Squarespace
The export carries the words and leaves the website
Squarespace has an export button, which puts it ahead of several platforms on this list. Read what it produces and the advantage thins: no store pages, no portfolio pages, no second blog, no style settings, no custom CSS1.
The interesting part is that the same things go missing when you move from Squarespace to Squarespace. That is not neglect. It is how the platform is built.
Squarespace’s own two lists
What is in the box, and what is not
Both columns come from the same support article, so every line is checkable against the vendor rather than against me1. The export is a WordPress XML file.
Comes with you
Layout pages
One blog page, with its posts and up to 1,000 comments per post
One. If you have a blog and a news section, pick.
Text blocks and image blocks
Gallery pages, on version 7.0 only
Text from embed and Instagram blocks, with minimum structure
Squarespace's phrase, not mine.
Stays behind
Store pages
An entire shop exports as nothing.
Portfolio pages
The page type Squarespace's core audience builds on.
Album, cover, index, info and calendar pages
More than one blog page
Content in page-specific headers, footers and sidebars
Product blocks, video blocks, audio blocks, dropdowns
Style settings and custom CSS
The design. The reason most people chose Squarespace.
Drafts
For a writer with one blog and a few pages, what comes with you is most of the site and the export does its job. For a shop, a portfolio, or anyone whose site is the design, what stays behind is the site.
The corroborating evidence
It loses things moving to itself
The obvious reply to the list above is that exports are always an afterthought. Here is why that explanation does not hold. This is Squarespace’s own tool, moving a Squarespace site from version 7.0 to 7.1, with the whole database on hand2.
- Album pages
- Squarespace's wording is that they “will disappear after the update”.
- SEO titles and descriptions on index sub-pages
- Rankings are built on these. They do not come across, and nothing warns you afterwards.
- Cover page audio layouts, and videos on gallery pages
- Media that was placed rather than uploaded as a file.
- Anything past 150 pages
- The tool is capped. Larger sites delete pages first or do it by hand.
And once you publish the update you cannot go back to 7.02. A one-way move, inside one product, that drops content the vendor itself stored.
The diagnosis
There is no seam to separate along
Most website software keeps two things apart: the content, sitting in a database as fields, and the template that renders it. Moving is possible because the seam is real. You take the fields and build a new template around them.
Squarespace does not work that way, and that is precisely why people love it. You are not filling in a form and hoping; you are arranging the page. A portfolio page is not a list of projects rendered by a layout, it is an arrangement. So is a store page. So is the index page with the sub-page titles on it.
An arrangement has no fields to hand over. That is one sentence explaining both lists on this page — why your shop exports as nothing, and why Squarespace’s own engineers could not move your album pages either.
It also means the thing to weigh is not whether Squarespace is good. It is how much of your business now lives inside an arrangement that only exists there, and whether you are comfortable with that number continuing to grow.
Credit where it is due
The most accessible builder measured
Squarespace’s median Lighthouse accessibility score is 95, first of the four hosted builders measured for this site and 2 points clear of the next5. Accessibility reflects the markup a platform emits, so that is a real compliment about real engineering, and it is the reason a Squarespace site usually needs less remedial work than its competitors’.
The templates are good. The editor is good. If you are one person with a brochure site or a portfolio, you want it to look considered, and you do not want to hire anybody, Squarespace is frequently the right answer and I have told people so.
It is not the best on everything, and the heading above is deliberately narrow. Wix takes the Lighthouse SEO median at 96 to Squarespace’s 92, and on Core Web Vitals Squarespace comes third: 72% of its origins pass, at a median 3 MB a page, behind Wix and GoDaddy and ahead of Weebly on 43%5.
I am not going to turn that into a verdict, because the Next.js population sits at 35% and I would be quoting a number that indicts my own stack harder than it indicts this one. Performance is not the reason to leave Squarespace, and anyone telling you otherwise is reaching.
Neither is the platform going anywhere. Squarespace runs 2.4% of all websites and 3.6% of those with a known CMS6, which is a large, healthy, well-supported ecosystem. This is not a thinning-platform argument.
One detail in the pricing
You pay extra for the customisation that cannot leave
| Plan | Annual billing | Store fee | Digital & memberships | Custom CSS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $19/mo | 2% | 7% | Not available |
| Core | $29/mo | 0% | 5% | Included |
| Plus | $49/mo | 0% | 1% | Included |
| Advanced | $99/mo | 0% | 0% | Included |
Read the last column against the manifest. Custom CSS and code injection start at Core3,4, so the styling that makes a Squarespace site look like yours rather than like the template is something you pay a tier to unlock — and it is on the list of things the export does not carry1. You rent the part you paid extra for.
The other column worth a look is the fourth. Basic charges 7% on digital content and memberships on top of card processing3. On $2,000 a month of course sales that is $140 a month, more than any plan on this table costs. If you sell memberships from Basic, moving up a tier pays for itself before anything else does.
