Should you move from Squarespace to WordPress?
Moving from Squarespace to WordPress makes sense when you have outgrown Squarespace’s templates, need plugins or integrations it doesn’t offer, or want full control of your SEO and hosting. It is a well-trodden route, and Squarespace even has a built-in WordPress export.
The catch is that the export is partial. Squarespace moves your basic pages and one blog. Your design, your store, most page types and several block types stay behind. Images and URLs also need attention, and those two decide whether you keep your Google rankings.
This guide covers exactly what exports, a step-by-step process, the SEO steps that protect your traffic, and one question worth asking before you start: whether WordPress is the right destination in 2026 at all. If you’d rather hand the whole job off, our SEO migration services cover it end to end.
What Squarespace exports, and what it doesn’t
Squarespace’s export tool creates a WordPress-compatible XML file. According to Squarespace’s own documentation:
| Exports | Does not export |
|---|---|
| Layout pages | Album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio and store pages |
| One blog page, with all its posts and up to 1,000 comments per post | Any blog page beyond the one you choose |
| Text blocks and image blocks | Product, video and audio blocks |
| Text from other blocks (such as embed and Instagram blocks), with minimal structure | Content in page-specific headers, footers and sidebars |
| Gallery pages, including York project pages (version 7.0 only) | Dropdowns, drafts, style settings and custom CSS |
If your site has more than one blog, Squarespace asks you to pick the one to export. It also warns that some content, such as linked PDF files, appears in the XML file but can’t be imported into WordPress, and that “not everything will export, as many features rely on our platform’s JavaScript and CSS.”
Squarespace’s documentation doesn’t list SEO titles or meta descriptions among the exported content, so plan to re-enter them yourself.
In practice, you will need to:
- Rebuild the design in a WordPress theme.
- Recreate portfolio, index and other unsupported pages by hand.
- Move products separately if you run a store. Squarespace can export up to 10,000 products to a CSV file, which you can then map into WooCommerce’s product CSV importer.
- Re-add videos, audio and forms.
- Recreate any second or third blog.
- Re-host your images (more on this below, because it is the step most guides skip).
Step-by-step: moving from Squarespace to WordPress
- Benchmark the current site. Crawl it and export every URL with its title and meta description. Squarespace generates a sitemap.xml automatically, which is a good starting list. Export Search Console data for the full window it keeps (16 months), and note which pages get traffic and which have backlinks.
- Copy your existing Squarespace redirects. Open Developer tools, then URL mappings, and save the rules somewhere safe. They live on Squarespace and won’t come with you.
- Set up WordPress on its final host at a temporary domain or staging URL. Choose a fast, lightweight theme; avoid heavy page builders if you care about speed.
- Export from Squarespace. Open the Import & export panel (under Settings, then Advanced), click Export, then click the WordPress icon. Download the XML file.
- Import into WordPress. Go to Tools, then Import, and choose WordPress. If the WordPress Importer isn’t installed yet, click Install Now, then Activate Plugin & Run Importer. Upload the XML file and assign the posts to an author.
- Bring images across. Squarespace warns that with the WordPress Importer, “WordPress may only pull reference links for the images,” so the images break when you deactivate your Squarespace site. Details in the next section.
- Rebuild what didn’t export: portfolio, index and store pages, videos, audio, forms, headers and footers.
- Move products to WooCommerce with the Squarespace CSV export if you sell online.
- Set permalinks to match your old URLs (see the URL mapping table below) and add 301 redirects for anything that changes.
- Install an SEO plugin (Yoast or Rank Math) and fill in SEO titles, meta descriptions and social images from your benchmark spreadsheet.
- Test on staging, then point your domain at the new host. Keep your Squarespace plan active for a few weeks as a fallback, which also keeps any images you missed online.
- Submit your sitemap in Search Console and monitor the site closely for 90 days.
How to move your images off Squarespace
Squarespace serves images from its own CDN, and the image URLs in the export point there. Once your Squarespace site is gone, every one of those images breaks. You have three options:
- Use a re-hosting plugin. Auto Upload Images finds external image URLs in your posts, uploads the files to your media library and replaces the old URLs with the new ones. Test it on a few posts first, then run it across the rest.
- Download and upload manually. This is Squarespace’s own recommendation for WordPress Importer users. It works for a small site and gets tedious past a few dozen posts.
- Import into WordPress.com instead. Squarespace notes that importing into WordPress.com “copies your images to WordPress’ servers.” That only helps if WordPress.com is where you want to host.
Whichever route you take, finish with two checks. Search your database or a fresh crawl for any remaining Squarespace image URLs, and confirm your images kept their alt text.
SEO: keeping your rankings
Match the URLs
Squarespace builds each blog post URL from the blog page’s slug plus the post’s slug, for example /blog/example-post. The format is set in Blog preferences and can include date variables for year, month and day, so some sites have dated URLs such as /blog/2024/03/15/example-post. Check which format yours uses before you touch WordPress permalinks.
