Squarespace exports one WordPress-format XML file, and its own documentation lists more things left out than taken. Here's what really moves, which URLs change, and what it costs to do it without dropping rankings.
The short answers, before the detail. Every one of these is expanded further down the page.
Squarespace sites rarely fail. They stop being able to become the next thing. These are the ceilings Studio removes, in the order Squarespace users tend to hit them.
Squarespace's design system is generous until the moment you need something it didn't anticipate. Studio's grid and breakpoints let you build the layout the brief actually calls for rather than the nearest available approximation.
Squarespace collections are tied to page types with fixed shapes. Studio's CMS lets you define your own fields and relationships, so a directory, a resource library and a product catalogue can each be the thing they are.
Squarespace allows several blog pages but exports only one, and that constraint reflects how it treats them. In Studio, news, resources and case studies are separate collections with their own templates and their own URLs.
Running a second language on Squarespace means duplicating pages or paying for a third-party layer. Studio handles translation natively, which is why a 70+ page site across two languages is a normal project rather than an exception.
Global text themes, colour and spacing mean a brand change is one edit. Squarespace's style editor gets you part of the way, then per-page custom CSS starts accumulating and nobody remembers what it targets.
Studio supports multiple editors with real permissions, so a marketing team can publish without the account password being shared around or a designer becoming the bottleneck.
The parts that cost people money here aren't the rebuild. They're the pages Squarespace never put in the export file, the second blog nobody remembered, and the post URLs mapped to one landing page instead of one by one, so we crawl the live site before anything is exported.
Landing pages and course infrastructure for an award-winning gardener
“Zenith redefined what hard work means to me. They treat every website project with pride, enthusiasm and extreme passion.”
Flynn BlackieDirector - MOD Digital
Squarespace sites don't usually break. They stop being able to become the next thing, which is a slower and much easier problem to ignore.
If adding custom code has come up more than twice this year, you've found the ceiling. If it hasn't, Squarespace is probably still the right tool and we'll say so.
Squarespace offers one export format: a .xml file structured for WordPress. Its documentation is refreshingly direct about the limits, and most of what follows comes straight from it.
Read the pattern rather than the rows: the XML carries structured text, everything visual gets rebuilt, and anything tied to a person stays behind. Already part-way through one of these yourself? You don't have to restart. Send us the Squarespace site and whatever you've built in Studio and we'll tell you what's missing from the export and finish it.
Seven stages, three to five weeks of active work. Your Squarespace site stays live and taking bookings until the day the domain moves.
Step 01
The XML tells you what Squarespace is willing to hand over. The crawl tells you what you actually have. The gap between the two is the project.
What the crawl captures:
Every live URL with its search data: Impressions, clicks, average position and inbound links over the last twelve months, so the redirect map can be prioritised rather than worked through alphabetically.
The pages the export will drop: Index, portfolio, album and cover pages are excluded from the XML, and on a design-led Squarespace site those are usually the pages people link to.
Current per-page metadata: Titles, descriptions and social images, none of which travel in the export, captured now so there's something to diff against before cutover.
Step 02
A Squarespace migration is four or five exports, not one. Each lives in a different part of the admin and each has its own gaps.
The full set:
The XML, for pages and one blog: Only a single blog page exports. Sites running a news feed and a separate resources feed lose the second one unless it's captured by crawl first.
A products CSV, if there's a store: Physical and service products only. Digital products have no export at all and get rebuilt by hand.
One submissions CSV per form block: Exported from each block's Storage tab, so six forms means six files. Uploaded files aren't included, though the CSV carries direct links to download them.
Your existing URL mappings: Squarespace's own redirect layer is where past site changes were papered over, and those addresses die the day the plan lapses.
Step 03
The stage that makes the move worth paying for. The ceiling you're leaving is structural, so the fix has to be structural too.
What gets modelled:
Repeating content becomes collections: Courses, locations, team members, properties: define the pattern once and publishing the twentieth item costs what the second did.
Index and portfolio pages come back as layouts: The page types the export drops are exactly the ones worth rebuilding as collection-driven pages rather than hand-placed galleries.
Global styles get set before anything is built: The custom CSS holding your template together stops being necessary, because the control it was faking is native here.
