Test Squarespace website: links a visitor follows

The editor lists every page you have built, so it is easy to think the site is complete when all of them exist. A visitor never sees that list. They see the menu you set, the buttons you placed and the links you pasted, and each of those can point somewhere else: a page you renamed, a draft, or a page you left out of the navigation. A page can be finished and still unreachable from any place a visitor would click, and the editor will not flag it.

• Open the home page in a private window and tap each menu item on a phone.
• Follow the main button. Does it open the page it names, or a different one?
• Open each link in your welcome and reminder emails. Does each one load?
• Look for any page that shows a password or coming soon screen to a visitor.
• Check the footer links too, since some visitors look there for contact details.

A first-time visitor sees the menu before any of your content, and most of what they do next follows from it. Each item in the menu is a link you chose, to a page that may have been renamed since. If the link was set before the page moved, the menu still points at the old address, and the visitor reaches an error. A menu item can also point at a section of a page that was later deleted, so the page loads and the visitor finds nothing where they expected a price.

Check the menu in the order a visitor reads it. Tap the first item on a phone, go back to the home page, and tap the next, then the one after that. A menu that looks complete in the editor can still hold an item with no link set, and a visitor who taps that item gets nothing at all, not even an error they could report.

A page can exist and still sit outside every route a stranger takes. It may be left out of the navigation, which keeps it off the menu but leaves its address live. It may be behind a password or a coming soon screen that you forgot to remove. It may be a draft that was published by mistake. Each of these looks fine from inside the editor, because you know the address and you open the page directly.

Test the reachable path, not the list of pages. Start from the home page and follow only links, the way a visitor would. Any page you want a visitor to reach that you cannot reach this way is a gap, even if you can open it yourself. Write the gaps in a list, and treat that list as the work to finish before launch.

Links also leave the site. A welcome email, a booking reminder or a social profile can point at an address you copied from a draft, so the visitor lands on something that looks like your site but is a different page. Footer links often lead to policy and contact pages, which visitors check when they decide whether to trust a site. Open each link from outside the site, in a private window, and check it loads the page you intended.

Renaming a page, moving it into another section or deleting a draft can leave an old link behind without any warning. Run the same visitors through the menu and the main button again after each change, and check the links in your emails and footer. If the site is behind a password while you build, that password needs paid credits, and the visitors can only get past it with the password you give them.