How to Design a High-Converting Freebies Page in Squarespace
Here's what my old freebies page looked like. And here's what I turned it into — start to finish, in under 45 minutes.
I wanted something that didn't just look good, but actually worked: clean, strategic, easy for someone to find the exact resource they needed without hunting for it. So I gave myself a tight deadline, opened a blank Squarespace page, and started building — screen recording the whole thing so you could watch over my shoulder. If you've got a resources or freebies page that's feeling cluttered, dated, or just a bit "thrown together," this one's for you.
Prefer to watch? Catch the full video below, or keep reading.
What Wasn't Working
Before touching anything, I duplicated the live page so I could rebuild it privately, then sat down and evaluated the old version honestly. Some of it was already right — the clear ordering of items, decent (if slightly thin) copy on each freebie. But the list of what needed to change was longer:
→ The heading wasn't pulling its weight — I wanted to go straight into the categories of freebies above the fold
→ Nothing told the reader, at a glance, that everything on the page was free
→ Each freebie needed its own defined section instead of blurring into the next
→ More visuals — ideally ones that communicated the format (is it a training video? A PDF? A quiz?)
→ The takeaway or result of each freebie needed to be instantly scannable, the way it already was on my courses page
→ The bottom section of the page needed a redesign of its own
None of these were huge fixes on their own — but stacked together, they were the difference between a page that lists things and a page that sells them.
Rewriting the Copy
I picked one freebie — the Homepage Copy & Content Planner — to rewrite as an example. Sometimes I write copy myself. When I'm short on time, I lean on ChatGPT, which by now knows my brand voice well enough that I can just say "write this in my voice" and it delivers.
The process: tell it what it is (yes, that first step feels obvious, but it matters — a tip I picked up from an AI masterclass on masterclass.com), give it context on the page and the freebie, and ask it to act as a world-renowned copywriter specialising in conversion copy. I gave it my existing copy, asked it to evaluate it against best practice for freebie promotion pages, and then rewrite it.
It came back close — but not quite on-brand. A fire emoji snuck in (not my vibe at all), so I asked for a rewrite without it. Everything else it wrote, I kept. The only piece I swapped out myself was the headline, which still wasn't landing with enough clarity. (For a full page of copy, rather than a single rewrite, I'd normally use Ashlyn Carter's templates — ChatGPT is more of a quick-fix tool for me.)
Building the New Layout
With copy sorted, I went hunting through my saved layout inspiration. I landed on a simple format — image on the left, text and a clear button on the right — because with 10 to 15 freebies stacked on one page, anything busier (like a full background image behind each block) was going to feel visually overwhelming fast.
For the visuals themselves, I mocked each freebie up inside an iPad or iPhone frame in Canva, since that reads instantly as "workbook" or "PDF" without needing extra explanation. Background images stayed deliberately understated — blurry, water, nature shots, nothing with text in it that would compete with the actual copy.
A few of the finer touches — sideways text, a shape turned into a vertical divider line, elements that scroll in and out as you move down the page — came from Square Kicker, a Squarespace add-on that lets you apply custom styling without writing any code. I tried the scroll-in/scroll-out effect across the page and ended up dropping it — with that many freebies, it made the page feel busier rather than more polished. Not every trick earns its place just because it's available.
The header got the same treatment: categories pulled above the fold, a quick line confirming everything's free, and a layout inspired by a social-proof section I'd saved — vertical divider lines, a mix of font styles, an image with a subtle overlay so the text stayed readable on top of it.
The rule that shaped every layout decision: the image is never the point — the offer is. Every visual choice should make the copy easier to read, not harder.
Doing This for Paying Clients
It's one thing to redesign your own page. Managing this kind of redesign process for paying clients is a different skill entirely — and one that trips up a lot of designers who are otherwise good at the design part.
As a gift for making it this far, I'm linking my Web Designer Client Process Template below too — it's the exact process I use to keep redesigns like this one organised when there's a real client and a real deadline involved.
And if you want the same list I used to pick fonts that stay consistent across Squarespace and Canva, it's here — worth bookmarking any time you're building or rebuilding a page.
Everything we covered here is worth getting right — but there's one piece we skipped entirely: picking colours that actually work together, rather than guessing and hoping. There's an exact formula for that.
Watch this next: the 60-30-10 colour rule, explained in full.
