How to Move from Squarespace to WordPress without Losing Organic Ranking

Do you want to move your website from Squarespace to WordPress without losing organic traffic?

Lots of website owners want to move their website to WordPress because it is one of the best and flexible platform to use. Most Squarespace users want to move when they are ready, but moving from one platform to another might make you lose organic rankings if you are not careful.

What is Squarespace ?

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Squarespace is an American website building and hosting company which is based in New York City, United States. It provides software as a service for website building and hosting, and allows users to use pre-built website templates and drag-and-drop elements to create and modify webpages. It is like WordPress, blogger, weebly platform. In this content, we will show you how to properly move from Squarespace to WordPress without losing traffic.

Reason Why you need to move from Squarespace to WordPress

As we have stated above, about Squarespace as a blogging platform like WordPress but it has a little limitation which are not found on WordPress. WordPress is a lot more flexible and allows you to make any kind of website you want but Squarespace are not really flexible. When talking about wordpress, we mean self-hosted WordPress.org site and not WordPress.com blog hosting service. For more understanding, you can read our guide on difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

How to move from Squarespace to WordPress

By a domain name and register for a web hosting account

If you are moving or getting started on WordPress, you need to buy a domain name and where you are hosting your website, that is why at wpressbeginner, we recommend Namecheap as the best hosting website you can think of as a beginner. They are one of the biggest hosting companies in the world and officially recommended WordPress hosting provider for beginners. If your Squarespace site has its own domain name, then you don’t need to buy domain name but some time you might want to transfer that domain to your new web host as well.

Install WordPress on Your Hosting

After signing up on your hosting account, you need to install WordPress on your website hosting account, namecheap makes it easier to install WordPress without stress. Most other top WordPress hosting companies also allow you to install WordPress with a single click from your hosting dashboard. After you have installed WordPress, you’ll be able to login to your WordPress admin dashboard.

Squarespace Content Exportation

After successfully installing WordPress on your Namecheap hosting account, just like moving from blogspot to WordPress which means you can’t export everything automatically also applicable to moving from Squarespace to WordPress.

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
Folders and index pages will be left out
If you had more than one blog page, then only one of them will be exported

But first and foremost you need to export others which can be exported automatically

Log into your Squarespace account and choose the website you want to export.
Access the website, then click Settings on the left menu bar.
Accessing the Settings page on Squarespace.
Scroll down and locate Advanced, and then Import / Export.
Choose Export, and select WordPress.
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.
Exporting Squarespace website’s files.
Wait a few seconds and press Download once a .xml file has been generated.

Install Content to WordPress

In order to import the content, follow these steps:

Login to WordPress admin dashboard and click on Tools > Import.
Next, click Install Now under WordPress
Once done, click Run Importer under WordPress
On the next page, click the Choose File button and select the downloaded Squarespace file. Then, click the Upload file and import button
Checkmark Download and import file attachments and click the Submit button
Then you have successful import your Squarespace content to WordPress

Here is the content that has been automatically exported above.

All your basic pages has been exported as WordPress pages.
One blog page has been exported, and it will appear in WordPress pages as Blog
All your blog posts under that one blog page has been exported as WordPress posts
Your Gallery pages has been exported
Text, Image, and Embed blocks will be exported

Import Images from Squarespace

As I have said above, importing images can only be done manually, so you can use the Import External Images plugin to move your images to WordPress. Read our guide to install plugins on your WordPress dashboard,

First thing you need to do is to install and activate the Auto Upload Images plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » Auto Upload Images page to review the plugin settings.
The default settings would work for most users, but you can change them as needed.

The plugin will import images to your default WordPress media uploads folder. You can change that by providing a different base URL. Other than that, it also allows you to set filename, image alt tag, image size, and exclude post types.

Once you are done, don’t forget to click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.

Next, you will need to update the posts or pages containing the external images. Since this is a manual process, it can be tedious if you have a lot of content.

Luckily, there’s a quick way to update all posts with external images. Simply go to Posts » All Posts page and then click on the Screen Options button at the top.
You need to increase the number to 999 in the ‘Number of items per page field’ field and click on the Apply button.

WordPress will reload the page, and this time it will show 999 posts at a time. Next, you need to select all your posts and then select Edit under the bulk actions menu.
After that you need to click the Apply button. WordPress will show you a quick edit box with all selected posts. You just need to click on the Update button, and WordPress will update all your posts.

Fixing your website permalinks

After successfully moving all your post, images and so on from Squarespace to WordPress, the next thing is to fix permalinks on your new hosting, just not to lose google ranking.

WordPress allows to create SEO friendly URLs, that can be similar to your Squarespace website URLs. Squarespace has year/month/day/post-name as the link format for blog posts. It also uses a prefix like blog or blog-1 in the post URLs.
If you are using Squarespace subdomain, the default blog post URL usually looks like this:
https://example.squarespace.com/blog-1/2016/3/6/post-title
To create similar URLs in WordPress website follow these steps:
In WordPress admin dashboard go to Settings > Permalinks menu.

Select the closest match to your old Squarespace URL structure, which is ‘Day and Name’:
Look for the Custom Structure field. It will be automatically filled with year, month number, day, and post name tags.
Now, you need to add ‘blog’ or ‘blog-1’ prefix at the beginning of the URL structure, e.g. /blog-1/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
Click the Save Changes button after that.

Importing Other Content from Squarespace to WordPress

Squarespace only allows you to export limited content. If you were using their eCommerce features, events, or hosting audio video files, then you will have to import all of them manually to your WordPress site.

Depending on how much content you have there, this process can take some time.

If you have any issue on this, you can use our comment session or join our delegate on facebook to solve any issues related to WordPress and subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials.

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