If you’ve been blogging for a while and realized you made the mistake of starting your blog on a platform like Squarespace, don’t worry.
In this article, I will walk you through how to move from Squarespace to WordPress and share what kinds of things to expect during your transition.
Why Move From Squarespace to WordPress?
I know learning WordPress can be scary at first. Trust me, I’ve been there. And it’s because of this that many bloggers decide to go with platforms like Squarespace or Wix since they’re very easy to work with and they are all-in-one tools.
But when it comes to creating blog content, and SEO in general, these platforms are behind on WordPress.
Not just the way the source code of WordPress is created, but also additional things like Schema, etc.
Besides the code, most companies that create online tools for website owners will create their tools for WordPress.
When starting your WordPress website, you will find out that there are hundreds of thousands of plugins available for us to add additional functionality to our blogs.
Plugins for selling your digital products, building up your email list, security, backups, and much more.
If you have built your blog on Squarespace and are thinking of switching to a self-hosted WordPress site, I recommend doing so as soon as possible.
This doesn’t have to be difficult, and there are ways to semi-automate things. But there’s still some work to do to get a good-functioning WordPress blog.
Things to Consider Before Migrating From Squarespace to WordPress
Before starting this process there are a couple of things you want to know to make this process as easy as possible.
- How many pages do you have?
- Do you have a custom domain with Squarespace that needs to be transferred?
- What hosting provider do you need for your WordPress Site?
- What WordPress theme are you going to use?
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How many pages do you have?
Because you will move over all of your content to your new WordPress website, it’s important to know how many pages you have.
With pages, I mean pages AND blog posts.
On your Squarespace site, there’s a sitemap that will show you all of the pages, posts, etc, including their respective URLs. Keep in mind this only goes for the live pages.
This is important because when you move everything over, you want those URLs to remain exactly the same, or you want to set up 301 redirects for them.
In order to visit your Sitemap, type in:
yourdomain/sitemap.xml
for example, my domain would then be https://blogtechsupport.com/sitemap.xml
This will give you a list with pages, posts, categories, etc and when you click on them, it will show the entire list of pages, posts, etc from your site.
Here is what the sitemap page looks like for this site, Blog Tech Support to give you an idea.
In order to keep track of all of them, you could put them all in a spreadsheet. That is how I do it.
Visit the sitemap extractor here and fill in your sitemap address. It will give you the entire list of URLs for your current site and you can save them in a spreadsheet.
I love Google Sheets for this.
Do you have a custom domain with Squarespace that needs to be transferred?
If you’re going to move to WordPress, you might also want to move your domain away from Squarespace.
But you don’t want to do this until your new website is ready to launch.
With Squarespace, you have the option to have a free Squarespace domain or to pick a custom domain for your business. But when you move your site, that domain will remain with Squarespace.
Personally, I like to keep my hosting and domains always separate from each other for safety measures. That way, you’ll never get stuck with 1 company.
For domains, I highly recommend Namecheap. I buy and host all of my domains, as well as my professional email addresses there.
But again, you want to wait to move your domain until the migration from Squarespace to WordPress is finished.
You don’t want to do this while moving everything over, but instead keep your current site on Squarespace live.
What hosting provider do you need for your WordPress Site?
Unlike with Squarespace, when you’re creating your self-hosted WordPress site, you’ll need a hosting package. With Squarespace, this is an all-in-1 deal. So you’ll purchase a Squarespace subscription, which will have hosting as well as your domain in 1 package.
For a self-hosted WordPress website, I recommend either Siteground or Cloudways.
Siteground is a shared hosting platform, which has excellent customer support and it’s fast. But you’re going to sign a contract for either 1 year or multiple and have to pay for the entire contract period at the beginning.
Cloudways is what I’m currently using and it gives you your own server where you can have multiple websites and you pay on a month-to-month basis. They start around $13 per month and you can easily upgrade as needed, without having to move over to a new host,
If you want a monthly payment plan instead of paying for the entire year or multiple years and you want superfast hosting, I would highly recommend signing up with Cloudways.
