How to Find Orphan Pages on Squarespace (Free, Nothing to Install)

Squarespace has a feature no other major platform makes quite so prominent: a Not Linked section, sitting at the bottom of every Pages panel, where you can park pages that shouldn’t appear in the menu. It’s genuinely useful — and it’s also a built-in orphan-page factory. Pages there remain fully public and indexable; Squarespace’s own documentation describes them as hidden from menus but reachable by URL and indexable by search engines. Which means every page you drag there and forget becomes an orphan page: live, in your sitemap, and linked from absolutely nowhere. Here’s why it happens, how to find every orphan on your Squarespace site for free, and how to fix the ones that matter.

Why Squarespace creates orphan pages by default

A few of these are universal; the first two are distinctly Squarespace:

• The Not Linked section. It’s the intended home for landing pages, thank-you pages, and works-in-progress — but nothing about it reminds you that its pages have no internal links. Sites accumulate years of “temporary” pages there: old promos, seasonal offers, that services page from the previous redesign. All public, all indexable, all unlinked.
• Navigation redesigns. On Squarespace, navigation largely is the internal linking — most templates generate few automatic contextual links between pages. So when you simplify your menu from twelve items to five, the seven pages you dragged to Not Linked lose, in many cases, their only internal links in one gesture.
• Blogs and collections in silos. If a blog page is removed from navigation, its posts can remain live and indexed while the path to reach them from your site disappears. Old posts with no in-body links pointing to them orphan quietly.
• Version migrations and template switches. Moving between Squarespace 7.0 and 7.1 or restructuring index pages into sections changes what’s linked from where; pages that were part of an index can end up standalone and unreferenced.
• Campaign and one-off pages. Pages built for an email blast or a social push get their traffic from the link in the campaign — and from nowhere on the site itself. When the campaign ends, the page keeps existing with zero paths to it.

How to find every orphan page, free

The definition is mechanical, so the method is too: build the list of pages that exist, build the map of pages your internal links reach, and diff them.

Step 1 — crawl your live site. Run your domain through Crawlmouse — it’s free, runs in the browser, and needs nothing installed (there’s no code injection or plugin involved, which on Squarespace is the only kind of tool you can use anyway). It follows every internal link from your homepage the way a search-engine crawler does, maps the link graph, and grades the structure — listing orphaned and near-orphaned pages and how deep each page sits. This is the “what’s reachable” half of the diff.

Step 2 — open your Pages panel and your sitemap. The “what exists” half lives in two places: the Pages panel (scroll to Not Linked and actually read what’s in there — most site owners are surprised) and yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, which Squarespace generates automatically and which includes your enabled public pages. Any URL in the sitemap that didn’t appear in the crawl is a page with no internal path to it.

Step 3 — cross-check with Google Search Console. If you have GSC set up, the Pages report shows URLs Google has discovered but not indexed — orphans are heavily over-represented there, because a page in the sitemap with no internal links is exactly what Google deprioritises. (Our guide to “Discovered – currently not indexed” covers that report in depth.)

How to fix the orphans that matter

• Triage first. Not every Not Linked page is a problem. Thank-you pages, private client pages, and active campaign landers are deliberate orphans — leave them (or hide them from search properly if they shouldn’t be indexed at all). You’re looking for pages you actually want found: services, portfolio pieces, evergreen posts, old pages still earning search impressions.
• Re-link deliberately, not just via the menu. Dragging a page back into navigation works, but menus shouldn’t carry everything. The stronger fix on Squarespace is contextual: text links from related pages and blog posts, buttons on relevant sections, and a footer that carries your important secondary pages. Contextual links also tell search engines what the page is about — a menu link doesn’t.
• Give every kept page at least one real link. The minimum standard: no page you care about should have zero internal links. One good contextual link from an established page moves a URL from “orphan” to “connected”; two or three from related content is better. Watch click depth too — a page linked only from another buried page is barely better off.
• Retire the rest. Pages that no longer serve a purpose: disable them, or if they have inbound links or search traffic, 301-redirect them to the closest live page (Squarespace supports URL mappings under Developer Tools).
• Re-crawl to confirm. Run the crawl again after fixing. Orphan-hunting is a diff; the after-picture is how you know the fix landed.

The same method works platform-to-platform — we’ve covered the specifics for WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow — but Squarespace is the one where the platform hands you a labelled box of orphans and politely never mentions it again. Ten minutes with the crawl and your Pages panel is usually all it takes to find years of them.

Crawlmouse is a free internal-linking grader built by Nahl Technologies.