How to fix listitem on Squarespace

Steps for Squarespace

1. Log in to your Squarespace account and open the affected page in the Pages panel.
2. If the broken list is inside a text block: click Edit on the block, select your list text, and use the Squarespace text toolbar to apply 'Bulleted List' or 'Numbered List' formatting — this generates proper `<ul><li>` or `<ol><li>` HTML.
3. If the broken list is in a custom Code Block (Add Block → Code), click to edit the block and rewrite the markup so `<li>` elements are wrapped in `<ul>` or `<ol>`.
4. For list markup injected via Settings → Advanced → Code Injection (site-wide header/footer scripts), find the relevant script and correct the HTML structure there.
5. If the issue originates in a Squarespace built-in navigation or summary block and you cannot change the markup, contact Squarespace support or use custom CSS combined with ARIA overrides only as a last resort.
6. Save and preview the page. Use axe DevTools browser extension to verify the fix.

What is listitem?

HTML lists are built from two parts: a container (`<ul>` for unordered, `<ol>` for ordered) and its items (`<li>`). When a `<li>` element's parent is something other than `<ul>`, `<ol>`, or an element with `role="list"`, the list structure is broken. This means a screen reader — the software blind and low-vision shoppers use to navigate — cannot tell the user they are inside a list, how many items it contains, or let them jump between items efficiently. The WCAG success criterion 1.3.1 (Info and Relationships) requires that structure conveyed visually (like a list of product features or navigation links) also be conveyed in the underlying code.

Screen reader users rely on correct list markup to understand and navigate your page — if list items are orphaned from their parent container, assistive technology may read each item as isolated, unrelated text, destroying the meaning of product feature lists, navigation menus, breadcrumbs, and shopping cart line items. This is a WCAG 2.x Level A failure (the most severe category), which creates legal accessibility risk under laws like the ADA in the US, the EAA in Europe, and equivalent legislation worldwide — online retailers have faced lawsuits and regulatory action over exactly these kinds of structural failures. Beyond legal risk, poor accessibility can reduce conversions from the roughly 1-in-4 adults who have a disability, and Google's crawlers also use semantic structure to understand page content, so clean markup supports SEO as a secondary benefit.

See the complete Listitem guide for every platform and the full background.