If you see a 403 forbidden message when you try to visit your Squarespace 5 site, we might have blacklisted your IP address because we think it's spam. Although it's rare, our system automatically blacklists an IP address as a security measure if it's accessing a site repeatedly in a short amount of time. In most cases, this is a temporary problem you can fix by following this guide.
There are a few things that can cause this message to show:
- Multiple people in a single network, such as an office or school, are accessing your site.
- A proxy server is fronting your site, resulting in traffic being filtered through a single IP.
- There's a browser extension that's refreshing a page repeatedly.
Note: If you're seeing this error on someone else's Squarespace 5 site, contact the site owner. They need to log in and resolve the issue following the steps in this guide.
Tip: For more features and functionality, upgrade your site to Squarespace 7. To learn more about the benefits of upgrading, visit Squarespace 5 vs. newer versions.
Fix the issue: Updating your DNS settings
The 403 error usually shows if a site's custom domain isn't up to date with our current DNS records. To fix the issue:
Step 1 - Open the DNS settings for your domain
- If you purchased your domain from a third-party provider, such as GoDaddy or Namecheap, log into your domain provider's site to find your DNS settings. Depending on your provider, this may be called Zone File Settings, DNS Manager, or something similar. Contact your provider's support team for help.
- For domains registered through Squarespace, visit Opening Squarespace 5 advanced DNS settings.
Step 2 - Update the records
Check the A Record and CNAME values. Edit them to use the following values if they don't match already:
A Records:
- 198.185.159.160
- 198.185.159.161
- 198.49.23.160
- 198.49.23.161
CNAME:
- ext5-cust.squarespace.com
More help
It can take 72 hours for these DNS changes to fully process.
If you're still experiencing an issue after 72 hours:
- Find your IP address by using Google's IP address finder tool: https://www.google.com/#q=what+is+my+ip
- Open a ticket to let us know you updated your DNS settings and are still seeing this error message. In the ticket, attach a screenshot of the message and include your IP address.
Our Customer Care team will forward this information to our engineers for review.
Note: Squarespace 5 is our legacy platform from 2012. Although we still support Squarespace 5, fixing bugs or issues is a lower priority for us while we focus on our current platform, Squarespace 7.