How to migrate from Squarespace to WordPress

You have created a site on Squarespace, but decided it’s time to move from Squarespace to WordPress because it is a more flexible platform?

Many novice webmasters use Squarespace for its first projects. It’s no surprise, Squarespace is a great tool for building a website easy and innovative design. He also takes care of web hosting and domain registration so you can focus on building your site. Your learning curve is not as steep compared to WordPress. However, while Squarespace is great for basic sites, it has some limitations:

• e-commerce integration very limited;
• difficult to expand functionality;
• limited themes and customization.

Fortunately, the migration to Squarespace WordPress is easy. In this tutorial, you will learn how to migrate your Squarespace site for WordPress.

Note: This tutorial shows you how to move to self-hosted WordPress platform. The steps provided below are not suitable if you are hosting your blog on WordPress.com .

What will you need

Before beginning this guide, you need the following:

• Access to Squarespace account;
• Account Hostinger .

Step 1 – Export content Squarespace

First of all, you need to export your Squarespace site data. Unfortunately, you will not be able to export all that you have automatically. This means that you will have to copy / paste parts of your site to WordPress manually. list of contents that can not be exported:

• index pages, event, album and product;
• folders;
• Blocks of audio and video products;
• style changes and custom CSS.

What can be exported:

• Blog (just a blog);
• basic and gallery pages;
• blocks of text and image;
• Text embedded blocks.

Follow these steps to start the export procedure:

1. Sign in to your Squarespace account .
2. On the left menu, click Settings .
   
3. In Website , click Advanced .
   
4. Now click Import  / Export .
   
5. How do you want to export the site, click on Export .
   
6. In the dialog box that opened, you can select the platform for which you want to export your website. The only option now is WordPress , but this is exactly what you need, then click it.
   
7. Once the file download  export is created, a new Download option appears. To download it to your computer, click the button.
   

When the download is complete, proceed to the next step.

Step 2 – Pointing space domain WordPress

If you are using a custom domain name (yourdomain.com) with Squarespace site and want to continue using it with the new WordPress site, you need to change the details of the DNS.

The process of changing DNS depends on where your domain name is registered. If the domain name registrar for Squarespace, the details of the DNS should be changed in the control panel.

See here .

IMPORTANT: It may take up to 48 hours for DNS to propagate completely around the world. During propagation, you may not access your site.

Step 3 – Squarespace content import WordPress

Step 3.1 – Installing WordPress

As this tutorial shows you how to migrate to WordPress, you need to have this installed CMS. The steps below show how easy it is to install WordPress in Hostinger. If you already have WordPress and is ready to import content Squarespace, go to Step 3.2.

1. WordPress can be installed manually  or by using the Autoinstaller  which can be found in your control panel in the section Website . In this tutorial, the Autoinstaller  will be used because it takes less time.
2. After clicking the Autoinstaller , a page with all automatic facilities available will open. You can scroll and find WordPress  or just type the name into the search bar and click it.
3. Fill in your details and click Install .
4. a message requesting that you update the page appears. Wait a few minutes and refresh. Now you will see that WordPress has been successfully installed.

IMPORTANT: Write down your user name and administrator password, because you will need them to access the WordPress admin area .

Step 3.2 – Importing Content

In this step, you will import content to WordPress. Follow the steps below to proceed:

1. Log in area of the WordPress admin . You can do this by adding / wp-admin / to the end of your domain.
2. Go to Tools > Import . In the list of platforms, you will not see Squarespace as it exports content in an XML file format compatible with WordPress . Because of this, you must click on Install WordPress . When the installation is complete, press the button Enable .
3. Select the export file ( Select file ) and click Upload file  and import the button.
4. Once the file has been uploaded, you will see a screen where you can choose whether to import the author, create a new user, or assign an existing user. You can select any suitable option for you. Also, you can choose to import files and attachments or not. Press Send  when ready.
   

IMPORTANT: If the import expires or return errors, try to uncheck the Download file and import file attachments . Depending on the size of your Squarespace account and the hosting server configuration, this option may prevent the import is completed successfully.

After the import is complete, you will see a green success message. Now you can review your WordPress site and make sure that all the necessary content has been successfully imported.

