How to Migrate from Squarespace to WordPress (Step by Step)

People leave Squarespace for the same reasons they leave any closed platform: they hit a wall. You want a plugin Squarespace does not offer, a level of design control its templates will not give you, or you simply do not want your business sitting on a system you cannot fully own. WordPress removes those limits. And unlike Wix, Squarespace gives you a real head start — a built-in export that hands WordPress a proper import file.

That export is genuinely useful, but it is not the whole job. It carries some of your content and skips the rest, and it does nothing to protect the rankings attached to your current URLs. This guide walks the migration in the order that moves everything cleanly while keeping your search traffic intact.

What Squarespace Exports — and What It Doesn't

Squarespace can export your site to a WordPress-compatible file (the same WXR format WordPress uses for its own exports). You will find it under Settings → Advanced → Import / Export → Export, then choose the WordPress option. WordPress reads that file directly, so the bulk transfer is real. The catch is what fits inside it.

The export carries:

Your pages and their text content
One blog page, with its posts
Images embedded in that content

The export does not carry:

More than one blog — if you run several blog pages, only one comes across, so the others have to be rebuilt
Product pages and your store, including orders and customers
Album pages, event pages, and most gallery blocks
Style, fonts, and layout — your Squarespace design does not transfer at all
Audio blocks, some embed blocks, and any custom code

So treat the export as a strong first pass on your text and primary blog, not a one-click clone. The sections below cover the rebuild for everything it leaves behind, and the redirects that protect your SEO regardless of what moved automatically.

Step 1: Inventory Every URL Before You Touch Anything

Do this while your Squarespace site is still live and serving visitors. You are building the master list that every later step depends on, and it is the single most important thing standing between a clean migration and a traffic drop.

Pull a complete list of your current URLs from three sources, then combine them into one spreadsheet:

Your Squarespace sitemap — visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml to see every page and post Squarespace has published.
Google Search Console — the Pages report under Indexing shows which URLs Google actually has indexed. Export it so you know what is genuinely ranking.
Google Analytics — sort landing pages by organic traffic over the last 12 months to see which URLs earn the visits worth protecting.

For each URL, record the page title, meta description, H1, and target keyword. This one spreadsheet becomes both your redirect map and your content checklist. Flag the top 10 to 20 pages by traffic; those earn the most careful attention later.

Step 2: Set Up WordPress on Proper Hosting

Stand up a fresh WordPress installation on your new hosting account, using a staging environment or temporary URL so your public domain keeps pointing at Squarespace while you build. Do not change DNS yet. Your live site should keep serving visitors, and earning rankings, until the new build is genuinely ready.

Choose hosting before you choose a theme. WordPress is only as fast as the server beneath it, and page speed is a direct ranking factor. Pick managed WordPress hosting with built-in caching, a CDN, and free SSL so performance is handled from day one rather than something you fight later.

Then install three things you will use before launch: a lightweight theme, an SEO plugin (Yoast SEO or Rank Math), and a redirect plugin (the free Redirection plugin is reliable). Squarespace ships with clean defaults, so resist the urge to bolt on dozens of plugins to recreate it — a lean install is easier to keep fast.

Step 3: Export from Squarespace, Import to WordPress

Run the export described above to download your .xml file from Squarespace. Then in WordPress, go to Tools → Import, install the WordPress importer, and upload that file. During import, WordPress offers to download and import file attachments — leave that box checked so it pulls your images into the media library instead of leaving them hotlinked to Squarespace.

When the import finishes, check it carefully rather than assuming it worked:

Open several imported posts and pages to confirm the text and headings came across intact.
Look for images that failed to download — these show as broken thumbnails or links still pointing at a squarespace.com URL. Re-upload any that did not transfer.
Check formatting on long pages, where Squarespace blocks sometimes import as awkward spacing or stray markup.

Images are the most common weak point. If a large share of them stayed on Squarespace, re-upload them now, because those links will break the moment you cancel your Squarespace subscription.

Step 4: Rebuild What Didn't Export

Now handle everything the export skipped. How much work this is depends entirely on what kind of Squarespace site you had.

