Square Industry Page Redesign
- 10x YoY Pageviews
- 230x YoY Signups
- 310x BoF NPA Increase
Square's industry landing page lived inside a public web ecosystem most people didn't know existed — 17,000+ pages, largely unmapped, with no unified ownership. The redesign was part of a broader initiative to modernise Square's public web presence, but the harder design problem wasn't visual. It was strategic: how do you build a page that's audience-agnostic without becoming a fallback?
The industry page needed to welcome everyone — bakeries, bars, food trucks, full-service restaurants — while actively guiding users toward the subcategory pages where they'd find the products relevant to them. A catch-all that still pushed people somewhere. A front door that wasn't a dead end.
The central tension surfaced during production: how to structure a page that was both entry point and navigator. A pivotal call I made was around the global navigation link — I proposed and demoed structuring it as a visually subordinate element relative to the "All industries →" link, a small but deliberate hierarchy signal that reinforced the audience pages as the primary destination rather than the industry index. It sounds minor, but it was the structural decision that resolved the front-door problem without requiring the page itself to carry all that weight alone.
Timing helped with the visual side of things. Fresh photography had just been shot for each subcategory — bakeries, bars, coffee shops, food trucks — and integrating that imagery into the index page gave it warmth and specificity, while the page structure and metadata handled the indexing and funnelling work underneath.
This project sharpened how I think about dependency mapping upfront. The navigation decision had downstream effects on page structure, metadata, SEO, and how the subcategory pages were linked — and surfacing that dependency early, rather than letting it emerge during QA, kept it from becoming a last-minute structural change.
I now treat navigation architecture as a production dependency, something that gets scoped and resolved at the beginning of the work rather than revisited at the end.
“Kudos to Jess, Laura, and Olivia for reimagining square.com/industry. Over the past 6 months YoY, the page has seen a 10x in pageviews, a 230x in signups, and a 310x increase in BoF NPA. Amazing results!”
— Cyrous Bortey, Block
