"Search is getting noisier, not clearer": Is curation the answer to better Squarespace websites?

I caught up with Miles Nobel to get his thoughts on how curation can create a competitive edge in website building

by · TechRadar

Features By Owain Williams Published 27 July 2026

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Platforms like Squarespace offer small businesses and website professionals a vast and valuable website-building resource. But more choice isn't always better.

We've all sat in a restaurant, stomach rumbling as we browse an endless menu. Everything sounds great, but it's hard to know what is really good. So, we look for reviews, we ask a friend, and try to catch a glimpse of what others have ordered.

The same can be said for building websites. You aren't short of tools and apps, but knowing which ones are worthwhile can be tricky. Reviews and download numbers can be misleading.

This is the problem SquareLocator aims to fix. Offering a curated list of the best tools within Squarespace's ecosystem. I caught up with Miles Nobel from SquareLocator to get his thoughts on why curation is now more important than ever.

Interview with:

Interview with: Miles Nobel

Interview by:

Interview by: Owain Williams

First, tell us a little about SquareLocator. What is it? How did the idea come about? How does it work?

The same thing kept happening.

I've been building websites for over 20 years, and for the last decade or so my agency has specialised in Squarespace. Across hundreds of client builds, the same thing kept happening: a client would need something Squarespace didn't do out of the box, and I'd spend an evening trawling a dozen different creator websites trying to remember who made the good version of that plugin.

The Squarespace community is full of brilliant independent creators, but they're scattered across the internet with no central place to find them. SquareLocator is my attempt to fix that. It's a curated directory of the plugins, templates, and tools I'd actually recommend, organised so you can filter by what you need, whether that's industry, style, or a specific bit of functionality.

Squarespace is already known for offering a more closed ecosystem than competitors such as WordPress, so why does it need a third-party marketplace?

The closed ecosystem is exactly why. WordPress has an official plugin repository with over 60,000 options. Squarespace deliberately doesn't, which keeps the platform stable and secure, and that matters more than ever nowadays.

It's also why I moved my agency to Squarespace in the first place. Over the years, I've built sites on WordPress, on Textpattern, and completely from scratch, and too much of that time went on maintenance rather than design: plugin conflicts, security patches, sites breaking after updates, and clients too nervous to touch their own website in case something broke.

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