What You Can Take With You When You Leave Squarespace

A Squarespace export is a single .xml file aimed at WordPress, and the gap between what people assume it contains and what it actually contains is the most expensive misunderstanding on this platform. This entry is the inventory: every item that travels, every item that does not, and what the difference means in practice.

It is deliberately not a migration guide. The question here is narrower and comes first — before anyone tells you how to move, it is worth knowing exactly what there is to move.

What the file contains

Squarespace produces one .xml file in WordPress import format. According to the company's own documentation, it carries layout pages, one blog page with all of its posts and up to a thousand comments per post, text blocks, image blocks, the text from embed and Instagram blocks with minimal structure, and gallery pages including York project pages on version 7.0.

In plain terms: your writing comes with you. If your site is principally a blog and some text pages, the export does most of what you would want. Everything below is what happens to the rest.

What stays behind

The list of exclusions is longer than the list of inclusions and it is published by Squarespace rather than inferred by us.

• Other page types entirely: album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio and store pages
• Content in page-specific headers, footers and sidebars
• Any blog beyond the first — multiple blog pages do not all export
• Dropdowns in your navigation
• Audio blocks, video blocks and product blocks
• Drafts of anything
• Style settings — your typography, colour and spacing choices
• Custom CSS, in its entirety

Read that list against what a real site is made of. A service business with a portfolio, a store, a calendar of events and a carefully tuned style palette is exporting its blog posts and its body copy, and leaving everything else where it stands.

One more nuance worth recording: if your site runs more than one blog page or more than one products page, only one of each is covered by a single export. Sites that grew organically into several parallel blogs — a news feed, a case-study feed, a notes section — discover this at exactly the wrong moment.

The sentence that matters most

Squarespace states plainly that it is not possible to export content from one Squarespace site and import it into another, because the platform is not optimised for importing content between sites.

That deserves a moment, because it surprises even experienced users. The export is a one-way door aimed at a different platform. Consolidating two Squarespace sites into one, or splitting one into two, is a manual copy-and-paste job regardless of how much you are paying.

The images problem

Image blocks appear in the export, but what travels is a reference to the image on Squarespace's content network rather than the file itself. The practical consequence is that a migrated site can look complete on day one and quietly break later if the original site is taken down.

If you are ever likely to move, download your media library separately and keep it somewhere you control. That is five minutes of work now and the difference between a migration and an archaeology project later.

What this actually costs you

Not your content. Your content is the part that exports, and it is also the part that took the longest to produce. What you lose is the build: the layout decisions, the styling, the navigation structure, the store configuration, the custom code somebody wrote for you.

For a site built in a weekend that is a weekend. For a site with three years of accumulated refinement, a designer's custom CSS and a configured shop, it is a project with a real budget attached. The honest way to think about it is that Squarespace design work is a rental rather than an asset, and the rent is fine as long as you knew.

This is the single largest debit in our Squarespace review, and it is the reason we mention portability on a page about templates and again on a page about payments. It is one constraint that touches everything.

What about the SEO you built up?

Rankings are attached to URLs, not to content, so the part of a move that most often goes wrong is the address structure rather than the text. Your page titles, meta descriptions and URL slugs are visible in the Squarespace admin and can be recorded by hand, but they are not carried across by the export in a form another platform will read.

The practical mitigation is to write down your URL structure before you touch anything — every page address, every blog post slug, every redirect you have already set up. That list is what lets you map old addresses to new ones on the other side. Without it you are reconstructing your own site map from a search engine's index, which is as unpleasant as it sounds.

How to reduce the damage before you need to

1. Keep your writing somewhere outside the platform. If your posts start life in a document or a plain-text file, the export barely matters.
2. Download the media library periodically rather than trusting the references in an export file.
3. Keep a copy of any custom CSS a designer writes for you, with notes on what it does. It will not export and it is the cheapest thing to lose.
4. Record your site structure — pages, navigation, redirects — in a simple list. Rebuilding from a map is far faster than rebuilding from memory.
5. Keep your domain registration independent of the platform where you can. A domain you control is the one piece of the setup that is genuinely portable.

Is this a reason not to use Squarespace?

For most people, no. The realistic alternative is a self-hosted build with its own maintenance burden, and plenty of sites will happily run here for a decade without anyone wanting to leave. Lock-in only costs you if you exercise it.

It is a reason not to use Squarespace if you already suspect you will outgrow it — if you are prototyping something you intend to move onto a custom stack, or if platform independence is a stated requirement. In that case you are paying for design convenience you will throw away, and the disqualifying cases are set out in who Squarespace is not for.