How to export your Squarespace site

There is an export button. It carries less than you would think.

The short answer: partly

Squarespace does have an export, and it produces a WordPress XML file. That is genuinely more than Wix offers. The catch is that it was built for one destination, WordPress, and even going there it carries only a portion of your site.

The strangest part: you cannot import a Squarespace export into another Squarespace site. The file exists to help you leave, not to help you move around inside.

What does not come with you

Squarespace's own list of what cannot be exported is longer than the list of what can. It leaves behind:

Product and store pages. Your entire commerce catalogue.
Album, cover, index, info, calendar and portfolio pages. If your site is built around a portfolio, that is the site.
Every blog after the first. If you run more than one, only one exports.
The design. Squarespace's layout system does not travel, so what arrives is your content with the design stripped off it.

Read your own export before you trust it

Open the file and check that the pages you actually care about are inside it. People discover the gaps after cancelling, which is the one moment at which this becomes expensive rather than annoying. It costs ten minutes to look.

What you should collect by hand

Your product catalogue, with descriptions and prices.
Every portfolio, gallery and album, image by image, at full size.
Any second or third blog.
A complete list of your page addresses, for redirects.
Your customer and order history, which is a separate export and a separate problem.

The order to do it in

Run the export first, then open it and see what is missing.
Collect the missing parts by hand while the site is still live.
Write down every page address before anything changes.
Build and check the new site.
Move the domain with the redirects already mapped.
Then cancel, and not before.

Why the design cannot come with you

Your words and your photographs are yours. The template is not, and neither are the platform's stock images or its fonts. That is true of every builder, including ours. What differs between platforms is whether they tell you plainly before you pay, or leave you to find out at the exit.

We do this for people. We rebuild the site properly, map every redirect before anything switches over, and your old site stays up until you tell us you are happy with the new one. From CA$1,800, quoted after we look at your pages rather than guessed. Tell us about your site.