Squarespace Member Sites and their limitations 2026

TL;DR - If you want to manually approve members to your Squarespace website, Member Sites isn’t suitable.

I’ve been a long-time advocate for Squarespace, having worked with them since 2007. I have provided clients with solutions based on Squarespace for many years but I am always open and honest with potential clients about what is possible with Squarespace and what isn’t. I will tell you from the outset whether the features you need are included, can be developed, or if you need a different platform to meet your needs.

If your client’s primary aim is to build a beautiful website, Squarespace is a great solution. Squarespace websites are usually streets ahead, at least from a design standpoint, and they continue to invest heavily in the platform by adding features at a steady pace (see our updates) but there are inevitably some areas where other platforms are slightly ahead. β€œMembership” features are one example.

In November 2020, Squarespace launched the Member Areas feature after a long period of development and testing. In March 2021, four months after the public launch, I discussed features that were missing from Squarespace Member Areas with the Product Team. I’m an active supporter of Squarespace (a long time Squarespace Expert, Squarespace Circle Leader, Squarespace Forum Moderator and so on) and so I posted this article, not to complain but for transparency. It describes the features that are β€œmissing” - written from both my perspective as a Experience Design Consultant and to aggregate feedback from clients who wanted to use the feature.

As features are released or updated I will update the list to keep it current.

[This article was last updated in August 2026].

Paul

What are β€˜Member Sites’?

The Member Sites feature (previously branded Member Areas) was added to allow site owners to create a β€œmembership site” or β€œgated content” - content that is only available to members. You can offer your site visitors free membership to your Member Site or you can charge a fee every week, every month or every year. If you do charge a fee you’ll need to pay some pretty high transaction fees to Squarespace - up to 7%) on top of the Stripe payment processing fees.

It took years to develop Member Sites. The initial version, released in 2020, was what we typically refer to as the 'minimum viable product'. Squarespace built the basics and made them available to gather feedback on how it was used and which features should be added over time. I know you can expect some major improvements to be made over the next five years, and I’m looking forward to them.

In 2021 they added different fee options so that you can offer members the opportunity to pay either a monthly or yearly fee to access the same Member Site. Or, they can pay a set amount as a single payment or split across installment payments.

In early 2022 they added Video Pages, allowing site owners to upload up to 50.5 hours of video content (depending on the pricing plan) to their Member Site, and further enhancements to Member Site Video Pages are expected in early 2023.

The missing features

If you are considering using Member Sites, here are some of the limitations that you’ll want to be aware of (in no particular order):

  1. There’s no manual approval feature. Anyone can sign-up! There isn’t a feature that allows you to approve members. It makes it unsuitable for situations where members must be approved, for example trade bodies, societies and clubs. It’s not ideal but the workaround is to password protect the sign up page. I’ve documented this in How to manually approve members in Squarespace.

  2. Users cannot be imported. It would make sense to be able to import a list of people and automatically create accounts for them, but this simply isn’t possible. You cannot sign users up for a member account on their behalf or import member profiles manually. Each member must personally sign up for membership and establish their own customer account with login credentials. If you are migrating members to Squarespace from another platform, you’ll need to contact all your existing members and invite them to create their own new account.

  3. Profiles cannot be corrected or removed. If a member enters incorrect personal data, such as a mistyped email address, it cannot be corrected. If someone signs up with the wrong email address, the only way for a member or a site owner to correct this is to cancel their membership and start a new one! Data protection laws in many countries require personal data to be accurate and kept up to date. GDPR says that "Every reasonable step must be taken to ensure that personal data that are inaccurate, are rectified without delay". Currently, the only way to edit data is to email Squarespace and ask them to correct it, but this generally takes 4-6 weeks! It isn't sustainable for any business to need to email Squarespace when members ask for their data to be corrected or removed.

  4. No branding or styling opportunities exist. You cannot style the popup windows for login, sign-up or the account panel (where members manage their account). This can be a deal breaker for many organisations because you can have black on white only - the Squarespace branding colours and the Squarespace (β€˜Clarkson’) font. In August 2022, Squarespace added a new partially customisable section for Member Sign-up Blocks and Access Denied screens, but it only allows you to display a brief summary of the features. It does not allow you to style it. Squarespace considers itself the leader in website design so it’s a little disappointing that these cannot be styled yet. Perhaps in 2027?

  5. Sign-up forms are fixed. In addition to the lack of styling options, you cannot prompt customers for information during sign-up, for example to ask customers to accept your terms and conditions. The fields cannot be changed.

  6. Transaction fees are high. On the 'Basic' website plan the transaction fee is 7% and on the 'Core' website plan it is now 5% (it was 4% in 2024). I would have liked to see lower transaction fees. The price difference between the annual Basic and Core plans is currently $84 USD per year, so the point at which you’ll want to move to β€˜Core’ is when you sell more than $4,200 in memberships per year ($350 per month) [calculated at $84 Γ· 2% = $4,200].

  7. Profile content is fixed. Organisations usually need to keep track of member information but this cannot be integrated with Member Sites. For example, you cannot add custom fields to store a customer's date of birth, their official membership number or a customer's favourite products. You must store and manage this information elsewhere (i.e. not on Squarespace).

  8. Images and files are not protected by Member Sites. Squarespace page content is protected better than with any other membership product, but files (like PDFs or Word documents) added to Member Sites are not currently protected. These are still vulnerable and can still be searched and accessed from any search engine.

  9. No Member-specific analytics. It isn’t currently possible to track signups or cancellations in Analytics, or to filter the page views and popular content for Member Site content. This makes it really difficult to gain insights into member-specific activity.

  10. Recurring payments are fixed and can never increase. To be fair, this is true for many membership platforms and may not be a problem for your situation, but it is something to be aware of. For example, I know that many industry bodies want to increase their membership fees on an annual basis.

  11. You cannot fully test the Member Site features during a free trial. Although you can create Member Site pages for your content, you will not be able to test Member Sites from a potential member’s point of view until you have signed up and paid for a Member Site subscription plan. For example, you will not be able to test the member sign-up process to see what potential members will see when they try to sign-up.

  12. Member Site content cannot overlap and members cannot β€˜upgrade’. On the Core and Pro plans you can have several different content areas (β€œMember Sites”) but these content areas are entirely separate. For example, if you publish content to one Member Site, it will not be accessible to members in other Member Sites - you will need to manually duplicate the same content for each one! Also, if you offer a basic and a premium plan to customers they cannot β€œupgrade” from one to the other. They must manually cancel their first subscription and then purchase a new one!