How to Migrate From Squarespace to WordPress?

Why You Should Migrate from Squarespace to WordPress

Squarespace is highly regarded for its ease of use, clean interface, and all-in-one pricing, but its simplicity can become a limitation as your site grows. Many of our customers have encountered restrictions in areas such as customization options, plugin availability, and SEO flexibility as their stores scale. WordPress, on the other hand, stands out as an open-source platform whose extensibility and customization capabilities overcome the limitations that Squarespace faces.

If you are a store owner who wants to expand your store with advanced features such as SEO or add a range of unique functionalities to your sales pages, WordPress is a better choice than Squarespace. With over 14 years of experience in the eCommerce industry and extensive work helping customers overcome Squarespace’s limitations, here are the main reasons we believe you should switch from Squarespace to WordPress:

1. Greater Customization

Squarespace offers beautifully designed templates, but customization is limited by what the platform allows. As our expert reviews show, it provides only around 200 templates, which is relatively few for an e-commerce platform.

WordPress, on the other hand, offers access to thousands of themes developed by both WordPress and its community, giving you complete control over design, functionality, and user experience. If you want extensive customization options and ownership of the tools you use for your store, WordPress has a clear advantage over Squarespace.

WordPress customization goes far beyond themes and plugins, inspiring a well-known saying in the community: “If you can imagine it, there’s probably a WordPress plugin for it.”

2. Data Control and Security

With Squarespace, your site runs entirely on their hosting platform. This means that if they change features, pricing, or policies, you have limited control.

WordPress works differently, it’s self-hosted. You own your files, database, and hosting, giving you complete independence and peace of mind.

In other words, if you’re comfortable managing databases, hosting, and security, WordPress is a far more flexible option.

3. Advanced SEO Capabilities

Being found on search engines like Google is essential for growth, whether your store is branded or not. Customers may access your store by following a direct link or by searching for a product name on Google. If your search engine optimization is poor, your products will have little chance of being discovered.

Squarespace includes basic SEO capabilities, but WordPress especially with plugins like Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and All-in-One SEO goes much further. Many of our customers have shared similar experiences, noting that SEO on WordPress is easier and far more customizable than on Squarespace. You can adjust everything from URL structure and metadata to schema markup, internal linking, and content hierarchy. That level of control makes a significant difference when you’re competing in search results or expanding into new markets.

In other words, when it comes to SEO, WordPress is the clear winner.

4. Cost Efficiency with Scalability

Squarespace operates on fixed pricing plans, with their recommended plan costing $32 per month or $26 per month when billed annually. However, if you want to expand, you’ll need to upgrade, and you may end up paying for features you don’t actually use. With WordPress, you can choose your own hosting, themes, and plugins, so you only pay for what you truly need. For many website owners, this flexibility reduces ongoing costs and frees up budget to invest in growth-oriented tools such as SEO plugins.

I’ve also worked with many clients who have kept their budgets as low as $10–15 per month using WordPress while still selling effectively with free themes and plugins. This makes it clear that WordPress can be more cost-competitive if you manage your own domain, hosting, and plugins.

5. Community and Support

WordPress powers over 40% of all websites worldwide, while Squarespace accounts for only about 3%. This scale has fueled a wealth of resources, tutorials, forums, plugins, themes, security tools, and more to help you keep your site up to date. Squarespace, on the other hand, relies heavily on its in-house support team and documentation. Many of our customers have said they feel more confident with WordPress because there is always a solution, expert advice, or community resource available when they need it. Squarespace’s support isn’t bad—especially since it’s included in your subscription—but it’s more limited than what WordPress offers.

How to Migrate Squarespace to WordPress: Step-by-Step

Preparation Before Migration

A migration is 80% preparation and 20% execution. Prematurely initiating data transfer without a robust infrastructure or a clear inventory of assets typically results in “content drift”, where images break, formatting degrades, and SEO rankings plummet.

Selecting the Hosting Environment for WordPress

Unlike Squarespace, which bundles hosting with the software license, WordPress requires an external web host. The selection of a hosting provider is the single most critical decision in the pre-migration phase, as the server’s configuration directly impacts the success of large XML/CSV imports:

• For users transitioning from a managed environment like Squarespace, Managed WordPress Hosting (e.g WP Engine, Kinsta, or SiteGround) is strongly recommended.
• For budget-conscious migrations using shared hosting (e.g., Hostinger, Bluehost), the user must manually verify the server environment. It is advisable to access the control panel and ensure the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size settings are sufficient to accommodate the exported data files. These are also the hostings that WordPress.org recommends on their official website.

