A Beginner’s Guide to Squarespace Archive Blocks

A Squarespace archive block can be used to display a list of content in an existing collection.

Archive blocks are a fantastic way to neatly list and link to your blog posts, events, or products. Here's what you can do with them:

  • Create organized lists: Easily group your content by tags, categories, authors, or dates.

  • Add extra navigation: Put archive blocks in footers, on the side of a blog post or page, or in any spot you like for quick access to additional content on your site.

  • Stay up-to-date: Your archive block automatically updates when you add, change, or remove content.

Important to know:

  • Archive blocks are specifically for blog posts, products, and events. You wont be able to link to a portfolio, project, or video collection.

  • Archive blocks only show text and wont display images, including thumbnails. If you want to share a list of collection content that includes images, you should consider a summary block instead of an archive block. To learn more about this feature, check out the beginner’s guide to Squarespace summary blocks.

How to add an archive block to Squarespace

If you want to feature images with your collection item links, check out the beginner’s guide to Squarespace summary blocks.

  1. Select edit on the top left-hand side of your website preview.

  2. Click the add block option on a page section, or the plus sign inside classic editor.*

  3. Select the archive option form the list of content blocks

  4. Double click on the block to edit the content, or select the pencil icon.

  5. Choose the collection page you want to pull information from.

  6. One the display tab, decide how you want your links to be displayed: index, list, or dropdown.

  7. Adjust the group and sort settings to display your content links in a specific order. Your options include organizing links by month, year, author, category, or tag.

A few pro tips about your archive block options:

  • You can only use one display option per block.

  • Archive blocks work with most pages, but not portfolios, courses, or video collections.

  • You can't hide past events in an events archive.

*Classic editor is used by blog posts, additional product details, individual events, and sites built on version 7.0 Learn more inside Squarespace Made Simple*

What you can customize about the archive block using Squarespace

  • You can choose between three layouts (examples below): dropdown, list, and index.

  • The text style will match your paragraph 2 style and can not be changed using the site editor.

  • The index layout can be adjusted to multiple columns.

  • You can display an automatic count of the items in a group when you are using the index layout.

Here is an example of archive blocks in a few different layout styles

The first example is the dropdown archive layout setting.

The list of months and years is the list archive layout setting.

The longest example on this page, with columns of months, titles, and dates is the index archive layout setting. L

Pro tip: longer content titles are at risk of being cut off to fit the layout width, as you can see from the example on this page.

List Archive Example
(display set to group by category)

Index Archive Example
(display set to group by category)

You can customize the archive block design using CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet and it’s a special type of code that you can use to customize Squarespace. Squarespace designers use custom CSS when the design menu has limited options.

This tutorial will teach you how to use custom CSS to change the style of different aspects of an archive block in your Squarespace website.

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Where you can learn more about the Squarespace archive block

Squarespace Made Simple

This mini course for beginners will teach you how to create your first Squarespace website. Lesson seven includes information about archive blocks.

LEARN MORE →

Squarespace Support Article

Learn more from the official Squarespace support blog

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