03 · Why Move Off Squarespace
Great for getting started. Not built to compete.
Squarespace is a good platform for getting a business online quickly, and it did that job for Legal Synthesis. But for competing in the legal sector, I wouldn't work on the SEO of a Squarespace website. You would be investing money and getting no results, which is exactly what you have seen happen before.
Law firm searches are some of the most competitive on Google. The firms that win have fast sites, a clear page for every service and location, and the technical detail Google and AI tools rely on. Squarespace can do some of this, but not with the control that SEO in a competitive market needs.
Limited technical controlPage titles run through a site wide format, which is how your page titles ended up with the brand added twice. Fine control over things like canonical tags, indexing and redirects is limited.
Schema you can't shapeSquarespace generates basic business schema. Adding legal service, FAQ and person markup for Emma means code injection workarounds rather than a proper setup on every page.
Rigid page structureLayouts and URLs are set by the template. Building a clean structure of service pages, each linked from the menu and from each other, is harder than it should be.
Speed you can't tuneSquarespace loads its own scripts and image handling on every page. You can't strip back what a page loads, and speed matters for rankings and for clients on a phone.
Hard to scaleEach new service, location or article page is built by hand in the editor, with limited templates. SEO growth needs pages that can be added quickly and consistently.
WordPress gives us the controlsFull control over titles, schema, URLs, internal links, speed and page templates. It is the platform we can properly optimise, and you own it.
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My honest advice. Build the right foundation first, then do the SEO. That is why the new website comes first and the SEO and AI retainer starts once the new site is live and the structure is in place.
