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:
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 .
Content
Before beginning this guide, you need the following:
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:
What can be exported:
Follow these steps to start the export procedure:
When the download is complete, proceed to the next step.
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.
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.
IMPORTANT: Write down your user name and administrator password, because you will need them to access the WordPress admin area .
In this step, you will import content to WordPress. Follow the steps below to proceed:
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.
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 :
When the import is complete, visit the WordPress site again and check posts with images.
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:
/ Superblog / year%% /% monthnum% / day%% /% postname% /
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.
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 .
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!