Your store

Squarespace Commerce does not export to WordPress. To keep selling, install WooCommerce and recreate your catalog. For a handful of products, rebuilding them by hand is fastest. For a large catalog, export your products from Squarespace as a CSV, then import that CSV into WooCommerce with its product importer. Orders and customer accounts do not transfer, so keep your Squarespace store readable until any open orders are fulfilled.

Galleries, events, and extra blogs

Album pages, event pages, and any blog beyond the first are rebuilt manually in WordPress. Gallery pages map cleanly to a WordPress gallery block or a dedicated gallery plugin. Events fit an events plugin such as The Events Calendar. A second or third blog can be recreated as a category, or as a separate post type if it genuinely needs to stay distinct.

Design and layout

None of your Squarespace styling comes across, so plan to rebuild the look in your WordPress theme. This is usually a feature, not a loss — it is the chance to get the faster, fully controllable design you left Squarespace to find. Recreate your core pages (home, about, services, contact) in the block editor so they are clean and fast rather than imported and messy.

Step 5: Match URLs and Build the Redirect Map

This is the step that decides whether you keep your rankings. Squarespace and WordPress generate different URL structures, so for every URL in your Step 1 inventory you have two choices: recreate the same path in WordPress, or 301-redirect the old path to its new home.

Where you can, set your WordPress permalinks and individual slugs to match the old Squarespace paths exactly. Squarespace blog posts usually live under a collection path such as /blog/post-title, while WordPress defaults can differ — adjust the permalink structure in Settings → Permalinks to get as close as possible, then fix individual slugs by hand.

For every path that still changes, create a 301 (permanent) redirect from the old URL to the new one in your redirect plugin. A 301 passes the large majority of the old page's ranking signal to the new URL. Map them one to one. Never bulk-redirect every old URL to your homepage — Google treats that as a soft 404 and passes no ranking value through it.

One Squarespace-specific trap: Squarespace has its own built-in URL redirect manager, but those redirects only run while your site is hosted on Squarespace. The moment you move DNS to WordPress, they stop working. Every redirect you need after launch has to be rebuilt on the WordPress side — do not assume your existing Squarespace redirects come with you.

Step 6: Test, Then Switch the Domain

Before you change a single DNS record, crawl your staging site with a tool like Screaming Frog to confirm there are no broken internal links and no missing title tags. Check Settings → Reading and make sure "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is unchecked — it is easy to leave on during a build, and it will quietly deindex you after launch.

When the new site is ready, move the domain. If your domain was registered through Squarespace, you will either point its DNS at your WordPress host or transfer the domain to a registrar you control. Update the A record, plus the www record, to your new server's IP. DNS propagates within a few hours for most visitors, and the moment it does your redirect map goes to work, forwarding every old Squarespace URL to its WordPress equivalent.

Step 7: The Post-Migration Checklist

Launch is not the finish line. Work through this within the first 48 hours:

Submit a fresh XML sitemap. Your SEO plugin generates one at /sitemap_index.xml. Submit it in Google Search Console to prompt a re-crawl of the new URLs.
Spot-check your redirects. Load 15 to 20 of your highest-traffic old URLs from the Step 1 inventory. Each should land on the correct new page with a 301, never a 404.
Confirm HTTPS. The whole site should load on https:// with no mixed-content warnings.
Keep Squarespace active for a few weeks. It is your safety net and your reference copy while you confirm nothing was missed.
Watch Search Console. A spike in 404s means a redirect you missed; a sustained ranking drop means a redirect or indexing issue to fix. A small, temporary wobble while Google re-crawls is normal.

Want It Done Without the Risk?

A Squarespace migration is more forgiving than a Wix one, but the URL mapping is still unforgiving, and a rebuilt store adds real work on top. If your site earns revenue from search or sales, the migration is not the place to learn by trial and error.

Our Squarespace to WordPress migration service handles the entire move: content export and import, a full WooCommerce rebuild where you sell, a complete one-to-one redirect map built from your live ranking data, plus Search Console monitoring after launch. Book a free call and we will review your current Squarespace site to map out the move.