Inventory and Audit of Content

Squarespace’s export tools have rigid limitations. Understanding exactly what will and will not transfer is essential for resource planning:

Insight: Squarespace Index Pages (stacked pages) do not export as a single entity. They typically break apart into individual pages or are ignored entirely. Users must identify all Index Pages in their current site structure to recreate them using WordPress Page Builders.

Domain and DNS

During the migration, the live Squarespace site must remain active to serve visitors and allow the WordPress importer to fetch images. Therefore, the WordPress site should be developed on a temporary domain or staging environment:

• Do not transfer the domain registration until the migration is complete. Domain transfers can take up to 7 days and often lock DNS settings, preventing the necessary switch-over when the new site is ready.
• DNS Planning: Locate the DNS management panel for the current domain. Prepare to update the A Record (which points to the IP address) or Nameservers when the migration is validated.

Step 1: Install and Configure WordPress for Migration

Before you can import data, your target environment must be configured to accept it. Default WordPress installations are rarely optimized for large data migrations like this.

Installation and Baseline Configuration

Most hosting providers offer “One-Click” installers. Upon installation, immediate configuration is required to match the Squarespace URL structure as closely as possible:

• Permalinks: Navigate to Settings > Permalinks. Squarespace typically defaults to a structure like yourdomain.com/blog/post-title. To minimize the need for redirection rules, select “Custom Structure” in WordPress and enter /blog/%postname%/. This ensures that imported blog posts retain their exact original URLs, preserving SEO authority without additional intervention.
• Search Engine Visibility: Navigate to Settings > Reading and check the box “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” This is crucial. It prevents Google from crawling the half-built site and penalizing it for duplicate content (since the Squarespace site is still live).

Theme Selection

Because Squarespace templates cannot be exported, the visual design must be rebuilt:

• Modern Block Themes: Using a theme like “Twenty Twenty-Four” allows users to use the Gutenberg Block Editor to recreate Squarespace’s “sections” visually.
• Page Builders: For a closer approximation of Squarespace’s drag-and-drop interface, installing a plugin like Elementor is often recommended for DIY users.

These tools provide the layout flexibility needed to rebuild complex pages like the Homepage or Index pages.

Step 2: Core Content Migration from Squarespace to WordPress

The primary mechanism for moving text-based content is the XML file. Squarespace generates an XML file that mimics the WordPress export format (WXR – WordPress eXtended RSS), effectively “tricking” WordPress into accepting the data.

Export Your Squarespace Content

The export process is initiated from the Squarespace dashboard:

• Navigate to Settings > Advanced > Import / Export.
• Select Export.
• Click the WordPress icon. Note that even if you are not exporting to WordPress.com, this is the universal format for data extraction.
• The Primary Blog Constraint: If the Squarespace site contains multiple blog pages, the exporter will prompt the user to select one primary blog. Squarespace’s XML export can only handle one blog stream at a time.
• Wait for the compilation to finish and click Download. This yields a file typically named squarespace-export.xml.

Import Data Into Your WordPress

To import data from Squarespace to WordPress:

• Log in to the WordPress Dashboard.
• Navigate to Tools > Import.
• Select WordPress. If this is a fresh install, the system will prompt to “Install Now.” This installs the official WordPress Importer plugin.
• Click Run Importer.
• Upload the squarespace-export.xml file.
• Author Mapping: The system will analyze the XML and identify authors associated with the content. It is best practice to map these Squarespace authors to existing WordPress users (e.g., the Administrator account created during setup) to ensure content ownership is clear.
• Attachment Handling: Ensure the checkbox “Download and import file attachments” is selected.

Warning: While this feature attempts to download images, it is notoriously unreliable when communicating with Squarespace servers due to CDN protections and timeouts. Often, it will import the reference to the image but fail to download the actual file. This results in “hotlinking,” where the image displays on the WordPress site but is actually loading from Squarespace. If the Squarespace site is canceled, these images will disappear. We address this failure point in the next steps.

Post-Import Validation

Upon completion, navigate to Posts > All Posts and Pages > All Pages.

• Verify the count of published items matches the Squarespace inventory.
• Check the “Trash” folder. Sometimes, the importer flags content as duplicated or invalid and moves it there.
• Note that formatting (headings, bold text) usually survives, but complex layout elements (columns, spacers) will likely be stripped or converted to generic HTML blocks.

