A working demo, not a mock-up. Everything on this page is editable, the art below is placeholder art, and nothing here is stored on a server. How to make it yours →

Your name here

Illustration. Ink and paper, mostly.

hello@example.com Commissions open

Making this yours, and getting off Squarespace

Three separate things, in the order they should happen. Nothing here needs a subscription and nothing here needs code.

One — fill it with your work

  1. Press Edit this site at the bottom. Every bit of text on the page becomes typeable, including your name.
  2. Either paste your current site's address into the box above to pull your pictures across, or press Add a piece and choose photos from your camera roll. On a phone that opens the camera roll straight away, same as the app you are used to.
  3. Press Download my site. You get one file called index.html. Your pictures are inside that file, so it is the whole site, not a link to one.

Nothing you add is uploaded anywhere. It stays in the browser you are using until you download the file, and then it is on your device.

Two — put the file online

Any of these will host that one file for free, on your own domain. In order of least fiddly:

Three — point the domain at it

The good news first: you almost certainly do not have to move the domain anywhere. The domain and the website are two separate things, and only a couple of records need to change — the ones that say which computer answers for the website. Everything else, your email included, can stay where it is.

Start by finding out who the domain is actually with. Open account.squarespace.com/domains, find it, and read the Provider column. That is the answer. A public WHOIS lookup will mislead you here, because Squarespace registers domains through other companies, so it can say Tucows or Key-Systems for a domain that is really theirs. And if you bought it through Google Domains at some point, it is a Squarespace domain now whether you moved it or not: they took those over in 2023.

The one way to break something. If you have email on that domain, be careful with nameservers specifically. Changing the website records above leaves mail alone. Changing nameservers hands your whole DNS to a different company, and any mail record that does not get copied across stops working — post simply stops arriving and nothing warns you. Before any nameserver change, photograph or export every record, especially the ones marked MX, and the TXT ones mentioning SPF, DKIM or DMARC. Those are your email. Art can be put back in a minute; mail that silently bounces is invisible until somebody tells you they wrote and heard nothing.

Do not cancel Squarespace until the new site answers on your domain. Order: file online, records pointed, then check both the site and your email on your phone with wi-fi off, and only then cancel. One thing worth knowing while you decide: cancelling the website does not cancel the domain. It keeps renewing on its own and stays yours.

Later on

Updating it is the same loop every time: open the file, edit, download, drop the new file on the host. Four times a year, that is a few minutes each time. Nothing expires and no one can reprice it.