How to Migrate Your Website from SquareSpace to WordPress

Squarespace has a lot to do. It can help you create really beautiful websites. It offers great value for money. It is advertised during popular podcasts. Perhaps best of all, Squarespace counts Keanu Reeves’ bike company as one of its customers.

But I will respect Keanu and his motorcycle, Squarespace not WordPress. On the other hand, no other website builder – WordPress dominates the market for no reason.

So when you get to the limits of what Squarespace has to offer, it’s only natural to turn your eyes to WordPress to serve as the new home for your content. Let’s see how you can migrate your website from Squarespace to WordPress.

We will show you:

Why Transfer from Squarespace to WordPress?

Every website builder you see on the market has a feature or two or even ten that might catch your attention. Squarespace is a website builder that cannot boast of having the most intuitive interface with the least steep learning curve. But it allows you to create stunning websites. it gets you like this.

And of course, that’s not all. Squarespace is reliable, fast and secure with good uptime. You can use it to build anything from an online store to a portfolio and it will serve you well. That is, up to a point.

Squarespace does not have a thriving community of third-party plugin creators. If you’re considering using third-party addons to expand your Squarespace functionality, you’re out of luck – you’ll have to choose a more expensive plan. Squarespace doesn’t have many advanced marketing optionsit can become painfully clear when your website takes off and you start to need them.

It’s pretty obvious that Squarespace isn’t WordPress. He is very good at what he does; It’s a shame he didn’t do more. If you’re lucky, you’ll know this before your website grows too big because migrating a website from Squarespace to WordPress can be challenging. Doing it sooner or later can save you a lot of trouble..

Create a WordPress Website and Choose a Theme

Your first step should always be to make sure you have a new place on Squarespace for all posts and pages that will no longer have a home. You must have a functional WordPress website (best choice for photographers) before starting the process. At a minimum, you should have a website with a temporary address or a pending staging website..

In addition to transferring the content of your website, transfer domain name if you used a custom one. It would be best to delay the transfer until your WordPress website is ready.. So, while you work on your staging website – something your WordPress hosting provider should help you set up – your Squarespace website should be fully functional and open for business.

If you don’t have a dedicated address, you should perform the regular steps of finding a host, registering the address, manually installing WordPress, or using a one-click installer if your host provides it. Once your website is set up, shopping for themes can be a pleasant thing.

There are all kinds of WordPress themes you can browse, but you should choose the one that suits your website purpose.. A creative WordPress theme will suit websites that creators have built to showcase their talents. Architecture and urban planning businesses may opt for architectural WordPress themes instead. Take your time, enjoy the search and make a choice you stand behind.

Export Content from Squarespace

There’s good news and bad news when it comes to exporting content from Squarespace. The good news is that Squarespace exports the content in a format that WordPress can import without any third-party conversion tools.. This means that as soon as you receive the file, you can immediately upload it to WordPress.

But the bad news is that when you do, you will find that some of your content is missing.. Or many, depending on your website. But first, let’s walk you through the steps to export the content.

Go to Squarespace and from the dashboard Settings > Advanced > Import/Export. There you will see two buttons that will activate the import or export procedure. Click on “Export”.

A window will open asking you to choose the format you want to export the content to. You have to choose “WordPress” and it may be the only option you get..

After clicking on it, Squarespace will take some time to prepare your content for export. You will be notified when the process is complete by receiving a download link for the XML file with the content you can export from Squarespace..

The problem here is that the file doesn’t contain all the content you have on Squarespace. Here are some of the things you can rightly expect to find in the export file::

And now, some of the things that probably won’t be there:

As you can imagine, this can pose a problem. And you’re the one who’s going to have to fix it. But first, let’s make sure that the content you manage to remove from Squarespace reaches its new destination relatively safely.

Export Content to WordPress

Go to your WordPress website and navigate to: Tools > Import. Here you will see many tools that you can use to import content from different websites. Since Squarespace exports your content in a format WordPress natively recognizes, the importer you’re looking for is the one that says “WordPress” at the bottom.

After running the import tool, you can navigate to the file you downloaded from Squarespace and upload it to your WordPress website.

You will then be able to choose which author you want to assign to the content you are importing and whether you want to download and import the file attachments.

Once this step is complete, most of the work of migrating your website from Squarespace to WordPress can be done.. Unfortunately, this is often not the case due to the missing content issue we mentioned earlier.

Manually Moving Content from Squarespace to WordPress

Every piece of content you want on your WordPress website that is not in the import will need to be migrated manually.. This means you have to create every missing page in WordPress, then go to Squarespace, copy its content and paste it into the page in WordPress.

At least that’s the simpler way to do it. More detailed pages should be built from scratch using one of the best page builders. Choosing a good theme is something that can significantly speed up the process as it gives you access to pre-made pages that may be suitable for your content..

And while you’re here, maybe you should check to see if the images you have on your site have arrived in their new home. Also, see if you can find them in your new media library. If you can’t, but you’re seeing them in posts you’ve imported to your new website, they’re still hosted by your old website and will crash with it.. If you can’t see them, maybe you should try using them. Auto Upload Pictures plugin for help.

This plugin should pull all images from Squarespace and move them to your library. If by any chance it doesn’t work, you’re in for a ride. Squarespace does not offer a simple way to download images that you have uploaded to your website. Instead, a workaround might be to create a page on your Squarespace website with all the images you need to download, visit that page as a regular user and use a browser extension to download all the images, or do this manually one by one.. You will still have to manually upload them to your new website.

Set up Connections

A link in Squarespace does not necessarily have the same structure as a link in WordPress. You should make sure that people who follow links to your website see the pages and posts on your new website instead of the 404 error.. Pages don’t give you as much trouble as posts because there is no standard way to create permalinks for posts.

Fortunately, WordPress is aware of how important permalinks are to website performance and allows you to create a custom permalink structure for your posts. YJust go to Settings > Permalinks and choose a custom build that matches the Squarespace build used.. Once you transfer the domain name to your new website and it goes live, visitors will have no trouble finding you using the old links.

Let’s wrap it up!

If your website is an important asset to your business or has personal value to you, you’ll always want to make sure it does exactly what you want it to do. As websites grow, so do the demands we place on them, so it’s easy to grow website builders like Squarespace. But don’t worry when that happens – moving your website from Squarespace to WordPress can be tedious, but it shouldn’t be too hard to do.