How to Migrate from Squarespace to WordPress: 8 Quick Steps

Deciding to move from Squarespace to WordPress? Great choice—you are not alone!

Although Squarespace is easy to use, many creators and business owners get to a point where their constraints start to limit their creativity, and they think, “I should switch to WordPress!” After all, limited design options, little control over SEO, and a lack of ownership can be frustrating!

But the trouble with moving from Squarespace to WordPress is that it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Just figuring out how to migrate your content and data properly, keeping SEO intact, can be a special challenge if you are unfamiliar with the steps to take.

That’s why we put together this no-frills, beginner-level guide on how to migrate from Squarespace to WordPress. We provide step-by-step instructions on everything from picking a hosting account to setting up redirects so you’ll feel (somewhat) prepared to do this process!

Why Migrate from Squarespace to WordPress?

Are you curious about why many website owners are switching from Squarespace to WordPress?

While Squarespace is a decent platform for beginners, it becomes restrictive once your needs expand. WordPress offers a more robust, scalable, and customizable option. Let us go into detail as to why it is wise to migrate from Squarespace to WordPress in 2026:

1. You Can Customize Everything: Squarespace will make it easy for you, but that easy option comes with limitations. WordPress is open-source, which means you have unlimited freedom to adjust layouts, alter code, and add more functionality. No more design walls
2. Unlimited Themes & Plugins: With WordPress, you will have access to 60,000+ plugins and robust themes. Do you want an SEO blog, a multilingual site, or a complex e-commerce store? There is a plugin for that and probably more than one.
3. Advanced SEO Features: When you switch from Squarespace to WordPress, you’ll quickly see the immediate SEO benefits. Plugins like Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, or Rank Math allow you to edit meta titles & descriptions, generate XML sitemaps, optimize schema markup, and Control canonical URLs. Squarespace cannot compete in this area.
4. Actual Ownership of Your Website: Squarespace hosts your site (i.e., your content resides on their servers). But with WordPress, you have full access—You own the host, the files, and the content. You can change hosts, scale up, or even go headless.
5. Better long-term value: What is great about WordPress is the separate hosting and potential long-term savings. Why? Because you pay for what you need (i.e, premium themes, plugins) without an all-inclusive price.
6. Scalability and Performance: As your business grows, so should your site. WordPress is set up for scaling, and can take everything from single-user blogs to very high-traffic business sites. Squarespace cannot compete with that.

Pro Tip: You can learn in detail to understand whether you should switch from Squarespace to WordPress or not in this guide.

How to Migrate from Squarespace to WordPress: 8 Essential Steps

Migrating your website need not be a tech nightmare. Here is exactly how to migrate from Squarespace to WordPress: an overview of eight necessary (and manageable) steps.

Step 1: Choose a Reliable WordPress Hosting Provider

Before you can migrate from Squarespace to WordPress, you need a new home for your website: a WordPress hosting provider. Think of hosting as the foundation of your new site, so you want to work with a provider that is fast, secure, and scalable.

There are three broad categories of WordPress hosting:

• Shared Hosting: Affordable and great for beginners (e.g., Bluehost, Hostinger).
• Managed WordPress Hosting: Higher performance and support (e.g., Kinsta, WP Engine).
• Cloud Hosting: Powerful for growing sites (e.g., SiteGround, Cloudways).

What to look for:

• One-click WordPress installation
• Free SSL certificate
• Daily backups
• Good customer support
• Built-in caching for speed

Once you have signed up, the majority of hosts will allow you to install WordPress in just one click! That’s what you need to move on to designing and creating your new site and getting it ready for importing content next.

Pro Tip: If you’re unsure about moving everything manually yet, choose a host that provides free site migration.

Step 2: Install WordPress and Set Basic Settings Up

After you have your host in place, it’s time to install WordPress and get your site prepped for content. Most modern hosting services have installations you can do in a few clicks, whether it is Softaculous, which is a common auto-installer script, or their own proprietary dashboard that has WordPress pre-installed and ready to go in only a few minutes.

After you’ve installed WordPress, you can log in to your shiny new site at:

yourdomain.com/wp-admin

Then you’ll want to configure some basic settings:

• Go to Settings > General: Add your site’s title and tagline
• Set your timezone and permalinks (the way you prefer URLs to read)
• Go to Settings > Permalinks: select “Post name” for SEO friendly URLs.
• Set your homepage (under Settings > Reading)

Then you will want to choose a clean, responsive theme for your site’s layout design. If you aren’t sure which theme to use, Astra, Kadence, and GeneratePress are either beginner themes or performance-centric ones. After you find a passable theme, you can change the layout later with the WordPress Customizer or a page builder like Elementor.

At this point, you now have the basic structure of your new website and can start moving content onto it.

Step 3: Export Content from Squarespace

Now, this is where the real migration begins. Squarespace only allows you to export your content in segments; you’re only able to export some pages (mainly Blog pages), so you won’t be exporting everything in one swoop. This is another reason for us to do it manually as well, later.

To Export from Squarespace:

1. Head to Settings > Advanced > Import/Export.
2. Click on Export. Choose WordPress as your export format.
3. Allow Squarespace to create a .xml file. Download the .xml file to your computer.

