Strade

What Strade is

Strade is one of Squarespace's own free 7.1 templates, built on Fluid Engine and styled as the site of a small tour company that runs trips in Switzerland, Spain and Italy. The tours in the demo are named after famous mountain passes (Grosse Scheidegg, Col de Sóller, the Italian Dolomites), so it reads as a cycling or road trip operator, with big landscape photography, a black, grey and white palette and clean, spacious type. The old listing on this page described Strade as a portfolio template for artists and designers with Home, About, Portfolio and Contact pages; there is no portfolio in the demo and the copy was wrong. It is a travel and tours site with a shop attached.

What it does

The pages in the demo are Home, Tours, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Information, Contact and a store. Home sets the scene with landscape imagery and links into the trips. Tours is the overview, and each country page carries the trips for that destination with its own imagery and copy. Information is where the practical detail lives (what is included, what to bring, how booking works), Contact is a form page, and the store is a standard Squarespace store page with three sample tours set up as products, so a visitor can book and pay for a trip through Squarespace Commerce rather than emailing. Every section is drag and drop in Fluid Engine, and the palette and type live in Site Styles.

Who it suits

Small tour operators, cycling and walking holiday companies, guides who sell a handful of dated trips a year, retreat organisers and anyone selling experiences by destination. The country page structure suits any business that organises its offer by place. It is not a portfolio for artists or designers, whatever earlier listings said: for that look at Kester or Night, two other free Squarespace templates I list.

One honest caveat

Selling tours as products needs a Business plan or higher, since Personal has no commerce, and Squarespace Commerce is built for physical and digital goods rather than dated bookings: it will take payment for a trip, but availability per date, deposits and participant details are not native, so a busy operator will want a booking tool such as Acuity, or a proper tour booking platform, embedded instead. The demo also assumes strong landscape photography, and there is no blog or About page, so both are yours to add.

Setup

Strade 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 Strade and move your content across. Plan for one to three hours to replace the demo trips, country pages and information copy, plus time to connect payments or a booking tool.

Related guide

Browse the full Squarespace templates list to compare Strade with paid travel and tourism templates, or read my guides on the best free Squarespace templates and how to choose the right Squarespace template.