How to Migrate From Squarespace to WordPress Without Losing Rankings
This is a move between two different kinds of system rather than between two similar products. One is closed and managed for you, the other is open and assembled from parts. The export problem, the address problem and the maintenance question all follow from that single difference.
Why People Make This Move
Businesses making this move usually have sound reasons for it. It is worth setting those out properly rather than treating the decision as something to be talked out of.
Outgrowing what a managed system allows. The commonest reason.
A business needing functionality the platform does not offer, else needing to change something the platform does not expose. That is a real ceiling and hitting it is a sign of growth rather than a mistake in the original choice.
Wanting control over the underlying site. The technical reason.
Direct access to how things are built, hosted and served. For a business with technical staff or a development partner, that access is worth having, because it turns requests into tasks they can simply do.
A specific requirement. The narrow one.
Something the business needs that only exists on the other system, whether an integration, a workflow or a particular kind of functionality. That is a straightforward reason and it does not require any wider argument about platforms.
What this page assumes. That the decision is made.
If somebody wants to move, the useful thing is helping them do it without losing anything. We build on the platform being left, which is exactly why this page argues no case in either direction.
What Actually Changes
The move is between a system where decisions are made for you and one where they are made by you. Every practical consequence on this page traces back to that.
Who decides how the site is built. The core change.
On a managed system, the structure and much of the behaviour are set by the platform. On an assembled one, somebody chooses each piece. Neither arrangement is better. They suit different situations and different businesses. The same business can be suited by different ones at different stages of its life.
Who is responsible for keeping it running. The change people underestimate.
Hosting, updates, security and compatibility between components move from the platform to whoever now owns the site. That is block five and it deserves its own space.
What the site is made of. One thing against many.
A managed platform is a single product. An assembled site is a collection of parts from different sources that have to work together and keep working together, which is simultaneously what makes it flexible and what makes it require attention.
What none of this touches. Search performance.
Neither arrangement is inherently better in search. Sites on both do extremely well and sites on both do poorly. Anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.
Content Export Is The First Problem
Getting content out of a managed platform is more limited than getting it out of an open one. That is a characteristic of closed systems generally rather than a fault of any particular product.
Why the limitation exists. The system holds it in its own way.
A managed platform stores content in whatever structure suits it. An export has to translate that into something another system understands. Some of it translates cleanly and some of it does not.
What tends to come across. The words.
Text and basic structure usually survive. Somebody opening a few pages afterwards sees something that looks broadly correct, which is why the scale of the remaining work is frequently discovered late rather than early.
What tends not to. The presentation and the attachments.
Layout arrangements built with the platform's own tools, image handling, descriptions written for search results and anything held in a feature specific to that system. Those are the parts a visual check will not miss and a content export frequently will.
What follows. Budget for rebuilding, not just transferring.
Pages frequently need reassembling rather than importing. That is the largest hidden cost in this direction and it belongs in the estimate from the start, since discovering it halfway through leaves nobody with a good option.
Address Structures Differ
The two systems construct addresses differently, particularly for anything dated or categorised. Assume every address changes unless somebody demonstrates otherwise.
Where the differences bite hardest. Anything organised.
Articles, news, dated content and anything grouped into categories. Each system has its own convention for expressing that in an address. The conventions do not match, so a site with years of dated content has years of addresses to map.
Why it is not usually preventable. Both have defaults.
The destination system can be configured to produce various patterns. Getting it to reproduce the original exactly is sometimes possible, frequently not. It is worth asking whether it can before assuming it cannot.
What that makes this project. A mapping exercise.
Every page, every article, every category page and every leftover address from anything earlier. That is the largest task in the migration and the one most likely to be underestimated, because it produces nothing anybody can look at while it is being done.
Where the detail sits. Its own guide.
How to build and test the map is in URL mapping for a site migration.
What You Gain And What You Take On
This is a trade rather than an upgrade. Both halves of it are real. Anybody presenting it as purely one or the other has an interest in the answer.
What you gain. Control, genuinely.
Direct access to how the site is built and served. The ability to add functionality nobody anticipated. Freedom from what any single company decides to offer. For a business that has hit a ceiling, those are not small things.
What you take on. Responsibility, also genuinely.
Hosting to arrange, updates to apply, security to attend to and compatibility between components to maintain. None of that was previously your concern and all of it now is.
Why the second half gets underestimated. It arrives later.
The control is available on day one and the maintenance obligation shows up over the following years, gradually, usually when somebody is busy with something else. Nothing about it appears during the project, which is when the decision gets made.
The question that settles it. Who does the maintaining.
A business with technical staff or a development partner is well placed. One without either is taking on work nobody has been assigned. That is worth answering before the move rather than after.
Common Mistakes In This Direction
Four things go wrong repeatedly on this particular move. All four are avoidable with a decision made early rather than a correction made late.
Treating it as a content transfer. The scoping error.
Scoped as an import when it is closer to a rebuild, because the layouts frequently do not survive. That gap appears mid-project, when the budget is already committed and the launch date has been announced internally.
Letting the address pattern default. The largest technical risk.
The destination system takes whatever pattern it is set to. The setting gets chosen during technical setup, before anybody has raised search. It changes every address at once.
Losing the search descriptions. The invisible loss.
Descriptions written for search results are held separately from content and frequently do not travel. Nothing reports their absence and nobody sees it on a page.
Nobody owning maintenance afterwards. The organisational one.
The build finishes, the developer moves on and updates stop being applied. The site works for a year and then does not, at which point nobody currently involved knows how it was assembled. Our platform-specific guide is WordPress CMS migration SEO.
Moving The Other Way
Plenty of businesses move in the opposite direction. It is a different set of problems rather than the same ones backwards. It deserves covering properly rather than as an afterthought.
Why businesses go this way. Usually maintenance.
An assembled site that nobody has maintained, where components have aged and the person who built it is long gone. Moving to a managed system removes that burden entirely, which for a business without technical staff is the whole point. That is the mirror image of block five and it is an equally sound reason.
What is easier in this direction. The export.
Getting content out of an open system is generally more straightforward. The starting point is more accessible, which reverses the block three problem.
What is harder. The address structure and the functionality.
The destination prescribes its address pattern, so preservation is frequently impossible. And anything the old site did through added components may not have an equivalent, which has to be established before committing rather than discovered during the build.
What is identical. Everything that matters.
The mapping, the redirects, the pre-migration record and the launch checks are the same in both directions, per types of site migration.
What To Check After
The general launch checks apply. Four things are worth verifying specifically because this is a move between different kinds of system.
That content survived in full. Against the record.
Comparing pages with the pre-migration crawl rather than looking at them, because shorter pages read as perfectly fine on their own and nothing flags a missing section.
That the address pattern is what was agreed. Not what defaulted.
The highest value check here, since it affects everything at once.
That search descriptions exist. They frequently do not.
Held separately from content on both systems and easily lost in translation between them, with no error produced when they go.
That nothing is telling crawlers to stay away. Within the hour.
Whichever direction you moved. The full series is on the website migration guide.
A trade,
not an
upgrade.
The project scoped as a rebuild rather than a transfer because layouts rarely survive, the address pattern agreed before technical setup chooses one, the search descriptions checked because nothing reports their absence, maintenance given an owner before the move rather than after, with no case argued in either direction.
What a migration engagement covers:
A migration is a one-off project rather than a monthly service, so it is scoped and quoted against the size of the site and how much is changing at once.
Every guide.
One practice.
What a migration is, the types, when to do it, planning, the checklist, auditing, mapping, redirects, internal links, tags, downtime, crawling, structured data, performance, notifying, monitoring, recovery and the mistakes.