What will be exported:

• Blog posts
• Static pages
• Images (sometimes)
• Categories and tags

What will NOT be exported:

• The product page (eCommerce)
• Custom CSS
• Style settings
• Event or album pages
• Any embedded content

Your export file is now ready to be imported into your new WordPress site.

Quick Note: Make sure to keep your old Squarespace site live until you’re fully migrated and have tested your WordPress site.

Step 4: Import Your Content into WordPress

Now that you’ve got your Squarespace export file, it’s time to migrate your content into WordPress.

Here are the steps to import your content:

1. From your WordPress dashboard, go to Tools > Import. Select WordPress, and if prompted, install the importer plugin.
2. Upload the .xml file that you saved from Squarespace.

WordPress will then upload your blog posts and basic pages. This could take a few minutes, depending on how large your site is.

After you import, make sure to check:

• All of your posts and pages appear under Posts and Pages.
• Check for missing images (more don’t always carry over, more on this soon).
• Open each post to ensure everything looks formatted correctly.

Tip: Use a plugin like Auto Upload Images if your imported posts reference image URLs on Squarespace.

Stage 5: Rebuild Custom Pages and Designs

Since Squarespace can’t export everything, you’ll have quite a bit more manual labor to do here. You’ll have to rebuild parts of your site, like:

• Home page layout
• Custom layouts
• Product or portfolio pages
• Themes
• Any embedded items (i.e., forms, calendars, or galleries)

You can use a WordPress page builder. Here are a few examples.

• Elementor
• Beaver Builder
• Gutenberg (Block Editor)

Most modern themes have available layout customization via drag-and-drop.

You will also want to make sure to:

• Rebuild contact forms using a WPForms or Contact Form 7 plugin.
• Make menus under Appearance > Menus.
• Add footers, widgets, and sidebars.

This stage may take a little bit of time, but this is where the true freedom of WordPress comes in; you will get full customization of your layout, look, and functionality.

You should not copy and paste everything, but you should take this opportunity to refresh your design and UX.

Step 6: Configure Permalinks and 301 Redirects

The big concern with maintaining your SEO rankings through this migration is URL structure and redirects.

Here’s what to do:

1. Configure Your WordPress Permalinks: Go to Settings > Permalinks and choose Post name . This is a clean and SEO-friendly structure.
2. Create 301 Redirects: Because Squarespace URLs often have different slugs, you must redirect the old URLs to their new URL. You can do this with the Redirection plugin, or you can add the redirect in your .htaccess file if you are using Apache servers. Example:

Redirect 301 /old-blog-post-title https://yourdomain.com/new-blog-post-title

If you exported your Squarespace URLs, you can make a redirect map before you close the site to help you map it out manually.

Step 7: Transfer or Re-Upload Images

Possibly the most complicated part of the migration is transferring images. Sometimes they’re included in your export file, but more often than not, they’re still hosted on Squarespace, and the images could break when the old site comes down.

There are a couple of shortcuts to fix this:

Option 1: Use the Instant Images Plugin

This plugin scans posts and pages for image URLs. It captures the URLs and retrieves the images, uploading them to WordPress, thereby replacing the old links automatically.

Option 2: Upload and Replace Images Manually

• Download all the images you need from Squarespace Media Library.
• Upload them to WordPress via Media > Add New.
• Reinsert images into posts using the block editor.

Be sure to:

• Optimize your images using a plugin like Smush or ShortPixel.
• Add alt tags to improve your SEO and accessibility.

Tip: Large images slow your site down, so compress and resize when possible.

Step 8: Testing Everything And Go Live

Now that you have your new site built, it is time to thoroughly test it and go live.

Pre-Launch Checklist:

• Are all pages and posts displaying correctly?
• Are internal and external links working?
• Are images displaying properly?
• Have you tested on mobile and browsers?
• Is your menu navigation working?
• Have you installed an SEO plugin and submitted your sitemap?

Tools To Help:

• Google Search Console – To monitor indexing
• Google Analytics – To track traffic
• PageSpeed Insights – Test your loading speed
• Broken Link Checker – to search for 404s

When you feel confident that everything is functioning properly, update your domain settings to point to your new WordPress site by using your hosting provider’s DNS settings.

Last Step: Submit your new sitemap to Google Search Console to speed up indexing.

Final Thoughts: Ready to Migrate from Squarespace to WordPress?

Well, by now, you should have a clear understanding of how to migrate from Squarespace to WordPress, step-by-step and without the anxiety.

From selecting your hosting provider and exporting your content to setting up redirects and rebuilding your custom pages manually, you have been given everything you need to move your site in a secure and sensible way. Sure, it will take some time and attention, but the payoff is well worth every click when you take a long-term view on switching to WordPress.

So, here is what you will get in the end:

• Control over your content and design
• Powerful SEO tools and plug-ins at your fingertips
• Complete flexibility to expand and grow your site
• Many future-proof options to customize your site

Moving your site is more than a change of platform- it is a change of control, creativity, and freedom. Now that you know how to migrate from Squarespace to WordPress, you are not simply migrating platforms- you are upgrading your entire digital presence.

So take a deep breath, back up your current site, and get ready to build something far better on WordPress.

You can do this.

Frequently Asked Questions