Step 04
The new site goes up on a staging URL while Squarespace keeps serving your domain. No maintenance page, no gap in enquiries or sales.
What changes in the build:
Breakpoints you control: Responsive behaviour set per breakpoint rather than inherited from a template's assumptions about your content.
Layouts that don't need code injection: The things you were adding custom CSS for are editor features here, which is the practical difference between the two platforms.
A working site you review on your own phone: Sign-off happens against the real thing on a real device, not a slide of screenshots.
Step 05
Text into the new layouts, images re-uploaded, products imported. Products need the most attention, because the CSV arrives with holes in it.
The parts that need hand-work:
Images re-uploaded and re-described: The XML references media by its Squarespace URL rather than bundling files, so everything is pulled down and re-uploaded, with alt text applied as it goes.
Product fields the CSV omits: Featured images, variant images, product image alt text, additional information and customer reviews all get re-attached by hand.
SEO fields entered and diffed: Every title, description and social image re-entered, then checked line by line against the inventory from stage one.
Step 06
The map is written and tested before the domain moves, never after. How long it runs was decided at the build stage, when the blog was either put on Wix's Blog app or modelled in the CMS.
How cutover runs:
One row per post, mapped by hand: Where post paths do change, Squarespace nests them under the blog page slug and the Blog app puts them under /post/, so no pattern rule does this correctly.
Imported in batches and tested: Wix's URL Redirect Manager takes up to 500 rows per CSV, and each batch is checked against the inventory before anything is repointed.
The domain moves last: Sitemap resubmitted, Search Console and analytics reconnected, forms and checkout submitted end to end the same afternoon.
Step 07
Coverage and impressions daily for the first fortnight, then weekly. Blog URLs get watched hardest, because they're the ones that changed.
What gets fixed inside the window:
Anything returning a 404: Usually a post URL whose slug differed from what the export implied, which is why the crawl matters more than the file.
Pages dropping out of coverage: Caught and resubmitted while we're still on the project, at no extra cost, against a price fixed before the work began.
Positions sliding on mapped URLs: A redirect that resolves isn't proof the mapping was right. Position data over four weeks is.
“Zenith redefined what hard work means to me. They treat every website project with pride, enthusiasm and extreme passion.”
Flynn BlackieDirector - MOD DigitalRated on Trustpilot
Send us the URL. We'll crawl the site, count the URLs in play, and show you which pages the XML leaves behind before you commit to anything.
Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed timeline. No retainers, no licensing traps, no surprise invoices.
A clean, credible build for businesses that need to launch fast.
one-time · 2-week delivery
Book a callCore functionality
Prestige design, custom functionality, and the full SEO and copy stack, handled.
one-time · 5-week delivery
Book a callEverything in The Minimum, plus:
A long-term partnership: growth retainers, ads, SEO campaigns, and ongoing builds.
monthly · Ongoing
Talk to usEverything in The Studio, plus:
What people ask on these calls once they've read the export documentation.
Partly. Squarespace gives you one .xml file in WordPress format containing your layout pages, one blog and its posts, and your text and image blocks. It leaves out index, portfolio, album, cover, info, calendar, and store pages, plus audio and video blocks, drafts, style settings, and custom CSS. So the words come across and the site doesn't. Everything the XML omits gets rebuilt, which is most of the visual design.
Not if the URLs are handled deliberately, and fewer of them have to change than most people assume. Standard pages keep their slugs, so /about stays /about. Blog posts come down to one build decision: Wix's Blog app forces a /post/ prefix that can't be removed, while a blog modelled on the Wix CMS lets you set the prefix and keep your existing /blog-name/post-name paths. Whatever does change gets a one-to-one redirect, tested against the URL inventory before the domain moves, then watched in Search Console for 30 days after.
Only one exports. Squarespace prompts you to select a primary blog page and the rest aren't in the file. We capture the others by crawling the live site before anything is switched off, which works fine but has to happen while the site is still up. It's the most common thing to discover too late on this migration.
Physical and service products come across through a separate CSV export, not through the XML. The CSV leaves out additional product information, customer reviews, featured images, product image alt text, and variant images, so budget a pass to re-attach those. Digital products have no export at all and get rebuilt by hand. Orders export for your records but can't be imported anywhere.
