
Click Appearance, then Menus.
Click Custom Links and add the URL and Link Text (name of your menu link).
Click Add to Menu.
Arrange the order by dragging the menu items on the right to where you want them.
Click Save Menu.
I added all my Squarespace menu links into my WordPress menu this way, so it “mostly” feels that you are always on the same site. It’s only “mostly” because the themes from one site to the next are not a perfect match, but I got them as close as I could. You can see how it works on my page by going to tristramlowe.com or just clicking the “home” button above. They are now the same thing.
Voila.
Squarespace and WordPress merged.
Stupidity thwarted.
Journal 