Move your pages, blog, and store off Squarespace and onto WordPress without losing content, traffic, or rankings.
Squarespace to WordPress migration, explained
Here is the part nobody tells you before you start. Squarespace gives you a partial export, not a full one. So a Squarespace to WordPress migration is really three jobs stitched together. You export what Squarespace allows, you import that into a self-hosted WordPress site, and then you rebuild by hand everything Squarespace flat-out refuses to hand over. Basic pages and one blog come across fine. Your store, your design, and a pile of content blocks do not.
I’ve moved a stack of small and mid-size businesses off Squarespace over the years, the same plain client work as the Wix, Joomla, and Drupal jobs I’ve handled, and every Squarespace one snaps to the same shape. The blog and pages export clean. Everything else you rebuild with your own two hands. The first time it caught me out, I imported the XML, watched the pages drop in fine, and only then realised the entire shop and every custom-styled section had simply not come. I was rebuilding product pages by hand at midnight. Now I scope that split on day one and the job turns calm and predictable. The people who get burned are the ones expecting a one-click clone, who find out halfway through that half their site never made the trip.
None of that is a reason to stay put. WordPress hands you full ownership of the site, thousands of themes and plugins, genuine SEO control, and zero platform lock-in. What follows is exactly what transfers, what you rebuild, and how to pull it off without watching your Google rankings slide.
Want the wider view first? The complete WordPress migration guide covers the full process across every source platform. Treat this page as the Squarespace-specific deep dive.
What Squarespace actually exports to WordPress
The whole export lands as one file. It’s a WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) XML file, and before you click a single button you want a realistic inventory of what actually survives the trip. The official Squarespace export documentation spells out the split, and here is how it breaks down.
What exports cleanly
- Basic layout pages (as WordPress pages)
- One blog page and all of its posts (as WordPress posts)
- Text and image blocks within those pages and posts
- Gallery pages (and York-template project pages on version 7.0)
- Up to 1,000 comments per blog post
What does NOT export
- Store / product pages and product blocks. E-commerce data is excluded from the XML entirely.
- Event pages, album pages, cover pages, index pages, info pages, calendar pages, and portfolio pages
- Audio blocks and video blocks
- Custom CSS and all style settings. Your design does not come with you.
- Content in page-specific headers, footers, and sidebars
- Draft posts, and any blog beyond the first (only one blog page exports)
Choose your migration path
Three realistic routes exist for getting off Squarespace. Which one fits comes down to site size, whether you run a store, and how much your own time is worth.
| Approach | Best for | Cost | Effort / risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Native export + manual rebuild (DIY) | Small blogs and brochure sites, no store | Free (hosting only) | High effort; image and styling cleanup required |
| DIY + automated content tool | Content-heavy blogs wanting less copy/paste | ~$50–$200 for a paid importer | Medium; tools capture text/basic formatting, not design |
| Done-for-you migration | Stores, business sites, anyone protecting rankings | Quoted, fixed scope | Lowest risk; redirects, images, and store handled for you |
Purely a blog? The DIY route is perfectly reasonable. Run a store, sit on years of content, or simply can’t stomach a traffic dip, and the math shifts. A botched migration costs you broken images, lost redirects, and deindexed pages, and that bill usually runs higher than paying to have it handled properly the first time. The done-for-you WordPress migration service rolls the export, the manual rebuild, and the redirect map into one fixed-scope project.
Not sure where your site stands? Run a free pre-migration audit to see your current pages, indexed URLs, and what will need redirects.
Prepare before you migrate
A clean migration starts well before you click export. Trade one hour here for days of cleanup you’d otherwise eat later.
1. Set up WordPress hosting
Self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org) is the requirement here, not the locked-down free WordPress.com plan, because only the self-hosted version lets you install the importer and the plugins you’ll need. Pick a host, install WordPress, then choose a theme that lands somewhere close to your current Squarespace look. Remember, the old design doesn’t transfer. The theme is how you claw that visual feel back.
2. Inventory your URLs
Build a spreadsheet of every Squarespace URL pulling organic traffic or carrying backlinks. This becomes your redirect map later, so don’t skip it. Pull the data from Google Search Console and your Squarespace analytics.
3. Export your store separately
Product data sits outside the XML, so you have to export it on its own. Open the Squarespace Products panel, select your products, and hit Export to pull down a CSV, exactly as the Squarespace product export documentation describes. A few limits will bite if you ignore them. Only physical and service products export, never digital ones. You get a maximum of three variant options per product. And the ceiling sits at 10,000 products and variants. That CSV is what you’ll later import into WooCommerce.
