Most businesses outgrow Squarespace at a predictable point, when they need plugins that Squarespace doesn’t have, when their SEO strategy hits Squarespace’s limitations, or when they simply need more control than a hosted template platform can provide. The migration to WordPress is the right move for most of them. But the process requires careful planning around one specific risk: maintaining the URL structure (or implementing proper redirects) so that Google’s existing index of your Squarespace pages carries over to your new WordPress site.
This guide covers the full migration process from start to launch, with specific attention to SEO preservation.
Why people leave Squarespace
Before the technical details, it helps to understand what’s actually driving the migration, because it shapes what you need to prioritize in the new WordPress build.
- SEO limitations: Squarespace doesn’t support full schema markup, limits canonical tag control, and its URL structure has constraints. For SEO-driven businesses, this becomes a ceiling.
- Plugin/integration gaps: Need a membership site? A specific booking system? Advanced form logic? WooCommerce? Squarespace’s app ecosystem is tiny compared to WordPress.
- Design control: Squarespace templates are beautiful but constrained. Getting off-template requires workarounds. WordPress with Elementor gives you pixel-level control.
- Content ownership: On Squarespace, your content lives on their servers. WordPress gives you complete data ownership and portability.
- Pricing at scale: Squarespace Business ($23/month) includes transaction fees. Commerce Basic ($28/month) removes them. WordPress hosting at equivalent quality runs $15-50/month with no transaction fees.
What Squarespace exports (and what it doesn’t)
Squarespace provides a built-in export tool under Settings > Advanced > Export. It generates an XML file in WordPress format that includes:
- Blog posts with their content, categories, tags, and dates
- Basic pages (with some limitations)
- Comments (if you have them enabled)
What the export does NOT include:
- Your Squarespace design and layout. This doesn’t transfer and needs to be rebuilt in WordPress
- Gallery pages and product pages (they export in limited form)
- Form submissions and contact data
- Member area content (if you use Squarespace Member Areas)
- E-commerce orders and customer data (need separate export)
- Custom CSS and code injection
Step 1: Audit your Squarespace site before you start
Before touching anything, crawl your current Squarespace site with Screaming Frog (free for up to 500 URLs) or Ahrefs’ site audit tool. Export the full list of all indexed URLs. This is your redirect map starting point, every URL that exists on your Squarespace site needs to either:
- Match exactly on your new WordPress site (same URL structure), or
- Have a 301 redirect pointing from the old URL to the corresponding new URL
Step 2: Set up WordPress on a staging environment
Never migrate directly to your live domain. Set up WordPress on a staging URL or a subdomain (staging.yoursite.com) first. Install WordPress, choose your theme (Elementor + Hello Elementor, Astra, or GeneratePress are good bases), and install the plugins you’ll need before importing content.
Managed WordPress hosts like Kinsta, WP Engine, and Flywheel all provide one-click staging environments that make this straightforward.
Step 3: Import the Squarespace export
Import the XML file from Squarespace using WordPress’s built-in Import tool (Tools > Import > WordPress). This will bring in your blog posts and basic pages. After import, audit the content for:
- Missing images (Squarespace images import by reference, not file copy. You may need to re-upload images)
- Formatting issues (Squarespace’s block types don’t always translate cleanly to WordPress blocks)
- Missing pages that didn’t export (rebuild these manually)
Step 4: Rebuild the design in WordPress
This is where the real work happens. The Squarespace export brings content, not design. Your homepage, service pages, about page, and any other template-based pages need to be rebuilt in your WordPress theme and page builder.
This is also an opportunity. Most Squarespace migrations we do result in a significantly better-looking site than what was on Squarespace, because we’re building a custom design rather than being constrained by template sections. If you’re going to the effort of migrating, use it to build the site you actually want.
Step 5: Configure SEO settings
Install Yoast SEO or Rank Math and configure:
- Title and meta description patterns for posts, pages, and archive pages
- XML sitemap (both plugins generate one automatically)
- Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags
- Schema markup appropriate to your business type
- Canonical URLs for any pages with potential duplicate content
Step 6: Build the redirect map
Compare the URL list from your Squarespace crawl with the URLs on your new WordPress site. For every Squarespace URL that has a different path on WordPress, create a 301 redirect. Squarespace uses URL patterns like:
- Blog posts:
/blog/post-title - Pages:
/page-name
WordPress blog posts default to /year/month/post-title unless you configure custom permalinks. Set WordPress permalinks to /%postname%/ or /blog/%postname%/ to match or approximate Squarespace’s structure.
Implement redirects using the Redirection plugin (free) or via server-level .htaccess rules for better performance.
Step 7: Test everything before going live
On your staging site, verify:
- All redirects resolve correctly (Screaming Frog can crawl and follow redirects)
- No 404 errors on pages that should exist
- Images load correctly on all pages
- Forms submit and send notifications
- Any e-commerce or booking functionality works end-to-end
- The site is mobile responsive and looks correct on phone-sized screens
- Page speed scores are acceptable (run PageSpeed Insights on key pages)
Step 8: Launch and update Google Search Console
Switch the DNS from Squarespace to your WordPress host. Propagation typically completes in 1-4 hours but can take up to 48 hours in some cases. Keep your Squarespace subscription active for at least 30 days after migration. You want the redirects working and you may need to reference the old site during QA.
In Google Search Console, submit your new XML sitemap. Monitor for crawl errors and manual actions for the first two weeks. If redirects are properly configured, rankings typically stabilize within 2-4 weeks as Google re-crawls and indexes the new URLs.
The common mistakes that cause ranking drops
- Not redirecting all old URLs – missing even 10-20% of your URL redirects leaves those pages returning 404, which drops them from the index
- Redirecting to the homepage instead of the equivalent page – /blog/my-post-title should redirect to the new equivalent post, not to the homepage
- Canceling Squarespace before DNS propagates – if the Squarespace site disappears before DNS propagates to your WordPress host, visitors see nothing
- Not submitting the new sitemap – Google needs to know the new URL structure exists
Need help with the migration?
We handle Squarespace to WordPress migrations with zero ranking loss. Full content migration, redirect mapping, design rebuild, and SEO configuration. See our migration service for pricing.
