WordPress to Squarespace: Using the Importer Properly

Going from WordPress to Squarespace is one of the few builder migrations with an importer built for the job rather than bolted on afterwards. Squarespace reads WordPress exports natively, alongside Blogger and Tumblr, and the list of what it carries is longer than most people assume.

It also has four specific limits that are documented, easy to trip over, and capable of silently mangling a large archive. Read them before you export anything, because two of them are cheaper to work around in advance than to repair afterwards.

What Squarespace will actually read

Squarespace’s content importer accepts WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and Squarespace 5. Products come in separately, from Shopify, Etsy, Big Cartel or a .csv file, and contacts from a .csv.

Two technical constraints apply before anything else. The export has to come from WordPress 3.2 or later, and Squarespace states that it is not possible to import .xml files generated by other services — only genuine WordPress exports. So a file that a third-party tool produced “in WordPress format” may or may not be accepted, and you find out by trying.

The import is also a one-time operation, not a sync. Anything you publish on WordPress after the export does not appear on Squarespace.

What comes across

Squarespace publishes the list, and it is worth reading in full rather than assuming the usual minimum. The importer brings across attachments, blog pages, blog posts and authors, categories, individual images, site pages and tags — and comments, which most builder migrations lose entirely.

That is a genuinely substantial import. Post dates and authorship survive, which means your archive arrives as an archive rather than as two hundred posts all dated today.

What does not

The exclusions are equally specific. Squarespace states that it will not import content from plugins, gallery images, image captions, images sitting in your media library that are not attached to a post or page, or your style and CSS.

Two of those deserve emphasis.

Content from plugins is a larger category than it sounds. Anything on your WordPress site rendered by a shortcode, a page builder, a form plugin, a table plugin or a slider is plugin content. It is not in the import in any usable form, and on a site built with a page builder that can be most of what a visitor sees. Check a few of your most important pages in the WordPress editor: if what you see there is a wall of shortcodes rather than text, plan on rebuilding those pages by hand.

Image captions going missing is a small thing that is very annoying at scale. If captions carry meaning on your site — credits, product details, alt information you rely on — copy them out before you import.

Squarespace also instructs you to disable your WordPress plugins before exporting, because they may interfere with the import. That is a five-minute job that prevents a class of mysterious failure.

The four limits that bite

File size. Squarespace warns that an export from a site with numerous pages or posts may simply be too large for the importer, and recommends the workaround directly: export several smaller .xml files covering specific date ranges and upload them one at a time. If you have a big archive, do this from the start rather than after a failure.

One hundred blocks per page. This is the one that does real damage. Squarespace documents that its pages and posts can hold around a hundred blocks, and that a page or post with more than a hundred images will lose images when you next edit it. Not at import — at edit. So a long, image-heavy post can appear to have imported perfectly and then shed half its pictures the first time you fix a typo in it. If you have posts like that, split them or rebuild them deliberately.

Tag and category lengths. Tags are cut off at eighty characters and categories at twenty-five. Long taxonomy names arrive truncated. Tidy them on the WordPress side first if they matter to your navigation.

Authors. Blog authors import as basic author records. Squarespace notes they need manual conversion to contributor accounts before those people can actually do anything, so a multi-author blog has an administrative step waiting for it after the content lands.

Running the export

On self-hosted WordPress, go to Tools, then Export, and choose all content. WordPress produces a WXR file — an .xml containing your posts, pages, terms, comments and custom fields. It does not contain your images; those are referenced, and the receiving end fetches them.

Which is why the old site has to stay up. Do not take WordPress offline, change its DNS or cancel the hosting before the import has finished pulling media. This is the single most common way a WordPress-to-Squarespace move ends with a library full of broken images.

If you are on WordPress.com rather than self-hosted, the export lives in the site tools rather than under Tools, but produces the same format.

Doing the import

In Squarespace, open Settings, then Import & Export Content, choose WordPress, and upload the file.

Large imports take time and look like nothing is happening. Leave it. Re-running an import that was quietly still working is how you end up with every post twice.

When it finishes, audit before you celebrate:

• Post count on both sides. If Squarespace has fewer, something was dropped.
• Publication dates on the oldest and newest posts.
• Ten posts opened at random, checking images, formatting and internal links.
• Your most important page, in full, against the original.
• Categories and tags, for truncation.

Fixing what arrives imperfectly

Expect three categories of repair work.

Formatting. WordPress content arrives as Squarespace blocks, and complex layouts flatten. Multi-column sections, custom HTML and anything a page builder produced will need re-laying-out.

Internal links. Every link in your imported posts still points at your old WordPress URL structure. Those need updating to the new paths — a find-and-replace on your content if the platform allows it, otherwise post by post. Leave them and every internal link on your site depends on a redirect, which is fragile and slow.

Missing media. Gallery images and unattached library images did not come. Re-upload what you need.

Redirects, because every URL changes

WordPress permalinks and Squarespace paths do not match, so every address on your site is changing. Build the two-column map before you import — old path, new path — and load it into Squarespace’s URL Mappings panel under Settings, Advanced, one rule per line in the form /old -> /new 301.

The method for collecting every URL is in build the redirect map. Do not skip it because WordPress sites often have the deepest archives and the most inbound links of anything on this site.

Before you cancel the hosting

Keep WordPress running for a few weeks after launch. It is still the source your images came from, the reference for anything that imported oddly, and the fallback if the new site turns out to have a problem you cannot fix quickly.

Confirm the audit list, confirm sample redirects, confirm forms and email, and then wind it down. The wider sequence is on the plan for switching website builders, and the reasoning behind the overlap is in run both sites in parallel.