Had a few clients reach out to me recently and asked about Squarespace 8.0. With the release of Squarespace’s Fluid Engine in early 2022, it’s possible they are gonna release 8.0 sometime in 2024. Let me explain my thinking.

Now, before we go any further let me just state this is completely a guess on my part. I have no insider insight into this, I’m just shooting into the dark to the best of my ability as a Squarespace developer for the past 7 years.

For years, I’ve always seen Squarespace as an “Apple“ type company, meaning, that they will release something when they’re ready to release it. This will come with no warning or heads-up to the development community like myself. One day something didn’t exist, and the next day it did.

This was always a bit frustrating to not know about any upcoming products or company announcements in advance. My clients look to me for answers and it always sucks when I’m not able to provide that to them.

That said, they have made some great improvements in communicating these types of things this year (2022) to the developer community. This would include early access to new features and a much more detailed road map for upcoming features. And even without exact dates, it’s been nice to know what’s coming and being worked on. This is great, even though I’m not always allowed to share everything while under an NDA as a Squarespace Circle Member.

The shift from 7.0 to 7.1

Back in 2014, Squarespace released 7.0, and it was a major change to their platform that put them in a much larger spotlight to the general DIY’er. This is also right around the time I discovered Squarespace as well. Personally, I feel when they got 7.0 built they just sat on it for a while, without making any major improvements for some time. Not saying what they built was bad, especially for the time, but I think that eventually bit them in the ass (again, this was just my perspective as a user at the time). This would lead them into thinking about what’s next.

This would take us to 2020 (what a crazy year) when they officially released 7.1 and the massive change that came along with it. But this was a, you loved it or hated it release for many within the Squarespace community. It was such a massive change to their platform that you couldn’t just simply upgrade from 7.0 to 7.1. For this to happen, you would have to completely rebuild your site in 7.1 from the ground up.

The new update did come with some great features but surprisingly left some out that people were depending on from the previous version, hence some of the frustration. I myself decided to go head first with all future projects using 7.1 ever since I was a part of the beta back in 2019. Yes, it definitely threw a big wrench into the standard build process that I was used to for years. But I learned how to make the most out of its improvements, as well as, its pitfalls.

The messy release of 7.1

Looking back on how 7.1 was released, it was definitely not done well, and this was another frustration that the community had. In my opinion, 7.1 went live still feeling like a very early beta. There were a lot of bugs and missing features that you could tell would be coming, but just didn’t exist yet. Combine this with everything that I mentioned above, it just soured a lot of people.

I also feel that they were probably under a lot of pressure from what their competition was putting out. This most likely forced their hand to push 7.1 out the door sooner rather than later.

But time went on and things got better over that year and leading into 2022, especially with their communication with the development community. Features were getting more polished and a few small features were getting added here and there.

Now it was starting to feel like a solid release.

Another large release, Fluid Engine

With the release of Fluid Engine on July 21, 2022, they made another major update to their platform. And just like the original 7.1 release, this came with both, love and hate. And it’s understandable, I was initially like “holy shit, they did it again,” with mixed feelings myself.

But after messing around with it during the beta and understanding its strengths, I've come to favor it, for the most part. In my opinion, some of its strengths come with more headaches. But that’s a more detailed post in itself.

Now, back to my 8.0 thinking

With the amount of work they did since 7.0 was first released back in 2014, it almost doesn’t feel like the same platform anymore. And that made me wonder, why didn’t they call it 8.0? They easily could've called 7.1 the new 8.0, especially being how dramatic the change was to the platform at the time. But now seeing how messy the launch for 7.1 went, I think they knew they weren’t ready to call it 8.0.

And it was also such an odd choice to call it 7.1 to begin with. In my opinion, this was a new version disguised as a new feature. When a release that big came through, especially since it was preventing the ability to upgrade, that was an obvious red flag from my perspective.

That said, seeing how everything has been playing out lately and how well they’ve polished up rough features, I feel they’re prepping to just shift from 7.1 to 8.0. Doing this gives them the time they need to have the shiny new toy they always wanted, without the stress.

Yes, they still have a good amount of features in testing, and even more, that is upcoming, but I feel it’s only a matter of time at this point. So, doing my best to guess through this, I’d say they are going to finish up a good size road map through 2023, then release something big in 2024. And just maybe, we will finally get 8.0 (but I’ll be pissed if they call it 7.2).