Step 3: Media Asset Recovery and Management

The most technically precarious aspect of this migration is image handling. Because the standard importer often fails to physically transfer image files to the WordPress wp-content/uploads directory, a secondary, targeted remediation strategy is required.

The Hotlinking Problem

“Hotlinking” occurs when the WordPress database contains an HTML image tag pointing to an external URL. This is dangerous because the asset resides on a server the user is about to stop paying for. The goal is to convert every external source URL into a local source URL.

Installation and Configuration “Auto Upload Images” Plugin

To resolve this without manually downloading and re-uploading hundreds of images, we use the Auto Upload Images plugin. This tool hooks into the WordPress “Save Post” action. When a post is saved, the plugin scans the content for external URLs, downloads the referenced image to the local server, adds it to the Media Library, and rewrites the HTML in the post to point to the new local file.

Note: Although this plugin has not been updated for many years, when we tested it (12, 2025) it still worked fine.

Here are steps to installation and configuration the plugin:

• Navigate to Plugins > Add New in WordPress.
• Search for Auto Upload Images often by Ali Irani.
• Install and Activate.
• Navigate to Settings > Auto Upload Images:
  • Base URL: Ensure this is set to allow standard image extensions.
  • Image Name Pattern: The plugin allows dynamic naming (e.g., %post_title%-%filename%). This is a significant SEO advantage. Squarespace image names are often alphanumeric strings. Configuring this plugin to rename images based on the post title automatically optimizes the image filenames for SEO during the migration process.

Perform WordPress Bulk Trigger

Manually opening and saving every post is inefficient. We can trigger the plugin globally using WordPress’s Bulk Edit feature:

• Navigate to Posts > All Posts.
• Click Screen Options (top right) and set “Number of items per page” to a high number (e.g., 999) to view all posts at once.
• Select all posts using the master checkbox in the header row.
• In the Bulk Actions dropdown, select Edit and click Apply.
• The Bulk Edit interface will appear. Do not change any data fields.
• Click Update. (This forces WordPress to execute the save_post function for every selected post. The Auto Upload Images plugin detects this event, iterates through the content, and processes the images in the background.)
• Verification: Navigate to Media > Library. You should see a rapid influx of images appearing. Check a few blog posts on the front end and inspect the image source code to verify the URL now points to your local domain.

Featured Images

Often, the “Featured Image” is not embedded in the content body and may be missed by the XML importer or the plugin > Check the “Posts” list. If the “Image” column is empty, the featured images were lost.

Unfortunately, if the importer fails here, this often requires manual re-assignment. Users must download the images from the live Squarespace site and upload them to the “Featured Image” meta box in the WordPress editor for each post.

Step 4: E-Commerce Data Migration

For users migrating an online store, the complexity increases significantly. Squarespace does not export product data via XML. Instead, it utilizes CSV files. WordPress does not have native e-commerce capability; it requires the WooCommerce plugin. The migration involves mapping the Squarespace CSV schema to the WooCommerce CSV schema.

Preparing the Commerce Environment

• Install WooCommerce: Navigate to Plugins > Add New, search for WooCommerce, and activate it.
• Run Setup Wizard: Configure the store location, currency, and payment gateways immediately. This establishes the necessary database tables.

Export Your eCommerce Data from Squarespace

Squarespace allows for the export of Products, Orders, and Customers as separate CSV files:

• Products: Navigate to Commerce > Inventory > Export All. This generates products.csv.
• Orders: Navigate to Commerce > Orders > Export CSV.
• Customers: Navigate to Commerce > Customers > Export CSV.

Limitation Alert: Squarespace only exports physical and service products. Digital products often do not export fully and may need manual recreation. Furthermore, Squarespace limits exports to 10,000 items and 3 variant options.

The CSV Mapping Matrix

WooCommerce has a built-in CSV importer that is highly sophisticated, but it requires data to be formatted correctly. The headers in the Squarespace CSV do not match WooCommerce requirements perfectly.

Strategic data mapping table:

Handling Variable Products

This is the most challenging part of a DIY e-commerce migration. Squarespace exports variants (e.g., a T-shirt in Red/Small) as individual rows with specific formatting. WooCommerce requires a parent/child relationship in the CSV for variable products:

• Simple Method: Import all products as “Simple” products using the standard importer. Then, manually group them in WooCommerce or use a plugin like “Product CSV Import Suite” (paid) to handle complex relationships.
• Advanced DIY Method: Open the CSV in Excel. Ensure that for a variable product, there is one “Parent” row (containing the generic description and title) and subsequent “Variation” rows (containing the specific SKU, price, and attribute). You may need to manually add a Parent SKU column to link variations to the main product.

