How to Add a Popup to Your Squarespace Site

What Squarespace's built-in pop-up gives you

Squarespace's promotional pop-up lives under Marketing → Promotional Pop-Up. Switch it on, pick a layout, write your headline, choose when it shows, and it appears across your site. Submissions go into Squarespace's own form storage or your connected email service.

For a lot of sites that is genuinely enough. It is free, it is already there, it matches your fonts, and it will collect email addresses today. If you have never run a popup before, switch it on this afternoon and come back to this guide when it starts to feel restrictive.

When you outgrow the promotional pop-up

The limit that bites first is not design, it's arithmetic: one pop-up, one audience. Everything else follows from that.

• You can't split by page. The visitor reading a blog post and the visitor staring at a product page want different things, and one pop-up has to pick a side.
• You can't split by visitor. A first-time reader and a returning customer get the same offer, which means the returning customer keeps getting asked to join a list they already joined.
• You can't run two campaigns at once. A permanent newsletter signup and a two-week sale announcement can't coexist — the sale evicts the signup, then you forget to put it back.
• You can't A/B test. With one pop-up there is no version B, so "does the discount beat the free-shipping offer?" stays an opinion.
• You can't move past a form. No quiz, no survey, no spin-to-win — the interactive formats that make a small site's popup feel like a reason to stop rather than an interruption.

One site-wide pop-up has to average every visitor. Targeted campaigns don't.

How to add ChilliPopup to a Squarespace site

Squarespace doesn't have an app store you install from, so every third-party widget arrives the same way: a script in Code Injection. You paste it once and it covers every page on the site — including pages you create next year.

<script id="chillipopup-pixel"
  src="https://player.chillipopup.com/javascript/pixel.js?id=YOUR_WORKSPACE_ID"
  data-api="https://api.chillipopup.com"
  async="true"></script>

Start from a template or describe the popup you want — then edit it like any other Squarespace block.

Six popup types that fit Squarespace sites

Squarespace sites skew towards design-led brands: studios, shops, restaurants, photographers, writers. These six earn their place on that kind of site.

1. The welcome offer. New visitors only, exit intent on desktop and roughly 50% scroll on mobile. One email field, one clear reward, one button.
2. The announcement bar. A slim bar anchored to the top or bottom for shipping deadlines, studio holidays or a sale window — the format that interrupts least.
3. The abandoned-cart catch. On /cart and /checkout, on exit, with a reason to finish rather than a discount by default.
4. The content upgrade. On blog posts only, after 60% scroll: a checklist or guide in exchange for an email, from someone who has proven they read to the end.
5. The enquiry form. For studios and service businesses — name, email, one "what do you need?" field, triggered on the pricing or contact page.
6. The spin-to-win. A prize wheel where a plain discount box gets ignored. The outcome is decided on the server, so it can't be rigged from the browser, and the claim screen collects the email.

Games are the one popup format visitors actively engage with — useful when a Squarespace store's discount box has stopped working.

Worked example: a welcome offer for a Squarespace store

A ceramics studio selling on Squarespace. Traffic comes from Instagram to product pages, bounces, and never returns. Here is the whole campaign.

The popup. A centred card, product photo on the left, copy on the right:

The rules.

• Trigger: exit intent on desktop; a second copy of the campaign at 50% page scroll for mobile, where exit intent barely exists.
• Pages: URL contains /shop — product and collection pages only, never the contact page.
• Audience: new visitors.
• Frequency: once every 7 days, and "show again after conversion" off.

The discount code appears on the thank-you screen straight away, so nobody has to wait for an email to shop. That one detail — reward now, not later — matters more than any headline rewrite.

Display rules for Squarespace URLs

Squarespace URLs are unusually predictable, which makes page targeting easy. Collections live under their slug and products underneath them, so a handful of rules covers most sites.

Layer the other rules on top — they combine as AND gates, so each one you enable narrows the audience further: a trigger (exit intent, a delay in seconds, scroll percentage, page count, click count or inactivity), an audience (everyone, new or returning visitors), a frequency, and optionally device, browser, a date window or a weekday-and-hour schedule. The full breakdown is in the popup targeting rules guide.

Squarespace-specific gotchas

The editor preview isn't your site

Injected scripts don't run inside Squarespace's builder. If you test there, you'll conclude the popup is broken. Publish, open the live URL in a private window, and test there.

Ajax page loading

Some Squarespace templates load pages without a full browser refresh. Rules are evaluated when the page actually loads, so with Ajax loading on, a visitor clicking around your nav may not tick over page-count triggers as you expect. If a page-count or per-page rule behaves oddly, switch Ajax loading off in your site style settings and re-test — it's the standard fix for third-party scripts on Squarespace.

Don't run two popup systems at once

If you keep Squarespace's promotional pop-up switched on and publish a welcome popup, a visitor can meet both in the same session. Pick one system. Usually that means switching the built-in one off the day your first campaign goes live.

Cookie banners and consent

If you use Squarespace's cookie banner, make sure your popup doesn't land on top of it — two overlays at once is how people learn to hit Escape reflexively. Delay the popup past the banner, and if you're collecting marketing consent, do it with an explicit consent checkbox in the popup rather than assuming it.

Seven mistakes with Squarespace popups

1. Firing on load. A popup that covers the page before it has been read is the exact pattern search engines call an intrusive interstitial. Give it a delay, a scroll, or an exit.
2. One popup on every page. The whole reason you installed a tool was to stop doing this.
3. Leaving "show again after conversion" on. Subscribers keep getting asked to subscribe.
4. Pasting the script twice — once in Code Injection and once in a page-level code block. Loading the pixel twice can render or count a popup twice.
5. A discount with no code on screen. Show the reward on the thank-you screen; don't make people go to their inbox mid-purchase.
6. Six fields. On a phone, every extra field is a keyboard, a scroll jump and a decision. Ask for the email; ask for the rest later.
7. Never checking mobile. Squarespace themes look beautiful on a laptop. Test the popup at 375px wide before you decide it's finished.

How to tell whether it worked

Four numbers, read weekly, in this order: views (is it even being shown?), submissions, conversion rate (submissions divided by views) and the desktop-vs-mobile split. That last one explains more bad results than anything else — a campaign that converts fine on desktop and dies on mobile is a rules problem, not a copy problem.

Views, clicks, submissions and conversion rate per campaign — plus the device split that usually explains a weak result.

When the numbers are ambiguous, stop guessing and split-test: run two variants of the same campaign, keep every rule identical, change one thing, and let the traffic decide. Our guide to what to test lists the changes that actually move a number, in order.

Build your Squarespace popup step by step

Twenty-five minutes, start to finish, and you only do the install part once.

Related reading

Frequently asked questions