Squarespace and salon or spa
When the booking page is not part of your site
A salon site built here nearly always ends at a button. The visitor reads a page or two, taps to book, and arrives on a scheduling address that is a separate surface with separate settings, and that is where the deposit, the notice period and the intake questions actually live. Everything the assistant can do has to happen before that tap.
Why this pairing is its own job
The Squarespace install guide covers the tag, and the salon or spa guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- Scheduling is served from its own address rather than from your site, so the injection field that covers every page you designed stops at the click. The client is then on a page you cannot put a launcher on, answering questions rather than asking them.
- The terms that govern the booking are typed once into the scheduling settings and shown at the point of payment. Nothing on the designed site repeats them, so a crawl of the site cannot repeat them either, and the assistant ends up knowing there is a deposit without knowing what it is.
- The price list on a salon site is almost always a designed graphic. From prices and the one line about what moves them, which is the entire honest answer to the most common question in this trade, are pixels rather than sentences.
- The patch test rule is safety information with a clock attached, and on this kind of site it usually appears only inside that same graphic or in a confirmation email nobody has read yet when they are asking.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the Squarespace guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a salon or spa site specifically.
The tag stops at the booking address
Code Injection applies to the site Squarespace builds for you. The scheduling pages a client lands on after tapping through, including the client login area where they reschedule, are served separately and are not yours to inject into. There is no field there and asking for one is asking for something that does not exist.
That is less of a loss than it sounds, provided you accept what it means. The assistant is a pre booking tool in this trade. Its job is to get someone from wondering what balayage costs to tapping the button with the right expectations, and everything after that belongs to the scheduler.
Copy the terms out of the scheduler before you index anything
Open the scheduling settings and read what a client is actually shown: the deposit amount, the notice period, what happens to the deposit on a late cancellation, how late is too late to be seen, and any intake question you ask before a treatment. Most salons find at least one rule there that appears nowhere on the website.
Publish those on a terms page of your own site and keep the two in step. Two versions of a cancellation charge is worse than one, and the version the assistant quotes will be the one on your site, so an old figure there becomes an argument at the till.
This is worth doing even if the assistant were not part of the plan, because a client who cannot find the deposit rule before booking assumes it was hidden from them on purpose.
The plan gate and the order of work
Code Injection needs a business plan. A salon on a personal plan cannot paste the tag anywhere on Squarespace, so the upgrade comes first and there is no arrangement of blocks that gets round it.
If the upgrade is going to take a week, spend that week on the price list and the patch test page instead. Both of those improve the site for every visitor whether or not a launcher ever appears, and both are prerequisites for the assistant being useful the day it does.
Where the answerable material lives
| The price list as text, with the reasons attached | Each service as a line with its starting price and one plain sentence on what moves it: length, thickness, how many bowls, whether a toner or a cut is included. The graphic can stay on the page. What cannot stay is the graphic being the only place those numbers exist. |
|---|---|
| The deposit and cancellation wording you typed into the scheduler | Reproduced on a page of the site, word for word where you can. This is the material that turns a vague answer about there being a deposit into the actual figure and the actual notice period. |
| The patch test policy as its own page | Which services need one, how far ahead, how long it stays valid, what happens to a client who has coloured with you before but not recently, and that the appointment will not go ahead without it. Its own page, so it can be quoted rather than summarised from somewhere else. |
| Gallery captions rather than a wall of images | A lookbook section is images. A client asking whether you do a particular technique gets nothing from forty untitled photographs. Caption the work with the service name it belongs to and the gallery starts answering the question it was built to answer. |
The first thing to get right
Publish the patch test policy as its own page with the timing and the validity period stated in full, and index that page.
It is the only answer in this trade that is simultaneously safety information, a hard deadline and a same day disappointment. Everything else can survive being approximated for a fortnight. A client booking colour for tomorrow who has never heard of a patch test cannot.
The failure that belongs to this combination
Terms that only exist on the other address
Somebody asks what happens if they cancel the morning of. The assistant has read every page of the designed site and none of them mention a charge, because the charge is a setting in the scheduler. So it says there is a cancellation policy and offers to take their details, which is a worse reply than the phone would have given.
The uglier version of this is a salon that once had the terms on a services page, changed the amount in the scheduler, and never changed the page. Now the assistant states an old figure with a citation pointing at your own site, and a client turns up holding it.
The scheduler is the system of record for what a client agrees to. The site is what gets read and answered from. Whenever one changes, change the other in the same sitting.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a salon or spa visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Can it appear on our booking page so clients can ask while choosing a time?
- Not on Squarespace's scheduling pages, no. Those are served separately from the site you designed and there is no injection field for them. If somebody needs to ask a question mid booking, the practical answer is to put everything they might need on the page with the booking button, so the question arrives before the tap rather than after it.
- Our prices are on a designed image. Is that really a problem?
- For a person, no. For anything reading the page, the image is not text and there is nothing in it. Since the price question is the one that decides whether somebody books, this is the difference between an assistant that qualifies enquiries and one that refers all of them to you. Keep the image and put the same numbers on the page underneath it.
- Can it tell someone whether a patch test is still valid for them?
- No, because that depends on when that individual last had one and there is nothing for it to look that up in. It can state the rule exactly as you published it, including how long a test stays valid, and then take their details so someone can check the record. That is the reply that stops an appointment being wasted.
Keep reading
- Installing on SquarespaceThe exact Code Injection footer setup for Squarespace, the plan it needs, and the two surfaces it will never reach.
- Everything for a salon or spaPrices depend on hair length and condition, so a real quote needs a consultation. Patch tests and pregnancy questions need a person.
- The page password protects the crawl, not the uploadSquarespace page passwords keep the arrival pack out of a crawl. The upload field is where owners hand over the door code without noticing.
- Open mornings, member areas, and an install you cannot subtract fromPast open mornings stay published, the member area shows a launcher to parents while hiding its pages from a crawl, and injection can add but not subtract.
- A salon site where the prices are drawn rather than writtenWix draws service prices and durations from its booking app, so the page a crawl receives holds no prices. Publish a text services page too.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.