What WordPress theme do you want?
If you’re unfamiliar with WordPress, besides pages and posts, WordPress is built with themes and plugins.
Themes are what make the design of your site. Things like your colors, fonts, how your menus and sidebar look, etc.
Plugins are small programs that you can install in order to add extra functionality to your site. Think about backups, security plugins, SEO plugins, image optimization plugins, etc.
Since you’re going to move your Squarespace site over to WordPress, you’re going to design your site from scratch. This means you’re going to pick a good WordPress theme to install and build your content into it.
My favorite WordPress theme to work with is the Kadence theme.
Kadence works with the WordPress block builder, which allows you to just click and add sections, images, etc as you go. One of the biggest advantages of Kadence is that it loads fast, which will help with user experience and therefore your rankings on Google.
Kadence is just the basic theme, which will let you design your pages from scratch and they come with some premade templates.
But if you want fully pre-designed Kadence sites where you only need to replace some images and texts, I would encourage you to look at sites such as Restored316. They have lots of Kadence-designed themes that will speed up your design process.
Below you see 2 examples of very popular Kadence child themes, which are available on Restored316, the Create Theme and the Limoncella theme.
Also, 17th Avenue designs has beautiful, mostly feminine designs. Just make sure to check that it’s for the Kadence theme, since they also sell themes for the Genesis Framework.
Now let’s get started with the migration process.
1. Setting up a Self-Hosted WordPress Website.
Assuming you have your hosting package, you’re going to install WordPress on it.
Again, I recommend Siteground or Cloudways for this.
They have an automatic WordPress installation option where you can install WordPress with just 2 or 3 clicks.
2. Exporting Your Content From Squarespace
Once WordPress is installed, you want to go ahead and export all of your pages and posts from your Squarespace website.
Once logged into Squarespace, go to Settings and then Advanced.
Here you’ll find the import/export option and it also provides you with the export for WordPress option.
Just one caveat: Squarespace only allows you to export the written content, so your images won’t be included in this export. However, I’ll explain later how to move those images over.
When you create the export of your content, it will allow you to download the XML file, which you will want to download to your computer.
Don’t worry if this takes a bit of time. That’s totally normal and depends on the size of your website.
3. Importing your content to your WordPress site
Once you have your exported content on your computer, you want to import this XML file onto your WordPress blog.
WordPress has its own tool for this, which is called the WordPress importer.
When you’re logged into the backend of your site, go to tools -> import and on that page you’ll find the importer tool. Click on Install and then on Run it.
It will ask you to choose the file and this is where you’re going to select the XML file you got from Squarespace.
It will also ask you to pick an author. If you’re the only person on your site, just click on your name. If you have multiple authors, you have to select the right username here.
This can take a minute and once it’s finished, all of your pages and posts will be on your new WordPress website.
Moving all of your images from Squarespace to WordPress
Now comes the tricky part.
Since you can’t just export all of your media from Squarespace, you want to use a specific WordPress plugin to scrape and import all of your media for you.
This plugin is called Auto Upload Images.
Even though this plugin isn’t maintained for a while, it still works.
You can find the plugin in your WordPress plugin directory by logging into your backend and go to Plugins -> add new and typing into the search bar: Auto Upload Images.
You can also find the plugin here.
Once you installed this plugin and activated it, go to your posts section and click on all posts.
At the top of the screen, click on Screen options and here you want to set it so that all of your posts appear on this page at once. So if you have 100 blog posts, increase the standard number of 20 to 100.
Now when you click the checkbox to select all of your blog posts, click on bulk edit and select edit.
Now when you click on the update button, all of your blog posts will be automatically edited and scraped for the right images.
This can take some time and if you’ve done this right, all of your images will show up in your blog posts.
And this is the easiest way of doing this. Of course, you can also manually upload all of your images to your WordPress site.
When all of this is done, you successfully moved over all of your content, but you still need to design your new website, which we will do in the next section.
Design your new WordPress website.
