How To Migrate Your Website From Squarespace To WordPress
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Squarespace provides a neat hosting platform for people just getting started online. Still, many users soon realize the Squarespace platform is somewhat limited in terms of what you can customize and have control over. If you’re one of those people, this tutorial will help you migrate your website easily from Squarespace to WordPress.
What You Need Before Migrating Your Website From Squarespace To WordPress
You’ll need web hosting before you export or migrate your site from Squarespace. There are a lot of web hosts to choose from, including ChemiCloud.
Join the growing club of happy customers who made the switch to better, faster WordPress Hosting.
The second thing you will need is to install WordPress. If you aren’t familiar with installing WordPress, no worries; we have you covered in our KB Article – How To Get Started With WordPress.
Additionally, until you are 100% sure you have migrated everything, including all of your text, image, and video content, from Squarespace to your WordPress site, do not cancel your Squarespace hosting. Your site could be mistakenly deleted and irrecoverable.
Exporting Your Squarespace Content
After you have installed WordPress, the next step is to export your content from Squarespace.
As you begin to export your site from Squarespace, you will notice, that the controls and features you have for the export are somewhat limited.
Depending on the types of content you have on your site, e.g., images, text, and video, only some of it will be exported. Because of how Squarespace is designed, it is impossible to export all types of content or files on your Squarespace site into a single ‘export bundle.’ Instead, their system will export an XML file.
What Squarespace Export Include:
When you use the Export Your Site function inside of Squarespace, the export includes the following types of content from your site:
The layout Pages
A blog Page, including all posts and comments
The text Blocks
The image Blocks
Text from other blocks like the Embed Block, Twitter Block, and Instagram Block will export with minimum structure
The gallery Pages
The project Pages
What Squarespace Export Don’t Include:
Other page types (including Album Pages, Cover Pages, Index Pages, Info Pages, Events Pages, Portfolio Pages, Products Pages, and Store Pages)
Content in page-specific headers, footers, and sidebars.
More than one Blog Page
Folders
Audio Blocks
Product Blocks
Video Blocks
Drafts
Style changes
Custom CSS
Important Note:
Note: Some content, such as linked .pdf files, will export in the .xml file but can’t import to a WordPress site. Be sure you download these files from your Squarespace manually and upload them to your WordPress site using the Media Library.
How To Export Your Squarespace Site
Step 1: Login to your site at Squarespace.Step 2: In the HomeMenu, click Settings.
Step 3: Click Advanced, and then click Import/ Export.
Step 4: Click Export:
Step 5: Squarespace will ask you which platform you’re exporting to. Click the WordPress icon.
Step 6: If you have more than one Blog Page on your site, a Select Primary Blog message will appear. Only one Blog Page can be exported.
Step 7: Select a Primary Blog from the drop-down menu, then click Export.
Step 8: Wait for the export to finish. It may take a little while depending on the amount of content on your Squarespace site. Once the export is complete, click Download button to save the .xml file to your computer, or click Clear to erase the export.
Importing Your Site Into WordPress
The next step is to import the .xml file you downloaded from Squarespace into your WordPress site.
Step 1: Log into your WordPress Admin area (wp-admin) and using the admin tools on the left side, hover over Tools and click Import.
Step 2: On the import screen, you’ll have a number of options you can use. Squarespace is not listed as an option here, however, the type of export that Squarespace does is a WordPress-compatible file format. To import your site using the XML file you downloaded from Squarespace, all you need to do is click Install Now beneath WordPress.
This will install the WordPress Importer.
After the importer installs, click Run Importer.
Step 3: WordPress will ask you to upload the XML file you downloaded from Squarespace, and in the background will import all of the content included in the export.
If all goes well with the import, which it should, then you will see an import settings screen where you’ll need to choose an author name for the imported content. WordPress can also import the Squarespace users and add them as subscribers on your WordPress site. You can also choose an existing admin user as author or even create a new user.
There is an option to import attachment images, but it doesn’t import your images, so don’t get too excited by seeing this. We will show you how to import your images later in this KB article. 17
To complete this, click the submit button. WordPress will then begin the import.
You’ll see a message saying “Success!” when it has finished. You can then browse your pages and posts in the WordPress Admin area to review your imported content.
Importing Your Images From Squarespace Into WordPress
Regrettably, powerful tho the WordPress Import Tool is, it isn’t sophisticated enough to import images from Squarespace sites. You’ll need to manually import them, but there is an automated way to do it, saving you a lot of time.
You’ll need to install an older plugin – Auto Upload Images. Despite the age of the plugin, it works great, even with the latest release of WordPress.
Step 1: To install the plugin in your WordPress Site, go to the Plugins Area on the left side of your wp-admin, then click Add New.
In the top right corner of the Add Plugins area, search for auto upload images
Step 2: Locate Auto Upload Images in the search results and click Install Now.
Once the plugin has been installed, click Activate to enable the plugin.
Step 3: To begin the import of the images from Squarespace to your WordPress site, you need to edit all posts and pages containing images. This will trigger the image import plugin when you save the post type.
Fortunately, WordPress comes with a really easy way to bulk edit your content so you can do this with a few clicks, instead of doing it one at a time. To do this, go to your Posts area from the left side of your wp-admin and click the Screen Options menu at the top.
You’ll need to fit all of your Posts on 1 page in order to do this, so increase the Number of items per page to be something really high, like 999 for example. Then click apply.
WordPress will reload the Posts page and will show all of your posts on one page. If you have a lot of posts, give it a few seconds to load everything before you proceed.
Step 4: Next, all you need to do is select all of your posts and bulk edit them. Click the check box next to Title to select all of your posts.
Next, click the Bulk actions menu, and click Edit. Then click Apply.
Following this, click the blue Update button.
Doing this will notify the plugin to begin the import of external images from your Squarespace website and store them in your WordPress media library.
Fixing Your Permalinks
Since you migrated your site to WordPress, you’ll want to make sure you don’t miss out on any traffic coming through using links to your old Squarespace website. WordPress uses a SEO Friendly URL Structure which enables you to customize the link structure in a variety of ways.
The idea here is to make the link structure for your WordPress site similar to the way it was when your site was at Squarespace. They use a year/month/day/post-name as their URL structure. They also use a prefix, like post or post-1 in the post URLs.
A typical blog post URL using Squarespaces default URL Structure Configuration looks like this:
Wouldn’t it be better practice to use get_the_title(..) in this case? directly accessing the post object’s data member would bypass applying filters and enforcing protected and private settings, unless that’s explicitly desired.
If you need special things—[shortcodes], paragraph tags, anything exciting—in the content, you should apply the filters as opposed to using do_shortcode().
Wouldn’t it be better practice to use get_the_title(..) in this case? directly accessing the post object’s data member would bypass applying filters and enforcing protected and private settings, unless that’s explicitly desired.