Here’s the one rule I genuinely never break. Keep the Squarespace subscription running until the new WordPress site is fully built, tested, and redirected. Cancel early and you snap your image links and yank your live store offline. You will discover both at the worst possible moment.
How to migrate from Squarespace to WordPress, step by step
Work through these in order. Each one lines up with a step in the structured how-to at the foot of this page.
First, export your Squarespace content
From your Squarespace dashboard, head to Settings → Advanced → Import / Export, choose Export, pick WordPress as the format, and grab the .xml file it spits out. One catch worth knowing. Only published, paid sites export. Trial sites won’t.
Install the WordPress Importer
Over in WordPress, open Tools → Import and install the official WordPress Importer plugin. Activate it. Then run the importer and feed it your Squarespace XML file.
Run the import and assign authors
Mid-import, tick “Download and import file attachments” so your images get pulled into the Media Library instead of being left dangling as Squarespace links. Then point the content at an existing WordPress author, or spin up a new one.
Verify images and fix broken media
Most DIY migrations skip this part. Don’t. Open a handful of imported posts and check that images both render and actually live in your Media Library. Anything still pointing back to a squarespace.com URL has to be re-uploaded. A broken-link checker plugin makes the hunt a lot faster.
Rebuild what didn't export
Now the manual work. Recreate your store in WooCommerce (covered next), then rebuild events, galleries, portfolios, and any custom-styled pages using your new theme and the block editor. This is design work, not import work. It’s also where the bulk of the hours go.
Set permalinks and 301 redirects
Line up your WordPress permalink structure with your old URLs wherever you can (Settings → Permalinks), then build 301 redirects for anything that changed. Google confirms that permanent (301) redirects pass canonicalization signals. Get them right and your rankings ride along.
Point your domain and go live
Repoint your domain’s DNS or nameservers at the WordPress host. Test it hard. Only once the new site is confirmed live and the redirects fire should you cancel Squarespace.
Migrating a Squarespace store to WooCommerce
Sell on Squarespace? Then your products are the piece that demands the most care, since the XML export leaves them out completely. On every client store I’ve moved off Squarespace, this is the part I block out the most hours for, and it surprises people every time. Pushing the CSV into WooCommerce is the quick bit. Then you open the catalog and the real grind starts. The variant options Squarespace dropped on export, the descriptions that came through as a wall of mangled formatting, the product photos that landed at the wrong sizes. I rebuilt one client’s whole catalog field by field because the export had quietly flattened every option set. The import is never the slow part. The cleanup behind it is.
Install WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the free, dominant e-commerce plugin for WordPress. Install it, activate it, run the setup wizard, then configure your currency, shipping, and payments.
Import your product CSV
Grab the product CSV you pulled from Squarespace and run it through WooCommerce’s built-in Product CSV Importer under Products → Import. It maps your CSV columns onto WooCommerce fields, handles both simple and variable products, and reads category hierarchy from > notation for parent/child structure. Plan to tidy up product images and descriptions once it finishes. And mind two ceilings the Squarespace side imposes. Its product CSVs cap at three variant options, and they drop digital products entirely. Bigger or messier catalog than that? Budget real time for manual product setup, or hand the whole thing off to be migrated.
Deeper, more tangled stores are a different animal. A professional migration can carry products, customers, and order history across while keeping your product URLs and redirects intact. For the wider plugin landscape, there’s a roundup of the best WordPress migration plugins.
Preserve SEO and avoid traffic loss
Losing search traffic is the single biggest risk in any platform switch. Two things stand between you and that loss. Matching URLs, and 301 redirects. Honestly, on most of my migrations the content move is the easy half. Preserving the years of SEO value bolted to those old URLs is the part that earns its keep.
Map every old URL to a new one
Pull up the URL spreadsheet from earlier and pair each Squarespace URL with its WordPress equivalent. Anything that shifts needs a permanent redirect. A redirect plugin like Redirection will let you import the whole map in one go.
Why 301s matter
Google is blunt about this. Its Search Central guidance says that when a URL changes you should “use a permanent server-side redirect whenever possible,” so the new URL becomes canonical and inherits the old page’s signals. Skip it and Google reads your new pages as brand-new. Your rankings restart from zero.
