How to Change Your Squarespace Website Domain Name (2025)
About this Squarespace video tutorial
To get Designing the Row's exclusive 20-25% off Squarespace discount, visit https://www.designingtherow.com/squarespace. When your website is ready to be launched, you'll need to update your domain or URL information on the front and back ends of your website. We'll go over what to do to get a domain or use an existing domain so all your website records are in order.
Timestamps
0:18 - Changing Your Built-In Domain
1:19 - Getting An External Domain
2:43 - Using An Existing Domain
4:30 - Next Steps With Google
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If you’ve been following along with the videos and articles I’ve been creating recently surrounding my Custom Copy Generator, you may be at the point with your website process that you’d want to get your URL, or your domain, in order. While there may be reasons to hold off on making a decision about your domain right now, we’ll get to that later, and you can always come back to this post when you need help with your site’s domain.
Changing Your Built-In Domain
For the first thing you need to do, we won’t be dealing with your external domain, the record that connects your site to the internet, but actually fixing the internal domain that Squarespace automatically applies to all websites built on the platform. At the creation of a site, Squarespace will put together a random string of words, and cleaning this up is a valuable part of getting your site’s details organized on the back end of your website.
Go to ‘settings’ on the left-hand side of your Squarespace editor, go to ‘domains and email’, and under ‘get a domain’, you can type into the ‘Site ID’ field and update your built in domain to something custom/branded to your business. It’s a good idea for this to be what your domain is or what you would like your domain to be, but it’s mostly so you can find this site as easily as possible when going through Squarespace, so it’s up to you.
NOTE: You’ll also be getting an email confirming this change of built-in domain to the email address connected to your Squarespace account, so be on the lookout for that message.
Getting An External Domain
Now we can move on to the external domains, which has two options on how to proceed. Firstly, I’ll tell you how to get a brand-new external domain for your website.
Under ‘domains and email’, when you click ‘get a domain’, it brings up some suggestions based on your site title that you can use of freely available URLs. You’re also welcome to type in the domain name you’d like your site to have. If this desired domain is in use by another website, you obviously won’t be able to use it, but it will give you some other options for similar domain names (.net versus .com, etc) you can use.
You can also go to domains.squarespace.com and search through domain possibilities to get the same results if you’re wanting to shop around.
NOTE: If you haven’t gotten your domain yet and you’re confident you want to use Squarespace, I would pause here if you’re thinking about doing an annual plan. An annual plan through Squarespace includes one year free of a domain name, so it can be a nice way to cut down on the expenses connected to launching your website.
Using An Existing Domain
If you already have a domain name connected to an existing site that you’ll want to move over to your Squarespace site, under ‘domains and email’, click ‘use a domain I own’, and type it into the text field. If this domain is already connected to a Squarespace website, it’s incredibly easy and intuitive to move this domain over as long as you have administrative access on both accounts. If your existing domain is on a site built on a non-Squareapace platform like GoDaddy, Network Solutions, or BlueHost, you can leave your domain name with those providers but connect it to your Squarespace site.
NOTE: If you have things like email addresses connected to your existing domain, I do recommend going into the domain records manually and updating them, just to make sure none of your important digital business information is jeopardized.
Next Steps With Google Workspace
When you’ve been going to the ‘domains and email’ section in settings, you may have noticed a button to sign up for Google Workspace. This is a valuable tool for your business I recommend you utilize, and all you need to do to learn how to set your business up with Google Workspace is to watch this video next!
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