Mycelium

What Mycelium is

Mycelium is one of Squarespace's own free 7.1 templates, built on Fluid Engine and styled as a small print shop for a landscape photographer. The demo is dark and quiet: near-black backgrounds, a red accent, lower-case type and moody photographs of Icelandic coastlines, riverbeds and hot springs. The old listing on this page described a four page portfolio with Home, About, Portfolio and Contact pages; the actual demo is three pages and the middle one is a shop. If you want to sell prints from a minimal, image-led site, this is one of the few free Squarespace templates built around that.

What it does

The pages in the demo are Home, Prints and Contact. Home is a full-bleed image page with a short line of copy and a link into the shop. Prints is a standard Squarespace store page with six sample products, each a landscape print with its own product page, price field, variants and add to cart button, so you inherit a working checkout rather than a gallery pretending to be one. Contact is a simple form page. There is no About page in the demo, no blog and no portfolio collection; the shop grid does the job of the portfolio. Because it is Fluid Engine, every section is drag and drop, and the dark palette, red accent and type all live in Site Styles.

Who it suits

Landscape, fine art and travel photographers who want to sell prints, illustrators and printmakers with a small catalogue, and anyone who wants a dark, image-first store with very little chrome. It works as a side shop for a photographer whose main portfolio lives elsewhere, and it scales to a few dozen products before the single grid starts to feel crowded.

One honest caveat

Selling anything on Squarespace needs a Business plan or higher (Personal does not include commerce), and Business takes a transaction fee on top of card processing; if you plan to sell more than a handful of prints a month, price the Commerce plans first. The demo also has no About page, so you will build the story of who you are yourself, and the dark palette only works with strong, consistent imagery. Print fulfilment is not part of the template: Squarespace's built-in commerce handles orders, but printing and shipping is your problem, or a print-on-demand extension's.

Setup

Mycelium is free and included with every Squarespace plan, but you need Business or above to take payments. You choose it when you start a new site, or preview the demo and click to start from it. There is no licence to buy and nothing to install. Squarespace 7.1 does not let you switch templates on an existing site, so if you already have a 7.1 site you would start a fresh trial from Mycelium and move your content across. Plan for one to three hours to replace the six demo products and the home and contact copy, plus time to connect a payment processor and set up shipping.

Related guide

See how Mycelium compares with paid designer templates in my roundup of the best Squarespace templates for photographers, or browse the templates for photographers collection and the full Squarespace templates list. If you are weighing a free Squarespace template against a designer template, read my guide on how to choose the right Squarespace template.