How to Make a Slideshow on Squarespace Easily 2026

Open your Squarespace site and enter the page editor for whichever page will hold the slideshow. In this example, a furniture and woodworking site called "PMN Online YT" has a hero section reading "Designed for Life" and navigation for About, Services, Gallery, and Book a Consultation.

The top bar shows Save, Exit, and undo/redo controls, plus a Page label confirming you're editing the Home page and that it's currently Published. That matters: changes here go live once saved, instead of sitting in a draft state first.

Click the add-content control where you want the slideshow to sit, which opens the Add a Section panel. Down the left side is a full list of section types: Testimonials, Events, Quotes, Digital Products, Scheduling, Donations, and further down, Images, Videos, Menus, Forms, and Charts. Selecting Images shows a live preview on the right with layout options, and a tooltip explains what these sections do: "These sections let you quickly add content items and switch between layouts without having to manually rearrange them." That's the key detail: the layout, including any of the slideshow variants, is something you can change afterward without rebuilding the block.

The Images section starts out in a Grid layout, and its settings panel opens with two tabs, Gallery and Colors. Under Gallery, a slider near the top controls image sizing, and below that sit Captions, Animation, Lightbox, and Divider toggles, plus an Anchor Link field for linking to this section from elsewhere on the page.

Captions shows or hides text under each image, Animation defaults to "Site Default" but can be set per block, Lightbox lets visitors click an image to view it enlarged, and Divider adds a line under the section. Decide on Lightbox now, because it disappears once the layout changes to Slideshow: Squarespace's own documentation states plainly that slideshow layouts don't support a lightbox feature. If a click-to-enlarge view matters to you, a Grid layout is the only option in this section type that offers it.

Reopen the layout panel, the same one used to choose Images originally, and pick one of Squarespace's three slideshow layouts: Slideshow: Simple (one image at a time, within the page's normal width), Slideshow: Full (one image at a time, edge to edge), or Slideshow: Reel (several images visible at once, like a film reel). There's no plain "carousel" option in this section type.

That name belongs to the older, separate Gallery block feature used inside page content, not to Gallery sections. Captions carry over differently depending on which slideshow you pick: Simple and Full show a caption under every image, while Reel shows one only under the image currently centered. Lightbox, set in the previous step, switches off automatically the moment you land on any slideshow variant.

Add the photos you want in the rotation directly into the gallery block, and drag them into the order you want them to appear. The tooltip from the Add a Section step already confirmed this layout lets you rearrange content without rebuilding it, so add more images than you need at first and trim or reorder later instead of trying to get the set perfect on the first pass.

Before publishing, compress your images so the slideshow loads quickly. Large, uncompressed photos are the most common reason a slideshow feels sluggish.

Use the device toggle near the top of the editor to preview how the slideshow looks on mobile, since captions and navigation controls that look fine on desktop can crowd a small screen. It's easier to adjust settings now than after visitors start seeing it.