Should I use Fluid Engine in Squarespace?

So what is the deal with Fluid Engine? Well, we've been using it for several months now and use it on all new client sites. Here are our thoughts.

One of the reasons we chose Squarespace as our preferred platform for my business is that we believe everyone should have a beautiful-looking, high-converting website that they can manage themselves, no matter how proficient you are with technology and design. With Squarespace, with a little bit of training, we were able to confidently hand over my clients sites, safe in the knowledge that they couldn't totally mess things up.

Prior to Fluid Engine, when you moved something around the screen, you could instantly see the impact on the other elements on the page and if there was a bit of clicking and dragging to be done, it was very doable and visually responsive. With Fluid Engine, you can move elements around a page independently of each other. Indeed you can layer them up, one on top of another if you wish. So the potential for design chaos is huge! This is surprising, given that Squarespace's aim is to enable the non-designer to design their website. In our opinion, non-designers are now in for a much more complex experience!

So will we still recommend Squarespace to our clients? Still a resounding yes, as we believe things will get easier as FE rolls out and I believe Squarespace is a beautiful tool with many many great functionalities for businesses looking to have a great online presence.

In addition to moving things around the screen, Fluid Engine allows you to edit everything separately for mobile, without the need for a heap of custom code. This is brilliant, but it has doubled the amount of time it takes to design a page. It no longer stacks elements in the order of your desktop layout. It stacks them in the order in which you added them to the page. So, a headache for non-designers, and more design time even for the pros. The question is, will Squarespace designers increase their fees in view of this development? Time will tell. We have not yet revised my pricing, but for more complex sites built in Fluid Engine there will definitely be a knock-on effect, given the separate mobile editor.

If all this sounds a bit scary, it’s useful to know not all pages on Squarespace 7.1 sites are using the new Fluid Engine editor. Blog pages, products pages, events pages and other ‘collection’ pages are still using the Classic Editor. So, for a recent client, we built her entire website using Fluid Engine, because we knew she would primarily be using the blog page going forward, which uses the Classic Editor and is more straightforward to lay out. She is not likely to be creating brand new pages herself, so Fluid Engine won’t really be an issue for her.

“But what about Fluid Engine and tablet layout? I heard it doesn’t work on tablet!”

Strangely, when Squarespace were building the mobile editor, they did not create an editor for tablet-view and this is definitely causing some headaches for tablet-users. Luckily, a code expert by the name of Will Mayers has come up with a solution for this, ostensibly allowing users to design everything in tablet mode instead of mobile mode, and everything looks good on both. You can find out more about this here (and buy him a coffee to say thanks for saving us all on this one!)

Can you switch Fluid Engine off, if you already have a Squarespace 7.1 site?

If all of this is sounding a bit terrifying, you do have the option to turn Fluid Engine off. We don’t know for how long we will have this option, but for now it’s there.

✅ If you already have a site built in 7.1 using the classic editor, if you or your designer is a Circle member, you can disable Fluid Engine entirely.

✅ If you built your site yourself and are not a Circle member, you simply have to ignore the 'Upgrade' button you will see when you are in editing mode.

✅ If you start a new site, it will automatically use Fluid Engine, but you can still choose to use page layouts using the Classic Editor. You'll be prompted to upgrade all the time, but it is technically possible to keep using the Classic Editor. We just don't know for how long.

And if you don't know what we are talking about, you are probably still on 7.0 and it might be time to move to 7.1. Like us! You’re reading this on our new 7.1 Fluid-Engine site.