Three to five weeks of active work for most sites, then a 30-day monitoring window that runs after you're already live. The blog archive is what moves that number: a site with fifteen posts and one with four hundred are different projects, because every post needs a mapped redirect either way.
For a small site with a short blog, yes. The trap is that the export looks like a complete backup and isn't, so the DIY question here is really "how much of my site is in the file?" A five-page brochure site with no store is a reasonable weekend project. A single blog with thirty posts is manageable, though on the Blog app you'll be mapping thirty redirects by hand. Beyond that it turns: a second blog page, an index or portfolio page, a store, a members area, or a few hundred posts each move it into territory where what you don't notice missing costs more than the help. The reliable signal is your blog archive. If it earns traffic, the URL decision is the one worth getting help with, and it's the part people skip.
Your standard pages keep their addresses. Squarespace uses clean, flat paths for regular pages and Wix Studio imposes no structure of its own, so /about stays /about and a brochure site needs almost no redirect work. Your blog depends on how it gets built. Wix's Blog app puts every post under a /post/ prefix that can't be removed, so on a site with two hundred posts that's two hundred mapped redirects. A blog modelled on the Wix CMS lets you set the prefix and the slug, which is how an existing /blog-name/post-name structure survives the move untouched. The quieter risk is metadata, which doesn't travel in the XML at all, so titles and descriptions get re-entered and diffed against the old site before the domain moves.
From €1,750, quoted as a fixed price before any work starts. What moves the number is almost entirely the blog: every post needs its own mapped redirect, so a fifteen-post site and a four-hundred-post site are different projects. After that it's the store, since products come across by CSV and then need their reviews, alt text and variant images re-attached by hand, and any page types Squarespace refuses to export at all.
WordPress solves the ceiling by handing you a maintenance job: plugin updates, security patching, hosting. Webflow solves it but leaves editing to whoever understands the class system, which recreates the bottleneck you're leaving. Studio gives you the responsive control and the CMS without either, and the people who write your content can publish it. If you want the custom-code answer instead, we build those too, and we'll say so if that's what your case actually calls for.
Yes, and it's the default. The Studio build lives on a staging URL while Squarespace keeps serving your domain, so there's no maintenance page and no gap in enquiries or sales. You sign off on a working site you can open on your own phone. The domain moves in a single afternoon at the end, once the redirect map has been tested.
Send us your site. We'll tell you how many URLs are in play, how much of it the XML actually covers, and what the move would cost. Free, and worth having even if you decide to stay.
Every platform limit on this page links to the vendor's own documentation, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Last verified 19 August 2026
The definitive list. Exports layout pages, one blog page and its posts, text and image blocks, and gallery pages on 7.0. Excludes album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio and store pages, page-specific headers, footers and sidebars, additional blog pages, dropdowns, audio, product and video blocks, drafts, style settings and custom CSS.
Confirms the export is a WordPress-format XML, and states that images can't be exported in bulk and uploaded video can't be exported at all.
Names exactly what the product CSV leaves out: additional product information, customer reviews, featured images, product image alt text and variant images.
Orders export for analysing sales outside Squarespace. No import path is documented.
Customer list exports to CSV. Notes are excluded and account logins are not covered.
Blog post URLs always begin with the blog page's own slug, which is what determines how much of your URL structure survives.
The /post/ prefix on Wix Blog URLs, which can't be removed, and why the blog build decision drives the redirect map.
The collection name is only a suggested default prefix and can be edited, which is how a CMS-built blog keeps existing Squarespace post paths.
CSV import into a collection, capped at 50,000 items per file.
Bulk redirect import, up to 500 rows at a time, which is how a few hundred mapped blog posts get loaded.
Google's own guidance on URL-changing moves, and its statement that following it does not guarantee crawling, indexing or ranking.
One source platform per guide. The hub covers the rest, and the siblings go equally deep on theirs.
The hub: what a migration to Wix Studio covers, what it costs, and every platform we move sites from.
The Wix-to-Wix move, where the URLs mostly hold and the layout has to be rebuilt anyway.
The other platform people weigh against Squarespace, and the only one Wix built an importer for.
Protecting the rankings through a move is the floor. This is the work that grows them afterwards.