Step 4 – Import images of Squarespace for WordPress

If you found your sites, you may have noticed that some images are still hosted on Squarespace. This is normal. Sometimes WordPress importer can not import images automatically from Squarespace. This means that you will have to add them manually or using the plugin Import External Images :

1. Install and activate the plugin Import External Images  in WordPress. If you do not know how to install WordPress plugins, you can check out [this tutorial] (/ tutorials / wordpress / how-to-install-wordpress-plugins.
2. After the installation is complete, click Media >  Import Pictures .
3. In Process all publications  image list your site will appear. Click Import Pictures .

When the import is complete, visit the WordPress site again and check posts with images.

Step 5 – Fixing links and creating redirects

Step 5.1 – Fixing Permalinks in WordPress

This step is vital if you do not want to lose your ranking in search engines and inbound traffic.

The Squarespace uses a different link structure of WordPress. Migrating from WordPress without changing permalinks will result in visitors getting the 404 error pages. Let’s say your blog URL in your Squarespace site looks like this:

http://www.yourname.squarespace.com/superblog/2017/1/2/post-about-kittens

Or that you were using a custom domain name:

http://wwww.yourdomain.com/superblog/2017/1/2/post-about-kitten

In this step, you will learn how to make the link structure of WordPress the same as you had in Squarespace:

1. Go to Settings > Permalinks  and select Day and name  for this option is the most similar to Squarespace URL structure.
2. You’ll notice that the value in the Custom structure  has changed.
3. Add your blog prefix in front of it so it would look like this:
   

   / Superblog / year%% /% monthnum% / day%% /% postname% /

4. Press Save Changes  at the bottom.

Step 5.2 – Creating Redirects in Squarespace

Unlike custom domain name, you can not point subdomain Squarespace (http://www.yourname.squarespace.com) for WordPress. Without proper redirection, all inbound traffic and links pointing to the subdomain would be lost. The Squarespace has a great tool called mappings URLs  for this. When using URL mappings , you can create 301 redirects and 302 and direct all traffic to the new site http://www.yourname.squarespace.com WordPress. A 301 redirect means that the URL has permanently moved, while a 302 redirect is a temporary change in URL. In general, it is best to use 301 redirects because they pass SEO value better than 302.

Access the Squarespace’s Admin panel and navigate to the Settings  -> Advanced  -> Mappings URL .

The Squarespace allows you to create redirects easily. For example, if you want to redirect all your posts in WordPress, use the following syntax:

/ Blog / [name] -> 301 http://yourdomain.com/

[Name]  variable allows you to redirect several pages with only one line of code.

Thus, all traffic coming to http://www.yourname.squarespace.com/blog/post-name will be redirected to your new domain WordPress. You can use the same syntax to create links to your product pages and events. If you want to create a redirect to a single page, use the following syntax:

/ Yourpage -> http://seudominio.com.br/seu page 301

The variable [name]  was not used here because we wanted to redirect one page.

When you finish creating redirects, press the button Save  at the top of the page.

This step ensures that your visitors and search engine crawlers can access your blog posts in WordPress. However, if you had a lot of custom pages in your Squarespace, you would want to take further and install All 404 Redirect to plugin Homepage . When the installation is complete, navigate to Settings  -> All 404 Redirect to Homepage  and press the Update Options button.

Now all users who hit 404 were not found page will be redirected to your home page.

Step 6 – Introduction to WordPress

Now, when your Squarespace content was migrated to WordPress you can begin to change the look of your site. WordPress has thousands of different themes to choose from. Both free and paid themes can be easily  installed on WordPress .

Once you have found the theme, you can customize by changing colors, menus, background, etc. This can be done in appearance  -> customization .

You want to extend the functionality of your WordPress site? That’s easy, you’re just a few clicks of thousands of WordPress plugins. See our detailed guide if you need help to install WordPress plugins .

You can easily set in eCommerce WordPress using Woocommerce . This eCommerce plugin is powerful and lets you choose from several different payment gateways, shipping methods and is easy to configure and administer.

WordPress has a here .

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to migrate all of Squarespace for WordPress. Also, you learned how to edit the permalinks structure of WordPress and redirect the subdomain Squarespace for WordPress.

As mentioned earlier, not all content of the Squarespace can be imported automatically. Your video and audio files, and e-commerce product pages should be imported manually. Depending on the size of your Squarespace site, it may take a long time. But still worth it as WordPress is a powerful and flexible platform.

Meet our custom web hosting for WordPress and now start your journey of success on the Internet with Hostinger!