Website builders
Squarespace Holiday Let Website, and When to Move On
Squarespace looks lovely and is easy to run. Booking is where holiday let and glamping owners start to feel its limits.
Maybe you’ve built a Squarespace site for your shepherd’s hut or cottage, or you’re about to. It will look good. The question is whether it will take bookings as the business grows.
A Squarespace holiday let website is a sound choice for design and for running the site yourself. It’s weaker on booking, because Squarespace has no built-in calendar for nightly stays. You add one with a booking tool, and that is where most limits show up.
What Squarespace does well for a holiday let
It makes a polished, photo-led site quickly, with no developer. For a glamping or holiday let owner who runs everything themselves, that counts for a lot.
- Design. The templates are clean and image-heavy, which suits a hut in a meadow or a cottage with a view. Galleries, full-width photos and simple layouts are easy to set up.
- Mobile. Guests often browse on their phones, and Squarespace layouts adapt to small screens without extra work.
- Editing. You can change text, swap photos and add a page yourself. There’s no waiting for someone to update a price.
- Basics included. Hosting, a domain option and SSL (the padlock in the browser) come as part of the package, so you’re not stitching together separate services.
How to add booking to a Squarespace holiday let site
You add booking through an embedded tool, an enquiry form, or a link out to another site. Squarespace itself doesn’t hold nightly availability, rates or minimum stays.
| Option | How it works | Suits | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booking widget (for example Lodgify or Bookalet) | The tool gives you embed code. You paste it into a page and guests check dates and book on your site. | Owners who want direct bookings with a live calendar | Monthly cost for the tool. The widget has its own look and rules. |
| Enquiry form and manual calendar | Guests send dates, you reply and confirm. | One or two units with low volume | You do the admin, and double bookings are on you. |
| Link out to Airbnb or another listing | A button sends guests to your listing page. | Owners starting out | Guests book through the platform, so you pay its commission. |
The widget route is the usual answer for “Squarespace booking for holiday lets”. Both Lodgify and Bookalet publish guides for embedding their widgets in a Squarespace page.
The basic set-up
- Choose a booking tool and add your unit, photos, rates and rules there.
- Connect its calendar to your Airbnb, Booking.com or other listing calendars, so a booking on one blocks the dates on the others. Most tools offer this, but check how yours handles it.
- Copy the embed code from the tool.
- On Squarespace, add a page, drop in an embed or code block, and paste the code.
- Test it on your phone, with a real date search, before you share the link.
The limits you will hit as bookings grow
Most limits come from the booking tool and the way it sits inside the page, not from Squarespace’s design. They tend to show up when you add units, change prices through the season, or want to tune the booking journey.
| Limit | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Seasonal rates and minimum stays | A midweek price, a weekend price and a two-night minimum in summer all have to live in the booking tool. Squarespace pages can’t calculate them. |
| Deposits and balances | Taking a deposit now and the balance later depends on what your booking tool supports. |
| Several unit types | A hut, a pod and a lodge each need their own availability, rates and pages. It gets fiddly to keep tidy. |
| Look and feel | An embedded widget can look different from the rest of your site, which can make the booking step feel like a different business. |
| Search visibility | Pages of embedded tools don’t give Google much text. You need real written content on each unit page. |
| Extras | Add-ons like a hot tub, firewood or a late checkout need the booking tool to support them. |
None of these are deal breakers on their own. Together they add up to more workarounds, more monthly tools and more things that can break.
We built Millie the Hut’s booking page to keep it simple for guests, with an availability calendar, a short enquiry form and a seasonal rate card (midweek and weekend prices, minimum stays) on one page. The site brought 42 direct bookings in its first year, saving the owners over £3,000 in commission.
Signs you’ve outgrown Squarespace
You’ve outgrown it when the workarounds cost you more time or bookings than a better setup would. A few clear signs help you decide.
Even guests who find you on a listing site often search for your own website afterwards. They hope for a better deal, or they know you keep more of the money on a direct booking. So the website needs to make booking easy, not just look nice.
Alternatives to a Squarespace holiday let website
The main alternatives are an all-in-one holiday let platform, WordPress, and a custom build. Each trades some of Squarespace’s ease for more control over booking and search.
| Route | Good for | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Stay on Squarespace with a booking widget | One or two units and DIY owners | Limits above as you grow |
| All-in-one holiday let platform with its own site builder | Owners who want booking and site in one login | Less design freedom, and your site depends on one tool |
| WordPress with a booking plugin | Owners who want control and are happy to manage updates | More upkeep and more to go wrong |
| A custom-built site with an embedded booking system | Several units, seasonal rates, direct bookings as the main goal | Costs more than DIY |
You don’t have to throw out your booking tool to change your site. Many owners keep a tool like Lodgify and put a custom website in front of it. We cover that on our Lodgify integration page.
The right pick also depends on what you let. A cottage owner has different needs from a glamping owner with a hot tub and extras, so see our pages on holiday let website design and unique stays website design for how we think about each.
FAQs
Is Squarespace good for a holiday let website?
It is good for the look and feel of a holiday let website. Templates are polished, mobile-friendly and easy to edit yourself. It has no built-in booking engine for nightly stays, so you need an embedded booking tool or an enquiry form. For one or two properties with modest booking volume, that can work well.
How do I take bookings on a Squarespace holiday let website?
The usual route is a booking tool such as Lodgify or Bookalet, which gives you a widget to paste into a page. Guests check dates and book from your site. The simpler route is an enquiry form with a calendar you update yourself. Both work, but the widget saves manual admin.
Can I build a glamping website on Squarespace?
Yes. Glamping suits Squarespace’s image-led templates, and a few units with a gallery, a page per unit and a booking widget is manageable. Things get harder with several unit types, seasonal rates, minimum stays and extras like hot tubs, because the booking tool has to handle all of that, not Squarespace.
When should I move off Squarespace?
Move when the site stops matching how you take bookings. Common signs are guests asking for prices that your page can’t show, a booking widget that looks out of place, a growing list of units, or pages you can’t get to rank on Google. Until then, staying put is usually cheaper and simpler.
Find out if your site is holding you back
Send us your website and we’ll tell you, for free, what’s stopping it getting bookings. Start with a free website audit.