WordPress, meanwhile, ships with “Plain” permalinks (/?p=123), which you should change on day one. Here is how the common Squarespace patterns map:
| Squarespace URL | WordPress setting that reproduces it | Resulting WordPress URL |
|---|---|---|
| /about (page) | Page slug “about” | /about/ |
| /blog/post-slug | Custom structure: /blog/%postname%/ | /blog/post-slug/ |
| /blog/2024/03/15/post-slug (dated format) | Custom structure: /blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ | /blog/2024/03/15/post-slug/ (WordPress always uses two-digit months and days, so compare against your real URLs) |
| /shop/p/product-slug (store product, 7.1) | WooCommerce product base | /product/product-slug/ by default, so plan a redirect rule |
Squarespace 7.1 always puts /p/ before a product slug, so product URLs almost never match one to one. Budget a redirect for every product.
Watch the trailing slash. Squarespace URLs have none, while WordPress’s built-in permalink structures end with one (/blog/post-slug/). WordPress normally redirects the no-slash version for you, but confirm it returns a single 301 (no redirect chain) and that your canonical tags use one consistent form.
Redirect everything that changes
- Build a one-to-one map of old URL → new URL for every page with traffic or backlinks.
- Add 301 redirects in WordPress with a redirect plugin or at server level. A typical rule for a dated post you are moving to a flat structure reads: /blog/2024/03/15/post-slug → /blog/post-slug/ (301).
- Re-create the redirects you copied from Squarespace’s URL mappings, and update any that now point to a URL that has changed again.
- Don’t send retired pages to the homepage. Google says redirecting many old pages there can be treated as a soft 404; redirect them to the closest relevant page.
Carry over metadata and structure
- SEO titles and meta descriptions on every key page.
- Image alt text, which you should spot-check after re-hosting.
- One H1 per page, with headings in a logical order.
- Internal links updated to the new URLs.
- Structured data (Organization, LocalBusiness, Article) through your SEO plugin.
After launch
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
- Check Search Console daily for 404s in the first week.
- Compare rankings and clicks page by page against your benchmark for 90 days. Google says a small to medium site can take a few weeks for most pages to move, and visibility may fluctuate in the meantime.
- Keep redirects in place for as long as possible. Google recommends at least one year; we keep them permanently.
The full process is in our website migration SEO checklist.
Should you skip WordPress and go straight to Astro?
If you’re leaving Squarespace anyway, it’s worth asking whether WordPress is the right destination. Since you are rebuilding the design and moving content by hand regardless, the extra effort to go to a modern static site is smaller than it looks.
| Choose WordPress if… | Consider Astro if… |
|---|---|
| You need WooCommerce, memberships or bookings | Your site is mostly pages and a blog |
| Non-technical staff will edit through an admin panel | You or your team use AI tools to edit content |
| You want a huge pool of freelancers and plugins | You want low hosting costs and no plugin updates |
| You’re comfortable managing updates and security | You want fast pages without tuning caching and plugins |
WordPress plugins accounted for 91% of the ecosystem’s 11,334 new vulnerabilities in 2025, according to Patchstack. That is the maintenance you take on with WordPress. We explore the trade-off in Is WordPress Still Worth It in the Age of AI?
Want it done without losing rankings?
SEO Savages handles Squarespace to WordPress migrations, as well as moves to Astro and Next.js, with full URL mapping, redirects, metadata and 90 days of post-launch monitoring. We start with a free pre-migration risk check.
FAQ
Can I transfer my Squarespace site to WordPress automatically?
Partly. Squarespace exports layout pages, one blog, and text and image blocks to a WordPress XML file. Design, store pages, portfolios, videos, audio and extra blogs must be rebuilt by hand.
Will I lose my Google rankings moving from Squarespace to WordPress?
Not if you keep URLs identical where possible, redirect every changed URL with a 301 and carry over titles, descriptions and alt text. In our experience, missing redirects are the most common reason rankings drop after a move. Expect some temporary fluctuation while Google processes the change.
Do my images move automatically?
Not reliably. Squarespace itself warns that the WordPress Importer may only keep links to images hosted on Squarespace. Re-host them in your WordPress media library before you cancel your Squarespace plan.
Can I keep my domain?
Yes. Point your domain’s DNS at the new host, or transfer the registration away from Squarespace if it’s registered there. A transfer can take up to 15 days, and it isn’t possible until 60 days after the domain was registered or last transferred. Transferring the domain doesn’t cancel your Squarespace site, so cancel that separately.
Can I export products from Squarespace to WooCommerce?
Yes, through a CSV file. Squarespace exports up to 10,000 products per file. The columns won’t match WooCommerce’s format exactly, so map them during the WooCommerce import and check variants and images afterward. Product pages themselves don’t come across in the WordPress export.
How long does a Squarespace to WordPress migration take?
In our experience, a small brochure site with a blog can move in a few days. Sites with stores, portfolios or hundreds of posts take longer, mainly because of the content that doesn’t export.
Sources
- Squarespace: Exporting your site
- Squarespace: Export products to a .csv
- Squarespace: URL slugs
- Squarespace: URL mappings
- Squarespace: Edit product details
- Squarespace: View your site map
- Squarespace: Transferring a domain away from Squarespace
- WordPress.org: Customize permalinks
- WordPress.org: WordPress Importer plugin
- WordPress.org: Auto Upload Images plugin
- Google Search Central: Site moves with URL changes
- Google Search Console Help: Performance report
- Patchstack: State of WordPress Security in 2026