What the export gives you, and what it quietly omits
Squarespace produces a WordPress-format file, which genuinely helps and does most of the boring work.
It brings across blog posts, basic pages, and the text inside them. It leaves behind your template and every layout decision in it. It also leaves product and event content, album and gallery pages, most block-level formatting, and any page built from blocks it has no equivalent for. So somebody rebuilds the presentation layer regardless. The export saves you retyping rather than saving you the project.
A Squarespace move is therefore a rebuild with a head start. Quotes that treat it as a file import describe a different job from the one you need.
A Squarespace to WordPress migration lives or dies on addresses
In a Squarespace to WordPress migration the URL patterns do not match WordPress defaults. Blog posts in particular carry date or collection segments, and WordPress will not reproduce those unless somebody tells it to.
Every one of those addresses needs a redirect to its closest real equivalent. The map has to come from a crawl of the live site rather than from the export file, because the export does not list everything reachable. Two mistakes recur. First, mapping only the pages someone remembered, which strands older posts. Second, pointing everything at the homepage, which search engines treat as a missing page and which strands the visitor just as effectively.
Squarespace also holds your domain in many setups. So the order of the DNS move against the redirect setup matters. Get that order wrong and you open a window where neither platform answers correctly. Google’s site move guidance covers how to change addresses without losing standing.
What else is rebuilt
- The template. Somebody recreates layouts, navigation and responsive behaviour as a WordPress theme. Nothing transfers.
- Forms and scheduling. Squarespace forms and any booking feature are platform features. We rebuild them, then test with a real submission that someone confirms arriving.
- Commerce, when present. Products, variants and order history need deliberate handling, and the checkout has to work end to end before launch rather than after.
- Titles and descriptions. A person wrote them and the old platform stored them. WordPress regenerates them from headings unless you carry them across on purpose.
- Analytics and search console. Both need reinstalling and reverifying, so you can see how the move went.
How this is scoped and sold
At the professional tier, and deliberately not on price.
Cheaper options exist and some are legitimate. Automated services move the export for very little. Managed hosts migrate free when you buy hosting. Productised agency offers sit in between. For a simple blog with a stock template and no forms, one of those may suit you exactly, and we would rather say so than sell you something larger.
What they leave out is the redirect map, the post-launch error watch, and somebody owning the domain and DNS sequencing so no window opens where your site answers wrongly. That is the work here, so the headline number is not the axis to compare on. We confirm scope and price in writing before implementation, exclusions named. The full ladder, including the options cheaper than us, sits in what builder migrations actually cost. Our pricing approach explains why no figure appears here.
When to stay on Squarespace
Squarespace maintains itself, and that is worth real money to an owner with no technical staff.
Consider a small site where nothing blocks you and nobody wants to take on updates, backups and monitoring. Moving would trade a solved problem for an unsolved one. So the honest recommendation is to stay, and we will make it.
Moving earns its cost when the platform blocks something you need, when you want your content in a portable form, or when you accept the maintenance obligation because the flexibility is worth it. Make that last decision consciously. The same question from the other direction is a useful check on it.
Start with a diagnosis
Send the site address, whether it includes a store or scheduling, and where the domain is registered. That is enough to scope the move and the DNS sequencing together.
You get the address plan, the rebuild inventory, the risks and the price in writing. Our published scope, how the process runs, and the migration overview sit alongside it. Afterwards WordPress does not maintain itself, so ongoing care belongs in the plan from the start. To begin, start a diagnosis. Meanwhile what actually breaks in a migration is worth reading while you compare providers.