Import Your eCommerce Data into WordPress (WooCommerce)

Follow these steps to import your eCommerce data into WooCommerce:

• Navigate to Products > All Products.
• Click Import.
• Upload the modified products.csv.
• Mapping Screen: WooCommerce will present a visual mapper. Carefully verify that the Squarespace columns are assigned to the correct WooCommerce fields.
• Image Fetching: Ensure the “Images” field is mapped to the URL column from Squarespace. The importer will attempt to download these images.
• Run Importer: Monitor for errors. The system produces a log of failed imports (often due to SKU duplicates or invalid formatting).

Step 5: SEO Preservation: Permalinks and Redirection

The greatest risk in migration is the loss of organic search traffic. If URLs change, Google considers the new pages to be brand new, stripping them of historical ranking authority.

• Blog Posts: Squarespace forces /blog/post-title. If we configured WordPress Permalinks to /blog/%postname%/ in Step 1, these should match perfectly. No redirect needed.
• Pages: Squarespace uses /page-slug. WordPress uses /page-slug. These usually match
• Products: This is the conflict zone. Squarespace uses /store/product-name. WooCommerce defaults to /product/product-name
• Categories: Squarespace uses ?category=Name. WordPress uses /category/name.

Implementing 301 Redirects

A “301 Redirect” is a permanent signal to search engines that a page has moved:

• Install Plugin: Install and activate the Redirection plugin (Free)
• Identify 404s: The plugin can monitor 404 errors. However, proactive redirection is better.
• Bulk Redirection (Regex): For pattern-based changes (like products), use Regular Expressions (Regex):
  • Example: Redirect all /store/* traffic to /product/*.
  • Source: /store/(.*)
  • Target: /product/$1
  • This simple rule saves hours of manual entry for large stores.
• Manual Redirection: For specific pages that changed names (e.g., /about-us to /about), enter the source and target manually in the plugin dashboard.

Step 6: Post-Migration Optimization and Security

Once the data is present and the design approximated, the site must be hardened before public launch.

Security Hardening

Squarespace handles security internally. In WordPress, this is the user’s responsibility.

• Security Plugin: Install a plugin like Wordfence or Solid Security. This provides a firewall and malware scanning.
• Backups: Install UpdraftPlus (Free). Configure it to back up the site to Google Drive or Dropbox. This is the safety net that Squarespace previously provided automatically.

Performance Tuning

WordPress can be slower than Squarespace if not optimized:

• Caching: Install a caching plugin like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. This generates static HTML files from the PHP code, drastically improving load times.
• Image Optimization: Install Smush or ShortPixel. Run a bulk optimization to compress the images downloaded by the “Auto Upload Images” plugin. This reduces the storage footprint and speeds up page rendering. If your image has been optimized before, you can skip this action.

Step 7: DNS Propagation and Final Verification

The final step is flipping the switch:

• Verify Staging: Ensure all pages load, images are local, and links work on the temporary URL.
• Update Site Address: In WordPress Settings > General, change the “WordPress Address” and “Site Address” from the temporary domain to the actual domain. The site will temporarily break/become inaccessible.
• Update DNS: Log in to the domain registrar. Update the Nameservers to point to the new hosting provider.
• Wait: Propagation takes 1–48 hours. During this time, some users will see the Squarespace site, others the WordPress site.
• SSL Generation: Once propagation is complete, the new host will automatically generate an SSL certificate (Let’s Encrypt). Ensure the site loads over HTTPS.

Post-Launch Monitoring:

• Google Search Console: Submit the new XML sitemap (generated by RankMath or Yoast SEO). Use the “URL Inspection” tool to verify Google can crawl the new structure.
• Check Redirects: Click old links from Google search results to ensure they redirect seamlessly to the new content.

Conclusion

Migrating from Squarespace to WordPress is a complex undertaking that extends far beyond a straightforward data transfer. It requires restructuring your digital assets as you move from a rented platform to an owned infrastructure. The DIY approach demands careful execution, particularly in areas such as media asset extraction, e-commerce data mapping, and SEO redirection. However, it remains the most reliable path to full digital autonomy, especially if you are comfortable with administrative tasks.

If this process feels overwhelming, you can rely on LitExtension’s Squarespace-to-WordPress migration service. Our experts are ready to manage the complex work for you, ensuring a smooth transition without requiring any effort on your end.