How to Migrate From Squarespace to WordPress

People outgrow Squarespace for good reasons: they want a plugin it doesn’t offer, a store with more flexibility, control over their SEO, or simply to stop being boxed in by a closed system. If that’s you, the goal is to migrate Squarespace to WordPress without losing your content or the search rankings you’ve built. The honest version of this guide matters, because Squarespace makes a clean, complete export harder than it should be — some things come across neatly, some things don’t come across at all, and knowing which is which is what keeps a migration from turning into a rebuild you didn’t plan for.

What exports cleanly from Squarespace

Squarespace offers a built-in export in WordPress’s own format (WXR), and for a basic blog-and-pages site it does a reasonable job. What generally comes across:

• Standard pages and their text content.
• Blog posts, with their text, and usually the featured images.
• Basic images embedded in that content.

For a straightforward site — a few pages and a blog — that export is a real starting point, and WordPress can import it directly.

What does not export (the part nobody warns you about)

Here’s where the honesty comes in. Squarespace’s export is famously partial, and the gaps are exactly the pieces people assume will “just come.” Plan for these to need hands-on work:

• Only one blog exports. If you run more than one blog, the export covers a single one; the rest have to be moved manually.
• Product and store data. Your Squarespace Commerce products, inventory, and orders don’t come through the standard export in any usable way. An online store essentially has to be rebuilt in WooCommerce, with products re-created or imported from a separate product spreadsheet.
• Style and layout. The export moves content, not design. Squarespace’s templates don’t translate to a WordPress theme, so the look is rebuilt on the WordPress side — which is usually what people wanted anyway, but it’s work, not a copy-paste.
• Custom blocks and embeds. Product blocks, event calendars, audio and album blocks, custom CSS, and third-party embeds generally don’t survive the export and need re-creating.
• Some images. A portion of images — particularly gallery and banner images — often don’t make the trip and have to be moved by hand.

None of this means the migration is a bad idea. It means a Squarespace move is more of a careful reconstruction than a one-click transfer, and anyone who promises otherwise hasn’t done many of them.

Don’t lose your SEO: the 301 redirect step

This is the step that protects the traffic you’ve earned, and it’s the one most likely to get skipped. Squarespace and WordPress structure their URLs differently, so when you move, the web addresses of your pages and posts change. If you do nothing, every link Google has indexed — and every link another site points at you — lands on a “page not found,” and the rankings attached to those pages evaporate.

The fix is a 301 redirect (a permanent forwarding address for a page) for each old URL pointing to its new home. A 301 tells search engines “this page moved here, permanently,” and it passes the ranking value along to the new address. The practical process is to make a list of your important Squarespace URLs before the move, map each to its new WordPress URL, and put the redirects in place at cutover. Miss this and you can watch months of traffic disappear in the weeks after an otherwise “successful” migration. Get it right and the move is invisible to Google, too — not just to visitors.

The safe cutover order

However you handle the content, the move itself should follow the zero-downtime sequence: build the full WordPress site on the new host first, check it privately on a temporary URL until it’s genuinely right, and only then point your domain over — with your 301 redirects live at the switch. Your Squarespace site stays up and serving visitors the entire time you’re building the replacement, so there’s no window where the site is offline. We break that whole sequence down in how to switch hosts without downtime and how a zero-downtime migration works.

Let us handle the messy parts

A Squarespace migration is very doable, but it’s the kind of job where the fiddly parts — rebuilding a store in WooCommerce, chasing down the images that didn’t export, mapping and installing every 301 redirect, re-creating the custom blocks — are exactly where a DIY move goes wrong or stalls out for a month. That’s the work we take off your plate.

When you join, our team does the migration for you, free: we rebuild the site properly on WordPress, move the content the export leaves behind, set up the redirects so your SEO survives, and run the cutover with zero downtime — your Squarespace site stays live until the WordPress one is verified and ready. And you land on a genuinely managed platform, not just a new address: a flat $29.99-a-month for managed WordPress (a shared store plan starts at $39.99 if you’re moving a shop to WooCommerce). A firewall and malware scanning keep it clean, updates are applied and verified, your site is backed up off-site 3 times a day and served fast worldwide — and support is there any hour. Leaving a walled garden like Squarespace? The same principles apply to migrating from Wix.

One thing worth being straight about: part of what Squarespace quietly did in the background — keeping the software current and secure — turns into real, ongoing work once you’re on WordPress, and most hosts hand that work to you. We don’t just move you, we keep doing that part. So the freedom of an open platform doesn’t arrive with a maintenance job you now have to fit in yourself or pay someone to cover — for one site or a handful, that upkeep stays ours.

Take a look at our plans when you’re ready, and tell us what your Squarespace site includes — pages, a blog, a store — and we’ll give you an honest read on the move and handle the parts that make people put it off.