How to Migrate Squarespace to WordPress

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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.

1. Exporting Squarespace Content

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:

• Index, event, album and product pages
• Folders, and drafts
• Audio, video and product blocks
• Style changes and custom CSS
• Multiple blog pages

Now that you know the exporting limitations, follow these steps to start exporting your website data from Squarespace:

1. Log into your Squarespace account and choose the website you want to export.
2. Access the website, then click Settings on the left menu bar.
   
3. Scroll down and locate Advanced, and then Import / Export.
4. Choose Export, and select WordPress.
   
5. If you have more than one Blog Page on your site, Select Primary Blog window will pop up. Select your choice from the drop-down menu and hit Export.
   
6. Wait a few seconds and press Download once a .xml file has been generated.

Once the download is complete, proceed to the next step.

2. Importing Content From Squarespace to WordPress

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.

If that’s not the case, we’ll show you how easy it is to install the platform using Hostinger’s Auto Installer.

1. From your hPanel, find the Auto Installer option under the Website section.
   
2. Choose WordPress and fill in your details in the required columns. Then, click Install.
   
3. Wait for a couple of minutes for WordPress to be successfully installed.

To import the content from your Squarespace site to WordPress, follow these steps:

1. Log into your WordPress admin area and head to Tools -> Import.
2. Squarespace exports its content in a WordPress compatible .xml file format, so choose the Install Now button under WordPress and press Run Importer once the installation is complete.
   
3. Select your exported file (Choose File) and click Upload file and import.
   
4. Once the file is uploaded, you’ll see a screen with options on user roles and attachments, select the ones that are suitable for you. When all is set, click Submit.

Now you can review your WordPress website and make sure all of the needed content is successfully imported.

3. Importing Images from Squarespace to WordPress

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:

1. Go to Posts and select the posts you want to update.
2. Head to the drop-down Bulk Actions menu and choose Edit and then Apply.
   
   
3. Once a new window pops out, don’t make any changes and simply click Update.
   
4. Now, all of the images from Squarespace should be uploaded to your WordPress server and updated in your posts automatically.

4. Pointing Squarespace Domain to WordPress

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

5. Fixing Permalinks in WordPress

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:

1. Login to WordPress Dashboard and go to Settings and then Permalinks.
2. Select the Day and Name option as it’s the most similar to the Squarespace’s URL structure.
   
3. Then, head to Custom Structure field and add the blog-1 prefix in front of it so it would look like this:

   /blog-1/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

4. Hit the Save Changes button at the bottom.

6. Getting Started with WordPress

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.

Why Would You Want to Migrate Squarespace to WordPress?

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.

Conclusion

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:

1. Export files from Squarespace
2. Import data to WordPress
3. Transferring images from Squarespace to WordPress using the Auto Upload Images plugin
4. Point the Squarespace domain to WordPress by changing DNS details
5. Fixing permalinks in WordPress to avoid losing website traffic
6. Getting started with WordPress as your go-to CMS

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.

The author

Domantas G.

Domantas leads the content and SEO teams forward with fresh ideas and out of the box approaches. Armed with extensive SEO and marketing knowledge, he aims to spread the word of Hostinger to every corner of the world. During his free time, Domantas likes to hone his web development skills and travel to exotic places.

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