How to Create a Blog on Square

The huge benefits of blogging are well-known to most. A well-organized blog with high-quality content is the core element of any content marketing strategy. It’s helped many achieve their business objectives – why not yours? 

A blog can help you reach a wider audience, show the human face of your company, educate users about your brand, increase your website traffic, and boost your conversion rates. There are many benefits and hardly any drawbacks to creating one. For this reason, in this brief guide, we’ll lead you through the simple steps of creating a blog on Square.

What Is Square?

Square refers to multiple entities. You may recognize Square as one of the more prominent payment gateways used in the US, but it’s also a part of the conglomerate Block, Inc. More importantly, though, the Square we’re talking about is an e-commerce solution built by Square, also known as Square Online, where you can also build a blog.

Square Online became possible thanks to the merger between Square and Weebly, the latter being an already famous website builder. Square acquired Weebly in 2018 and used its technologies and software solutions to develop the Square Online builder.

The Square Online builder continues to coexist alongside the Weebly builder. Still, unlike the latter, its sole purpose is to enable users and business owners to build and manage e-commerce websites or online stores quickly and easily.

Does Square Offer a Blog?

The answer is yes. Square does offer a blogging solution, or more accurately, something along the lines of a blogging functionality. They’ve called it Stories.

To use Square Online Stories, you need to log in to your Square account and open your website in the Square Online builder for editing. You need to add a new “Stories overview” page within the Square Online builder. If you can’t see it right away among the available page types, click “Show more.” 

The following image shows how this looks in the Square Online builder:

You can see the “Stories overview” option in the left sidebar, accompanied by a brief explanation of its function. The description implies that the role of a story is approximately equivalent to a blog post. So, as Square describes it, you can publish your Stories to: 

• Introduce your company to your audience.
• Promote new sales items.
• Keep your customers and visitors updated.
• Work on other promotional objectives that a blog allows you to achieve.

The Stories overview page contains links to your individual stories. To add a new Story, you can use the “Story” option displayed in the image above, right below “Stories overview.” 

Creating a new Story looks like this:

As the image above shows, you have some customization options at your disposal. In addition to customization, Square Online also allows you to optimize your posts for search engines (SEO). You can set your Story SEO through the “Page settings” option:

Optimizing your stories will allow search engines to accurately index your pages and enable visitors to find your content more easily. SEO settings are crucial to achieving better rankings on SERPs (search engine results pages). 

However, in saying all this, Square Online’s blog-like functionality is rudimentary. It allows you to adjust a few basic SEO settings, but it doesn’t provide significant help. SEO is quite complex, so a tool that gives you feedback on your posts’ SEO performance is a must today, especially if you’re serious about blogging. 

Simultaneously, if it offers practical tips on improving SEO, that’s even better. Unfortunately, Square Online lacks an SEO tool like this.

Companies need feature-rich, powerful apps concentrated on blogging and content marketing. In addition, these apps need to meet today’s entrepreneurs’ design and practicality demands. Based on this, today’s blog has to:

• Have a modern design and interface that create a smooth user experience.
• Be simple to use and easy to get your head around.

A tool that makes exactly this type of blog possible is DropInBlog, but first you’ll need to meet a few prerequisites to get started.

Prerequisites

You will need to sign up for a DropInBlog account. There’s a 14-day free trial, which is all you need to try this tool out on Square.

To integrate Square with DropInBlog, you don’t even need a paid Square account. The Free plan includes everything you need to create a blog on Square.

Now, let’s see how to add DropInBlog to Square.

Step One: Open Your Square Website in the Editor

Provided that you have already signed in to your Square account, the first thing you need to do is click the “Online” option in your Square Online admin dashboard.

Clicking the Online option will lead you to another side of the dashboard, where you’ll be able to see and edit all your existing websites. This step may lead you directly to the Square site to which you’d like to add a blog, like in our case. 

If that happens, just click the Edit site button, and you’ll find yourself inside the Square Online builder, which is the editor.

Alternatively, click Website on the left sidebar. That will show you a dropdown menu from which you’ll need to choose the Edit Site option.

If your target Square website is not the one Square shows you first, click the button right below the Online hamburger menu in the above image (top left of the screen). In our case, it’s called My Business. 

However, keep in mind that yours will be something different, depending on the names of your Square-built websites.

Select the website you want to enrich with a blog and then click Edit site, just like in the second image in this section.

Step Two: Add a New Page

You’re now inside the Square Online editor. The next step is to add a new blank page. To do that, click the plus sign on the navigation menu, then click Page.

Move your mouse cursor and hover over the [blank page] option. Select this option and give your blog page a name. Finally, click the blue Add button.

The Square Online builder will automatically present you with your newly-created blank page when you finish this step.