Post-launch checklist
- Submit a new XML sitemap in Google Search Console
- Verify redirects with a crawler. No chains, no 404s.
- Re-add page titles and meta descriptions (these do not transfer)
- Confirm images have descriptive alt text
If you hit problems like broken images, 404s, or redirect loops, the guide to fixing common WordPress migration errors covers the fixes.
Common Squarespace migration mistakes to avoid
Failed Squarespace migrations tend to fail the same handful of ways. Spot them ahead of time and you’ve already won half the fight.
Cancelling Squarespace too early
This one costs the most. Since images so often import as links pointing back to Squarespace, killing the old plan before you’ve re-hosted your media leaves the new site riddled with broken images and your store dark. Run both in parallel until the WordPress build is fully verified. No exceptions.
Forgetting the redirect map
Everyone fixates on getting the content across and then forgets the URLs moved. Every old URL carrying traffic or backlinks needs a 301. Leave them out and Google treats your new pages as strangers, and the rankings slide.
Assuming the store comes with the export
It doesn’t. The XML drops product data, full stop. Plan for a separate CSV export and a WooCommerce build from day one instead of tripping over the gap halfway through.
Skipping on-page SEO recovery
Page titles and meta descriptions don’t make the trip. Fail to re-enter them with an SEO plugin and you launch a site wearing thin or missing metadata.
Underestimating the rebuild
This, in my experience, is where most DIY Squarespace moves stall out. The export step feels like the entire job, so the design and store rebuild gets shrugged off as a quick afterthought. Wrong way round. The export is the easy hour. What eats the days is everything Squarespace flatly refuses to hand over, the custom CSS, the event and gallery pages, the styling that gave the site its character. All of it gets rebuilt by hand in the block editor against a fresh theme. I’ve watched clients budget an afternoon for this and then lose a week to it. Scope the rebuild honestly before you lock in a launch date, because that is the part that actually decides when you go live.
For what it’s worth, Squarespace is one of the gentler platforms to walk away from, if only because your pages and one blog do export. Compare that to a Wix to WordPress migration, which offers no native export whatsoever, or a Shopify to WooCommerce migration, which throws orders and customers into the bargain. Weighing platforms? Factor in how much each one genuinely lets you carry out the door.
Whatever you’re facing, run a dry run on a staging copy before you go anywhere near your live domain. A test import flushes out broken images, oversized files, and import limits while they’re still cheap to fix. Want a second set of eyes? The WordPress migration specialists can vet your plan or take the whole job off your plate.
Moving from Squarespace to WordPress without the headaches
None of this is out of reach. A Squarespace to WordPress migration is genuinely doable. The catch is that the partial export pushes all the real effort into the rebuild. You re-create the store, restore the images, recover the design, and shield your rankings with redirects. Handle that carefully and you walk away with a faster, fully-owned site that bends to whatever you need next.
Rather skip the manual cleanup and the redirect spreadsheet altogether? The done-for-you WordPress migration service takes the entire move, content, store, images, and SEO-safe redirects, and runs it as a single fixed-scope project, so you land on WordPress without surrendering a day of traffic. Start with a free pre-migration audit to scope your site.
Frequently asked questions
Can you migrate everything from Squarespace to WordPress?
No. Squarespace exports basic pages, one blog with its posts, and text/image blocks. Products, events, albums, index pages, custom CSS, and styling do not export and must be rebuilt manually.
Do Squarespace products export to WordPress?
Not in the XML file. You export products separately as a CSV (physical and service products only, max three variant options, up to 10,000 items) and import that into WooCommerce.
Will I lose my Google rankings when I move to WordPress?
Not if you set up 301 redirects from every old URL to its new location. Google confirms permanent redirects pass ranking signals, so your equity transfers when redirects are done correctly.
Why are my images broken after importing from Squarespace?
The WordPress Importer often imports images as links back to Squarespace instead of copying the files. Enable “Download and import file attachments” during import, and re-upload any image still pointing to a squarespace.com URL before cancelling your Squarespace plan.
How long does a Squarespace to WordPress migration take?
A small blog can be moved in a day. A business site or store with hundreds of products, custom design, and a full redirect map typically takes several days to a couple of weeks depending on complexity.
Should I cancel Squarespace before or after migrating?
After. Keep Squarespace active until your WordPress site is built, tested, and live with working redirects. Cancelling early breaks your image links and takes your store offline.