The export still gets used, because for blog posts it is the cleanest source available. But it is the second step, not the first. The site is crawled first: every page, every URL, every image at full resolution, including all the page types the XML file omits.
Products come out of the commerce exporter, which does work properly and is separate from the site export. Every indexed URL is mapped one-to-one to its replacement before launch, which matters here because Squarespace URL patterns are distinctive and a blanket redirect would flatten them.
The design is rebuilt rather than moved, and I would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise. That is the real cost of leaving Squarespace and the reason a quote for this is higher than for a plain template site. It is also the part most people actually want, since the usual reason for the conversation is that the template has started to feel like a template.
The result is a Next.js site on Vercel, and the thing worth noticing about it is the seam. Your posts, products and pages sit in content files; the design reads them and renders them. Change the design and the content is untouched. Take the content elsewhere and it comes away whole, because it was never welded to a layout in the first place. That is the property Squarespace trades away for its editor, and getting it back is most of the point of the exercise.
It runs from a repository you own, hosted and secured here rather than by you. Step-by-step, the process is on the migration page; a site that has to do things rather than say them turns into development work.
The obvious replies
Starting with the export button
It solves part of it. The export produces a WordPress XML file containing your layout pages, one blog with its posts, and your text and images. That is genuinely useful and it is more than some platforms give you. What it does not contain is store pages, portfolio pages, every blog after the first, your style settings and your custom CSS. So the export carries the words and leaves the website. For a text-heavy site that is most of the job; for a shop or a portfolio it is close to nothing.
Because it is the same problem, not a separate one. Squarespace's own update tool is capped at 150 pages, cannot be reversed once published, makes album pages disappear, and does not carry SEO titles and descriptions on index sub-pages. If a lossless move were possible, the company with the database would be the one able to do it. That it cannot is the clearest evidence that pages here are not stored as content plus a template, but as one thing.
No, and this page would be dishonest if it implied that. Squarespace has the best median accessibility score of the four hosted builders measured for this site, its templates are genuinely well-made, and for a brochure site or a portfolio run by one person who wants it to look good without hiring anyone, it is often the right answer and I will say so. The case for leaving is not that it is bad. It is that what you build there is difficult to take anywhere else, and that becomes a problem only when you need to.
On the Basic plan there is a 2% fee on store sales and 7% on digital content and memberships, on top of card processing. On $2,000 a month of course or membership sales that 7% is $140 a month, which is more than any Squarespace plan costs, so moving up to Core pays for itself immediately at that volume. The fees go to zero on Advanced. Worth checking which side of that line you are on, because plenty of people are paying the Basic fee without noticing.
Not if the URLs are mapped. Rankings attach to addresses, so every indexed URL on the current site is crawled and pointed at its replacement before launch rather than after. This matters more than usual coming off Squarespace, because the platform's own version move is documented to drop SEO titles and descriptions on some pages, and a site that has already been through that may have gaps worth fixing during the rebuild rather than faithfully reproducing.
Yes, usually, and the manifest on this page is the reason. Where a platform hands over structured content, a migration is mostly plumbing. Here the pages have to be recovered by crawling, and the design is rebuilt rather than moved, so more of the work is actual design work. A brochure site or portfolio sits in the $2,500 to $15,000 web design range; if Squarespace Commerce is where your revenue comes from, the destination is Shopify rather than a custom site and the range is $5,000 to $15,000. Either way it is three to six weeks, weighted by how many store, portfolio and index pages you have rather than by page count alone.
Sources
Four of the six are Squarespace’s own documentation, which is deliberate: an argument about what a platform cannot do should be made from that platform’s manual, not from a review site.
- 1
Exporting your site — Squarespace. Squarespace's own list of what does and does not leave with you. Checked 21 September 2026.
- 2
Moving from Squarespace version 7.0 to version 7.1 — Squarespace. The page cap, what disappears, and that the move cannot be undone. Checked 21 September 2026.
- 3
Pricing — Squarespace. Plan prices, transaction fees, and which tier unlocks CSS. Read from the live page, 21 September 2026.
- 4
Customize parts of your site with code injection — Squarespace. Which plans may add custom code at all. Checked 21 September 2026.
- 5
Core Web Vitals Technology Report — HTTP Archive. Field performance and Lighthouse medians, from real Chrome users. August 2026 data, read 21 September 2026.
- 6
Usage statistics and market share of content management systems — W3Techs. Platform share of all websites, surveyed daily and vendor-independent. 21 September 2026.
Current to September 2026. Prices are annual billing; monthly costs more. Squarespace improves its export from time to time, so check the article before you take the manifest as final — and tell me if it has grown, because that changes the quote in your favour.
Send the address and your page types
Count your store, portfolio and index pages. That count is what the export cannot give back, so it is also most of what the quote is made of. A five-page blog sits at the cheap end of this and I would rather tell you that than discover it halfway through.