October 17, 2020
5min Read
Domantas G.
Planning to migrate your Squarespace website to WordPress, but don’t know how? Luckily, migrating Squarespace to WordPress is not as complicated as you might think and we’re going to explain just how. In this tutorial, we’ll guide you through the process with ease.
IMPORTANT: This tutorial shows how to migrate to the self-hosted WordPress platform. So, the steps provided below may not work if you’re planning to host your site on WordPress.com.
The first step of migrating your Squarespace site to WordPress is to export all of your website data. Unfortunately, you can’t export everything automatically from Squarespace.
Here are the lists of content that you need to export manually:
Now that you know the exporting limitations, follow these steps to start exporting your website data from Squarespace:
Once the download is complete, proceed to the next step.
As this tutorial shows how to migrate Squarespace to WordPress, we’re going to assume that you already have WordPress installed on your Hostinger account.
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If that’s not the case, we’ll show you how easy it is to install the platform using Hostinger’s Auto Installer.
IMPORTANT: Write down your administrator username and password as you will need them to access the WordPress dashboard.
To import the content from your Squarespace site to WordPress, follow these steps:
Now you can review your WordPress website and make sure all of the needed content is successfully imported.
IMPORTANT: If the process runs out of time or returns an error message, try unchecking the Download file and import file attachments option. Depending on the size of your Squarespace account and server configuration, this option may prevent the import process from completing successfully.
While checking your new website, you might have noticed that some of your images stare still hosted on Squarespace. This is normal because sometimes WordPress importer fails to import those images automatically.
To migrate all of your images to WordPress, you will have to add them either manually or by using a plugin. Since doing it manually takes quite some time, we’ll show you how to use the Auto Upload Images plugin instead.
The plugin searches for image URLs in your posts and uploads them automatically to the WordPress media library once triggered. It also replaces old image URLs with the new ones in your server.
All you need to do is install and activate the plugin in WordPress, then update all of your posts containing images to trigger the auto-upload using Bulk Actions. Here’s how to do it:
If you’ve been using a custom domain name with your Squarespace site and want to continue using it after migrating, you will need to change your DNS details.
The process depends on where your domain name is registered. If the registrar is Squarespace, then DNS details must be changed within their control panel. If that’s the case, refer to this tutorial for additional information.
However, if you register the domain name with a different company, then the DNS details will have to be changed in their system. We have a great guide that you can follow here. Plus, the process is similar to most registrars
PRO TIP: This method only works if you have a custom domain name as you can’t point the built-in Squarespace subdomain to any website or server.
As Squarespace uses a different link structure than WordPress, migrating sites from it to WordPress without changing permalinks will result in your visitors hitting 404 Not Found pages.
Therefore, this step is vital if you don’t want to lose your search engine rankings and incoming traffic.
Page URLs on Squarespace use year/month/day/post-name as the link formats. While WordPress also has this format option, Squarespace tends to use prefixes like blog-1 for its post URLs too.
A Squarespace URL with a custom domain looks like the following:
http://www.yourdomain.com/blog-1/2020/1/1/post-example
Here’s how it looks like with a sub-domain:
http://www.yourdomain.squarespace/blog-1/2020/1/1/post-example
To change the permalinks of your new WordPress site to match the Squarespace URL structure, simply follow these steps:
/blog-1/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
PRO TIP: It’s recommended to choose Post Name as your WordPress default’s permalink setting for your next posts as it’s short and concise, arguably the best URL structure to maximize SEO.
Now that you have successfully migrated all of your content from Squarespace to WordPress, you can start changing the look of your website with the vast selection of customizable themes from the WordPress directory.
If you wish to extend the functionality of your site, WordPress also has thousands of free plugins you can use to optimize your website. As an example, WooCommerce is a powerful plugin that allows you to set up eCommerce sites.
What’s more, WordPress has a big community ready to answer any questions you have about the CMS. Plus, there are a number of in-depth guides and tutorials available online. For more information, take a look at all of Hostinger’s WordPress tutorials here.
Squarespace is a popular all-in-one beginner-friendly web building solution. However, while it is great for basic projects, Squarespace has quite a few shortcomings — not having enough options to extend functionality and limited design selections, for example.
On the other hand, despite having a steeper learning curve, WordPress offers more control and flexibility when it comes to managing a website. Users can add and customize any themes and plugins to further optimize their site’s potential.
In this tutorial, you’ve learned how to migrate your Squarespace website to WordPress. You also know how to point your Squarespace domain to the new WordPress site and modifying its permalinks to avoid losing traffic.
Here’s a quick recap of the steps:
Pretty easy, right? Depending on the size of your Squarespace website, migrating all of your content to WordPress can take a while. However, it’s still worth it as WordPress is a powerful and more flexible platform. Good luck and leave a comment down below if you have any further questions or suggestions.
July 03 2019
Can you repeat these steps if you have multiple blogs on squarespace? Will the additional blogs import into your blog posts section?
October 28 2020
Can we do it even when the Squarespace license hasn't been renewed? Thanks!
Replied on February 02 2021
Hi, Alexandre! It's not possible to export from an expired website, but it could be that your old host still has a backup of your data. You should check with them directly about your backup.
Domantas G.
Replied on September 24 2019
Hey Mike, Yes, multiple blogs can be imported into a single WordPress site.