Step Three: Embed the Integration Code from DropInBlog

The embed code step is one of the critical steps of the DropInBlog integration process. To prepare the ground for adding the embed code, click the Add Section option while keeping your Blog page open.

Scroll down until you see Embed code as one of the available sections. Click Embed code and pick one of the two suggested layout options. We recommend the first one on the left since it looks slightly better with DropInBlog.

When you click on the Embed code section in the middle of the page, the left sidebar will display several new possibilities. The most important for us is the Code box.

Leave everything as it is and head to DropInBlog in a new browser tab. Log in to your account and click Code & Layout in the navigation bar. The next page you’ll see contains the code you need for your DropInBlog integration.

One note before we proceed: instead of the thick blue line under Step 1, you’ll see your unique DropInBlog ID. This information is private, so you shouldn’t reveal or share it publicly. That’s why we’re not showing ours here.

Step 1:

<script>
var dib_id = 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX';
</script>
<script src="https://io.dropinblog.com/js/embed.js"></script>

Step 2:

<div id="dib-posts"></div>

What you’ll need to do is copy the code from above and paste it into the Square Online builder. More precisely, copy the code from Step 1 and head back to Square. Paste it into the open Code box and repeat the same procedure with the Step 2 code. It should look like this:

Once you’ve copied and pasted the code, the Square Online builder instantly shows you how your blog will look. 

Before saving your changes, you can toggle off or customize both the section title and section description.

When you finish the customization, you’ll have two choices. One is to save all the changes and return to work on your blog page later, while the other is to publish your site with the newly-created blog. 

You can postpone working on your blog by clicking the Done button in the uppermost part of the left sidebar. To publish your blog, just click the blue Publish button on the right.

Step Four: Copy Your Blog Page URL

This step is the last and final phase of creating a blog on Square with DropInBlog. It’s quick, effortless, and straightforward.

Even if you decide to postpone publishing your website, you’ll eventually have to make it publicly accessible. And when you do that, to complete the integration between DropInBlog and Square, the first thing you should do is copy your blog page URL and paste it into DropInBlog.

When you click Publish, you’ll see a pop-up like this one:

The highlighted part shows the website URL, which is what you need. We’re using a Square subdomain with our free account for illustrative purposes. You may buy a new custom domain or use one you already own. However, keep in mind that you’ll need a paid subscription to use a custom domain name. 

To see your website and blog, click the blue URL in the upper part of the pop-up. A click on the URL will lead you to your website and show you how it looks on the web. The next thing to do is click Blog in the navigation menu, and you’ll see your blog in its splendor.

Copy the blog page URL and head back to DropInBlog. Once inside your DropInBlog account, open the Settings page in the navigation menu. Paste the blog URL in the Blog URL field.

After you paste the URL, scroll down until you see a Save All Changes button. Click on the button to save your Square blog URL in DropInBlog. When DropInBlog confirms that everything went well, you’ll know you’re all set and ready to write a new chapter.

Things Worth Noting

As we saw, it only takes four simple steps to create an uber-cool, modern, robust blog on Square. But there’s much more you can do in DropInBlog to make your blog and blogging even more awesome and convenient.

Custom CSS

One of those things is you can add custom CSS to style your blog the way you want. To apply style changes directly from within your DropInBlog account, you need the Code & Layout page again. 

After you open the page, scroll down until you see the Custom CSS section under the rubric Advanced. You should see the following:

You can write your custom CSS code in the specified area and beautify your blog page. DropInBlog even gives you an example of the syntax you can use.

Recent Posts Widget

Another great thing to do in DropInBlog is to add the recent posts widget to your website home page. As its name suggests, this widget will allow you to display your latest blog posts. The number of blog posts is adjustable, so you can choose to show however many items you want.

You only need two lines of code to show your recent blog posts on your Square site. As you might have expected, you’ll find the recent posts’ widget code on the Code & Layout page in the Advanced section. 

The procedure for adding the recent posts code is the same as the blog integration code. Let’s say you plan on adding this widget to your site’s home page. To do that, just add a new Embed code section to this page and copy the entire code you see in the image above into the Code box, just like in the image below:

The var dib_recent_posts = 3; part is where you can alter the number of posts you want to display. As you must have noticed in the image, we set the number of recent posts to two instead of three. That makes more sense to us, considering the page layout. You can do the same for your site.

The only thing you need to pay attention to when adding the recent posts widget is to place it in the most suitable and logical place on the page. You don’t want it to interrupt the existing sections’ order or logical sequence, so take note of that when adding this great DropInBlog tool to your website.

SEO Analyzer

The SEO Analyzer is not a tool you can add to Square or, for that matter, any other platform. It’s a native DropInBlog tool that analyzes your blog posts, evaluates their SEO score, and gives tips on how to improve your posts’ SEO. 

The SEO Analyzer is based on current SEO best practices. You can learn more about this tool from DropInBlog support.

FAQs