5 simple ways to add a Portfolio to your Squarespace website
Creating a website with Squarespace is pretty darn easy, but doing any sort of customization sometimes requires a bit of thinking outside of the box.
While the free, built-in templates can be a great guide for your site, they can also be a little bit limiting. When using one of those to build your site, it’s not obvious how much you can actually do with Squarespace (and trust me, you can do a lot!)
So, that’s when it’s great to have someone who’s been working with it for years (me!) to pass along a few tricks about things you can create, easily, with just a little bit of guidance.
Today I’m going to show you a few different ways you can display your Portfolio on your Squarespace site, which is a question I get quite a lot. And for good reason — Portfolios are seriously important!
But they’re also very varied, as in, a portfolio for a photographer is going to look a lot different than a portfolio for a copywriter.
So that’s why I’m here, to give you a bunch of options that I think are great, and you can choose which one would work best for your type of business and portfolio content!
There's options here for Squarespace 7.0 and 7.1. If you are using Squarespace 7.0, the examples below are based on using the Brine template, but if you know how your template works, you should be able to just take these ideas and adapt them slightly to implement them on your template (yay!).
PS - we cover 3 of the ways below in this video, but there's more in the post so make sure to read the whole thing!
Use your existing blog for your portfolio, and separate your portfolio with categories
This may seem pretty obvious, but this is definitely one of my fav techniques for your portfolio. And there’s a couple of different options when using your blog.
This is actually what I do on my site! I have one blog with tonnes of different content on it, and I organise it into different categories. One of those categories is my Portfolio!
You can see the live example by going to my main blog page, then toggling the dropdown menu, there you will see “Portfolio”. Click on that and the blog will only show things that I have categorized with “Portfolio” - easy, right?
This is a simple method, and great for people who don’t have or need extensive portfolios (like my biz!)
Create a whole new blog for your portfolio
Did you know that you can have more than one Blog on a Squarespace site? You can actually have as many as you want. So you could have your regular blog, with all of your regular blog content, and then you could add a new blog, and call it “Portfolio”.
It acts just like a regular blog, except there’s no regular blog content on it, just portfolio pieces!
I love this technique for larger portfolios that need more organizing because you can add categories (just like you would in a regular blog) but these categories could help organize your portfolio. Eg if you were a photographer you could have categories like: Weddings, Portraits, Engagements etc. It’s a great clean way to display lots of pieces.
I also love it because you can add as little or as much information you want to for each piece. Within the Portfolio *blog* post, you could have a paragraph of text talking about the project, you could have images, galleries, videos, whatever you want! You can put anything into a post.
One of our clients, Blnk Films, uses this method for her Portfolio. I think she has done a beautiful job of making her Portfolio look organized and professional, while still having that really artistic and intriguing vibe that you should get from a Portfolio, it doesn’t feel like a “blog” at all. Check it out here!
Create a stacked index-page with different portfolio sections
I loveeee this style of portfolio page! It’s slick and pretty, and just works really well! The only draw back to this would be that if you had lots of text or content for 1 portfolio piece, it might make the different sections a bit big. I think this style of Portfolio page works better with less content.
If you are using Squarespace 7.0, this technique will only work with the Brine Family. If you are using Squarespace 7.1, this will work on any template!
Start by creating a top section that has different thumbnails for each of your projects
Then create a new index page section for each project (if you’re on 7.0, this is just a regular page section). You can visually separate these sections by using different background colors. You can also add whatever you like to these sections: Gallery blocks, videos, text etc.
To connect everything, you’ll want to use Anchor-Links, which are those links that jump to different sections of the page. If you’re not sure how to create links that jump down the page, check out this in-depth video tutorial on how to create anchor links in Squarespace 7.1 and 7.0!
You’ll want to use Anchor-Links to link the thumbnail images at the top…
and I like to add a “back-to-top” link to the bottom of every index section. This just makes it easy for the visitor to go back to the top quickly so they can see the thumbnails and to view another project.
We use this exact method in our Squarespace Template Kit “Sophie 7.0” which you can view here.
Use a drop-down menu and different Gallery pages
This is another great method to organize your projects even further, and it’s really easy.
You can easily add a drop-down menu to your main Squarespace header menu:
Head over to your Pages panel and click on the + icon to add a new page.
Instead of adding a page, add a “folder”. The folder will act as a drop-down menu.
Then you can click on the + icon to add a new page. Once you’ve added this new page, you can click and drag it into the folder in the Pages panel. Once it’s in in the folder, it will now only show up when you hover over your main menu folder link (you may need to refresh your page before you see this change)
You can add as many pages as you want into this folder, and they can be any type of page: a regular page, a gallery page, a blog etc. You can get creative!
Use the Squarespace 7.1 Portfolio feature page
An amazing upgrade for our Squarespace 7.1 users is Portfolio pages. This is a purpose-built page specifically for portfolios (finally!)
We have a whole dedicated post to breaking down exactly how to use the portfolio pages, but let’s dive into the basics:
How to Add a Portfolio Page
From your Main Navigation Menu, go to Pages
Press + (plus) to add a new page
Choose Portfolio: this will prompt you to choose a design, choose one, it doesn’t matter which one as we can change this later
And that’s it, you’ve added a new portfolio page!
Some great features of the portfolio page:
This page is completely customizable like any other Squarespace 7.0 page, which is amazing.
You can click on the + icon to add different projects, kind of like a blog, but it’s a bit less advanced than a blog.
The big pro of portfolio pages it that the project pages, unlike blog posts, are completely customizable like any other page. So they have a ton more design options including adding page sections, photo grids, slideshow, etc.
A couple of cons about the portfolio pages:
There’s a limit of 40 projects in the portfolio
They don’t have the option of putting your projects in draft mode before you publish them
You can’t add categories or tags to these yet
You can’t move the project pages anywhere else around the site, or even to a different portfolio, so it’s stuck there forever.
Final tip:
Gallery Blocks and Gallery Sections are your best friend for Portfolios
Gallery Blocks are built-in Squarespace “blocks” that you can use on any template.
They are solely for displaying images in beautiful and functional ways, and there’s so many different settings on them that you can use to adjust them so they’re perfect to display your images.
If you have images to display in your Portfolio, I highly recommend playing around with these. You can create so many beautiful layouts for your photos (see three different layouts below).
Just click to add a block like you normally would, then scroll down to the Gallery section:
Gallery Sections are only available in Squarespace 7.1. They are entire page sections dedicated to display photos. They have a ton of different layouts similar to those in the gallery blocks, but these are a bit more fun because you can create full-width options!
Add a Gallery Section in Squarespace 7.1 by
Clicking EDIT on your page
Clicking + Add a New Section
Choose Gallery
Then in the section settings, you can add images and adjust the layout of the gallery!
I hope this has inspired you to get creative with your portfolio. All of these options are extremely easy to implement, work really well and are easy to update as your portfolio grows too, so choose one and get that portfolio up!
Check out these posts for more Portfolio tips 👇
The Ultimate Guide to Portfolio Pages in Squarespace 7.1
How to Build a Design Portfolio when you haven’t had any clients yet
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