Adding Monocle to my Website

Goal of this tutorial

We aim to have you up and running with Monocle Search on your Squarespace site by the end of this tutorial. That is to say: you site will be fully indexed, and your visitors will have an easy way to access the search.

If you are not using Squarespace, please check out this guide instead.

Part 1: Adding Monocle Search

• On monocle-search.com, click on Register in the upper right corner.
• On the registration page, click on the "Register with Squarespace" button
• If you have multiple sites, you will be shown them all. Click on the site you would like to add Monocle Search to
• Once you click "Allow" in the permissions overview, and have entered your e-mail address, you are done!

You should now see a screen like to this one:

There are two main areas we would like to draw your attention to:

1. Triggering a crawl

Your website will automatically be crawled at a regular interval (once per day for paying customers). If, however, you have made major changes to your website that you would like to immediately have reflected in the search results, you can trigger as new crawl manually here.

2. Deactivating Monocle Search

If you want to temporarily disable Monocle Search from your site, you can click the "Deactivate Monocle Search" button. Once clicked, it will turn into a button that allows you to add it back again, so there is no harm in trying out this button!

Part 2: Making your site searchable

You have already done most of the hard work – congratulations! Think of this section as the icing on the cake. Something that will elevate your site even further!

Before we continue, let's take stock of what we have achieved so far:

• we have added Monocle Search to our site
• any user who goes to the regular Squarespace search page (the one found under /search) will already get an upgraded search experience
• if you have placed any search blocks (that is to say the search text fields Squarespace offers) on your site, then these will also already have been upgraded

As the next step we will add a link to your site header to open up the Monocle Search interface. This is the search interface preferred by most of our customers because it gives them the largest degree of flexibility when it comes to design, and also offers the best search experience we have to offer.

The search interface opens up whenever someone clicks on a link to /search. To add such a link, head over to the website editor in Squarespace. There you click on the plus (+) sign right next to the header named "Main Navigation", and then choose "Link" as the type of item you would like to add:

In the window that pops up now, write whatever you want people to click on – in our case, that is “🔎 Search”. Feel free to copy and paste from here! In the “URL” field, simply enter “/search”. It should now look like this:

If everything worked as intended, you should now see the “🔎 Search” field in your navigation bar. Why don’t you go ahead and click on it? The search interface should pop up and you can find everything on your site!

Clicking on this link, will open up the search interface:

Next steps

We recommend you visit the "Design" section of the Monocle Search admin interface next. There you will be able to tweak the search experience to match that of your site.

You can find the design section in the left hand menu:

Additional information

Squarespace Search Block

If you are using the Squarespace Search Block (i.e., the interface that looks like a regular text-field and that can be placed anywhere you like on your website), please make sure you switch off the "Quick Preview" setting!

You can do this by clicking the little "edit" pen and then navigate to "Display". Here, make sure that "Quick Preview" is switched OFF.