How to Migrate Squarespace to WordPress, Step by Step

Squarespace publishes a WordPress export, so this looks like a two-click job. The import genuinely is easy. Everything the import does not cover is the actual project, and knowing that in advance is the difference between a weekend and a bad month.

This is the sequence we work in, written so you can follow it yourself.

If you have not decided yet, should you switch from Squarespace to WordPress covers the four cases where it is worth it and the three where staying is the better call. What follows assumes the answer was yes.

Before you touch anything: inventory#

Do this first, because after cutover you cannot reconstruct it.

Crawl your live site and save every URL. Screaming Frog's free tier covers 500 URLs, which is more than most Squarespace sites have. Export the list to a spreadsheet. This list is your redirect map, and it does not exist anywhere else.

Export Search Console, sorted by clicks. These are the addresses that actually earn you traffic, and they get priority if you have to make judgement calls later.

Download your form submissions. Squarespace stores enquiries in the form panel and the export does not include them. Once the account closes, they are gone.

Note the things that will not come across. Walk your own site and list anything that is not a page of text: galleries, product pages, index sections, members areas, scheduling blocks, custom code injections. That list is your rebuild backlog.

Step 1: export from Squarespace#

Settings, then Import and Export Content, then Export, and pick the WordPress option. You get one XML file.

Two things to know about it:

• It carries pages, blog posts with dates and authors, and body text. That is genuinely useful and it is genuinely partial.
• It references images rather than containing them. The files stay on Squarespace's servers until something fetches them.

If you sell anything, export the product catalogue separately as a CSV from the commerce panel. The site export does not include products.

Step 2: stand up WordPress before you cancel anything#

Buy hosting and install WordPress on a temporary address or a staging subdomain. Do not point your domain at it yet, and do not cancel Squarespace. Your live site keeps running and earning throughout.

Hosting suitable for a small business site runs about $10 to $30 a month. That is the whole running cost after this, which is usually less than the Squarespace plan you are leaving.

Step 3: run the import#

In WordPress: Tools, then Import, then install and run the WordPress importer. Upload the XML.

When it asks, tick "Download and import file attachments". This is the step that pulls your images off Squarespace and onto your own server, and it only works while your Squarespace subscription is still live.

Step 4: verify the images before you celebrate#

Open a few imported posts and view the page source. Look at the image src values.

If they still start with a Squarespace domain, the import hot-linked rather than downloaded them. The site looks perfect right now and will break entirely the day your subscription lapses. Re-run the import with attachments enabled, or use a media import plugin to pull them across, and check again.

This is the single most expensive mistake in this migration, and it is invisible at the moment it happens.

Step 5: rebuild what the export left behind#

Work through the backlog you listed at the start. In practice this is:

• Gallery and album pages. These do not export. Rebuild with a gallery block or plugin.
• Index page sections. Squarespace's stacked-section pages come through as flattened content at best. These get rebuilt as normal pages.
• Product pages. Reshape the CSV and import it into WooCommerce if you sell; the Squarespace to WooCommerce guide covers the column mapping, which is fiddlier than it looks.
• Forms. Rebuild them and test that submissions actually arrive somewhere you will read.
• Custom CSS and code injections. These are not in the export. Copy them out of Squarespace before you cancel, even if you do not reuse them directly.

Step 6: the redirect map, which is the whole point#

Everything above is reversible. This step is what decides whether the traffic you have built survives.

Squarespace generates distinctive URL shapes, which is good news, because distinctive shapes map mechanically:

Squarespace	WordPress
/blog/2024/3/14/post-title	/blog/post-title
/about-1, /new-page	/about, a real slug
/shop/p/product-slug	/product/product-slug
/store	/shop
/config/...	home, never a content page

The dated blog paths matter most. Squarespace stamps the publish date into every post URL, WordPress sites conventionally do not, and nobody wants /blog/2019/11/2/ in their addresses forever. But those dated URLs are exactly what Google has indexed and what other sites have linked to. Each one needs a 301 to its clean equivalent, or you lose the accumulated authority of your entire archive in an afternoon.

Because the transformation is mechanical, generate it rather than typing it. Paste your crawled URL list into our redirect map generator; it applies these Squarespace transformations and exports as .htaccess, nginx config or a WordPress Redirection CSV. Review the output before deploying it, then implement with the Redirection plugin or at server level.

Step 7: cut over, then verify#

Lower your DNS TTL a day or two ahead so the switch propagates quickly. Point the domain at your new host during a quiet hour for your traffic, which your analytics can tell you.

Then, in the first hour:

1. Spot-check your top twenty URLs from the Search Console export. Each should return a single 301 to a working page, not a chain and not a 404.
2. Check robots.txt allows crawling, and check the page source for a stray noindex left over from staging. This is the mistake that collapses traffic rather than denting it.
3. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.

Keep Squarespace paid for another two weeks. It is cheap insurance and it is your only rollback.

What to expect afterwards#

Some ranking movement in the first fortnight is normal while Google re-crawls, and it recovers. What matters is the direction after week two, and Search Console's Page Indexing report tells you far sooner than the traffic graph does. SEO recovery after a migration covers how to read that, including how to tell a routine dip apart from a redirect map with a hole in it.

Should you do this yourself?#

Genuinely yes, if your site is a handful of pages, your blog archive is short, and search traffic is not yet a major source of business. The steps above are the whole job and none of them are exotic.

Reconsider if you have a large dated blog archive, if organic search is a meaningful share of your revenue, or if you sell online. Not because the steps change, but because the cost of missing one goes up sharply, and the redirect map is unforgiving in a way the rest of it is not.

If you would rather hand it over, we do this at a fixed price with the crawl, the complete redirect map and six weeks of Search Console monitoring included. Either way, do the inventory in step zero first. It is the part you cannot redo later.