Standing out online requires a website design that feels intentional, distinct, and trustworthy from the start. A premium visual experience doesn’t just capture attention—it builds credibility and signals quality, so visitors feel confident engaging with you.
Design choices can also play a key role in performance—keeping your audience engaged longer and guiding them toward action. With the right tools, creating a high-impact, professional site becomes less about complexity and more about building an experience that works as beautifully as it looks.
That’s why Squarespace has introduced Finish Layer, a new suite of professional-grade creative tools built into the core editor. Backed by over 20 years of Squarespace design expertise, Finish Layer is powerful enough for pros, but straightforward enough that anyone can use it. The result can help you maintain your unique visual style and grow your online presence.
Below, we outline the ways Finish Layer supports individuals, brands, and small businesses who use Squarespace 7.1 in creating premium and professional websites.
Build studio-quality designs
The goal of many websites is to reflect a specific personal style and make a strong impact. Finish Layer does just that. With intuitive, sophisticated design capabilities, you can draw attention to the content you choose while reinforcing your visual storytelling.
Block Animations: Start with a preset trigger or create one from scratch to add motion when visitors scroll, hover, click, and more. Animations make your site feel more dynamic while directing focus to specific content or calls to action.
Block Transforms: Flex your personality by changing how your content is displayed and positioned. From opacity and rotate to scale and skew, you can elevate your aesthetic and make a statement in just a few clicks.
Z-axis Control: Use the Layers panel to control the order of content in a section, introducing new depth and overlap. Soon, 3D mode for Animations and Transforms can also create even more dimensional designs that evolve beyond traditional flat layouts.
Enhanced site customization
Your website is an extension of your identity, and a generic design is a missed opportunity to represent your purpose, brand, or business. Finish Layer gives you deeper creative control to reflect your vision—helping fine-tune every design detail until it feels genuinely true to you.
More precision: Get everything exactly where you want it. Adjust any visual property to the exact percentage or degree, so your layout and content looks clean, symmetrical, and purpose-built.
Font file uploads: Upload external font files and apply them on your site—with standard font controls like letter spacing and text transform—to create consistent branding across all of your touchpoints.
Boost mobile performance
Not all desktop design choices are effective on mobile. With new device-specific editing capabilities, Finish Layer helps create contextually optimized designs that are more likely to drive engagement and conversion.
Block Hiding: Choose content to hide on mobile or desktop view so that your site best fits any visitor's screen. Each section will automatically adjust to remove negative space, so there aren't gaps in your layout.
Overrides: Customize block characteristics on individual device views—updating things like button width, background colors, and more. You can choose to push updates in the mobile editor to desktop, or keep them separate.
Streamline your workflow
Finish Layer creates professional results, but it doesn't require coding or formal training. You can design your entire site yourself with intuitive editing workflows and enhanced UI options.
Stacks: Create clean layouts and maintain visual consistency by arranging, spacing, aligning, or styling multiple blocks together as a group. You can also rearrange a stack's block order from the Layers panel.
Updated Interface: Beyond the Layers panel, you can right-click anywhere for quick menu access, freely drag and drop panels, or speed up action with keyboard shortcuts.
Finish Layer gives you the power to craft a stunning online presence directly within Squarespace. With rich visual treatments, no-code customization, and flexible editing logic, you can launch a standout site without any technical skills.