Where the SEO settings actually are in Squarespace and Wix

Open the SEO panel on a page you have already published, in either Squarespace or Wix, and the first feeling is usually relief — there is a title field, a description field, a slug field, exactly where a checklist article told you to expect them. The second feeling, ten minutes later, is that half of what actually determines how the page shows up in a search result is not in that panel at all. It is in a separate marketing settings screen, or it was filled in for you the moment you published, or it does not exist as a control anywhere in the product. Both companies' own help documentation describes these fields in terms lifted from a technical SEO glossary — "canonical URL," "structured markup," "crawl directive" — which is precise and also useless to someone who typed "why isn't my page title showing right in Google" into a search bar. The value here is not explaining what a meta description is. It is telling you exactly which screen it lives on, which platform writes one for you whether you asked or not, and which controls are simply missing.

If what you are building is one person's page rather than a multi-page business site, reach is the strongest answer available, and it is worth saying that plainly before the rest of this piece gets into Squarespace and Wix in detail. reach generates a complete one-page site from a CV in about twenty seconds and gets it live at a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes, and because there is exactly one page, there is exactly one title and one description to get right — not a sitewide format to reason about across dozens of pages. The honest trade is that reach has no custom-code field at all, on any plan, so anyone who eventually needs a robots.txt override or hand-written structured data has already outgrown it. For a single credible page, though, the settings tour that follows for Squarespace and Wix is mostly a tour of problems a one-page site does not have.

For everyone building the multi-page site, here is where the fields actually are.

Page titles and the suffix you did not type

Squarespace's per-page title field sits in Page Settings under the SEO tab, and it accepts a small set of variable tags — %page.title% and %site.title% are the two that matter — so what shows in the browser tab and in a search result is built from a pattern rather than plain text. The sitewide half of that pattern, the part that appends your site name after a dash or pipe on every single page, lives somewhere else entirely: Marketing → SEO, in the general site settings, not on any individual page. Change it there and every page's title changes at once; there is no way to opt one page out of the suffix short of overriding that page's title field directly.

Wix does the same split with different names. The Advanced SEO panel — reached per-page through the page's own settings, not through the main Marketing & SEO hub — has a title field with its own variable tokens, and a separate, sitewide "SEO title tag" pattern that appends your business name. The practical trap in both tools is the same one: someone spends an afternoon writing careful, distinct titles for six pages, then goes into the sitewide setting to fix an unrelated typo and silently changes the suffix on all six without meaning to.

Descriptions, and the one Squarespace and Wix write when you don't

Leave the meta description field blank in either platform and nothing stays blank. Squarespace pulls the opening text block of the page and uses that as the description a search engine sees. Wix does the equivalent — pulling from page content to generate something rather than leaving the tag empty. Neither generated version is written for the job a meta description actually does, which is convincing someone scanning ten blue links to click yours. An opening paragraph is written to flow into the next sentence; a meta description is written to stand alone in roughly 155 characters next to nine competitors. The fix is not complicated, but it requires knowing the field exists and is not already handled — the platform filling it in silently is exactly what makes people assume it is fine.

Alt text: editable on real images, absent on decoration

Both tools give you an alt text field on any image you place through a standard image block or gallery element — click the image, open its settings, there is a labelled field. That part is consistent and has been for years.

Where it breaks down is background and design imagery. A Squarespace section background image, or a Wix strip background used purely for visual texture, generally has no alt text field attached to it at all, because the platform's own information architecture treats it as decoration rather than content — which is often the right call, and sometimes isn't, if that background image is actually doing communicative work (a screenshot used as a hero background, for instance). The mistake worth avoiding is assuming that because the content images on a page all have alt text filled in, the page's image accessibility and SEO surface is covered. It usually is not; it is covered for the images the builder considers images.

Sitemaps, robots, and turning off one page

Neither Squarespace nor Wix lets you hand-edit the XML sitemap — it is generated automatically from your published pages and there is no interface for adding, removing or reordering entries manually. That is not really a limitation for either platform's audience; a hand-curated sitemap is a large-site concern.

The two diverge on robots.txt. Wix's advanced SEO settings include a robots.txt editor, so you can add custom disallow rules or crawl directives directly. Squarespace does not expose one at all — its robots.txt is fixed, and the only lever you get is per page: a "Hide page from search results" toggle in that page's SEO settings, which adds a noindex directive without unpublishing the page itself. Wix has the equivalent per-page exclusion inside its Advanced SEO panel. Functionally, for the common case — keep a thank-you page or an old landing page out of search without deleting it — both tools solve the actual problem. Only Wix additionally lets you touch the crawl-level file directly.

Redirects, and where they stop being enough

Squarespace's redirect tool lives under Marketing → URL Mappings and takes simple pattern rules — old path to new path, with a basic wildcard for matching groups of URLs at once. Wix's version sits in Marketing & SEO as a URL Redirect Manager, entering one old URL and one new URL per rule. Both do the ordinary job well: someone renamed a page, or restructured a menu, and needs old links to land somewhere real instead of a 404. We go through why that matters for search rankings specifically, and what happens if you skip it during a bigger move, in keeping your URLs when you move.

Where both tools run out of road is anything that isn't a one-to-one mapping: no server-level rewrite logic, no bulk pattern import beyond the basic wildcard, and the redirect table lives inside the builder rather than at the DNS or server layer, so it disappears entirely if you ever migrate off the platform. That last point is the one worth planning around rather than discovering later — a redirect map built inside Squarespace or Wix is not portable, and if you ever leave, you are rebuilding it from scratch on whatever comes next.

The fields at a glance

Tool	Sitewide title suffix	Auto-written description if blank	robots.txt editable	Redirect tool
reach	Not applicable — one page, one title	No — you write the one description that exists	No	Not applicable — one page, nothing to redirect from
Squarespace	Marketing → SEO, separate from page settings	Yes, pulled from page content	No — fixed, noindex toggle only	Marketing → URL Mappings, basic wildcard
Wix	Advanced SEO panel, per site	Yes, pulled from page content	Yes, in Advanced SEO settings	URL Redirect Manager, one-to-one

Prices checked August 2026 — none of the fields above sit behind a plan tier on either platform; the SEO settings tour is the same whether you're on the cheapest paid plan or the most expensive one, which is not true of code injection or CMS-driven schema, covered in the wider piece on what website builders let you do about SEO. If any of the terms in this piece — canonical tag, crawl directive, structured markup — are still unclear, the plain-language versions are in the website builder jargon glossary.

None of this is complicated once you know where to look, which is the actual complaint worth having about both platforms: not that the controls are missing, but that finding them takes longer than using them does. For a multi-page site, that ten minutes of hunting is worth doing properly, because a wrong sitewide title suffix or an un-overridden autogenerated description costs you for as long as the page is live. For a single page built to be one person's whole presence, the honest answer is that most of this settings tour doesn't apply — there's one title, one description, and nothing to hunt for.