Unfortunately, you can’t just copy over the design of a Squarespace site to WordPress, and this is where WordPress themes come into play.
Earlier I mentioned you have to pick a good WordPress theme in order to design your website.
My favorite WordPress theme right now is the Kadence theme. Kadence is fast, works with the WordPress block builder, has a huge community of people who help each other solve issues, and also has great customer support.
Kadence itself has some ready-to-use templates available for you, but there are a few websites that offer beautiful custom designs that you can install on top of the Kadence theme and these allow you to just replace some texts and images with your own and you have a fully functioning website.
Especially the design of Limoncella, which is designed for food bloggers, or for example Create. This is a great design for DIY, Crafts, and lifestyle bloggers.
And all of these theme designs are easily customizable once installed.
Once you installed your desired theme, and switched out the content of the pages, your new website is ready to go live. So let’s make sure visitors can actually see your new blog.
Moving your domain from Squarespace to a different domain host
Now that everything is ready to be shown to the world, it’s time to point your domain name to your WordPress website.
At this moment, your domain is with Squarespace.
I would recommend first moving your domain to a domain hosting provider. For this I use Namecheap.
I have all of my domains as well as my professional email address with Namecheap because they’re cheap and super easy to edit settings if needed.
Keep in mind, that this only works if you have a custom domain, like blogtechsupport.com for example. And it can take a maximum of 15 days for your domain to be fully moved from Squarespace to a different domain host. This is because of Squarespace and there’s not much you can do about it.
If you have a domain that ends with Squarespace.com, this doesn’t work and I would recommend using your own domain instead for branding purposes.
- In Squarespace, go to domains and select the domain you want to transfer.
- Click the toggle to unlock your domain. Currently, your domain is locked.
- Click on Request transfer code and then on OK.
- Now within the next 24 hours, you’ll receive an email from Squarespace with a transfer code.
When you go to Namecheap and log into your account or create one if you don’t have one yet, you can click on transfer domain.
They will ask you for a transfer code, which is the code you received in the email from Squarespace.
You type this in and continue the transfer process.
Namecheap will do all of this for you from here.
Again, this process of moving your domain from Squarespace to Namecheap or any other domain name provider for that matter, can take from 48 hours to 15 days.
Personally, I never worked with Squarespace, only WordPress and the process went very smoothly.
Pointing your domain name to your new WordPress host
Now that your domain name is moved away from Squarespace and can be pointed to your WordPress host, let’s finish this process.
If you’re using Namecheap for the domain, log into your Namecheap dashboard and click on the domain list.
On the right side of your domain, click on Manage and then on Advanced DNS.
There are 2 different ways to do it.
- by changing the DNS settings to those of the new hosting company.
- By adding an A-record and pointing the domain to an IP address.
Personally, I always use the 2nd way, because I want to keep my emails with Namecheap.
When you’re using Siteground for example, you want to log into your account and find the IP address for your website. This will be shown in the settings of your site.
Then go to the Advanced settings page on Namecheap and click on add new record.
Here you will choose for A-record, in the Host field you will fill in the @ symbol and in the IP address field, you fill in the IP address of your Siteground website.
See image of my own domain below:
Click on save and it can take a few minutes for the domain to be pointed to Siteground.
Once this process is finished, you can go to Siteground and within your new website settings click on add new primary domain and fill in your domain there. Your new domain will send your visitors to your new website from now on.
I know this all can be a bit scary and overwhelming, but just know that I’m right here for you if you need help with this.
And of course, if you don’t want to worry about this at all, I offer website migrations as one of my services.
If you want me to do all of this for you, you can easily contact me through my contact page and I’ll get this done for you quick and safely. And I’ll make sure that nothing is broken afterward.
If you know someone who’s looking for this tutorial, make sure to send them over to this article.
And if you think this isn’t something you can do, just know I’m only 1 message away. Just go to my contact page and send me a message and I can do all of this for you. This service starts at €97 for a smaller site and we can always discuss price for your own site.
Yours Truly,
Chris
