Wix to Squarespace, step by step — and why it is a rebuild

Moving from Wix to Squarespace is the most-searched builder migration there is, and almost every guide to it buries the one sentence that decides how long your week will be. Here it is first: Squarespace cannot import a Wix site. Its own help documentation, updated for the current version, states that it is not possible to import your previous site’s layout, design, fonts or other content, and lists exactly what it can read — pages and posts from WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, and products from Shopify, Etsy, Big Cartel or a .csv file. Wix is not on the reading list, and Wix does not write a file it could read.

That is not a criticism of either company so much as a fact about the shape of the job. You are going to retype your site. The rest of this page is about making that retyping survivable and making sure the parts that can move — products, contacts, and above all your URLs — actually do.

Step one: get everything out of Wix that will come out

Do this before you build anything, because a couple of these downloads stop being available the moment the plan lapses.

1. Products. In the Wix dashboard, open the Products tab, select all, then More Actions and Export. Wix documents a ceiling of 5,000 rows per file and states that digital products are not covered by the export — if you sell downloads, list them separately by hand.
2. Orders. Wix exports orders as CSV, and lets you choose whether each line item gets its own row. Take the item-per-row version; it is easier to read later. Note that the timestamps come out in UTC, which will confuse you at reconciliation time if you do not know.
3. Contacts. Export your contact list as CSV while you still have dashboard access. This is your mailing list and it is not reproducible.
4. Blog posts. There is no export. Wix’s help centre says directly that it is not currently possible to export blog posts to other platforms. The blog does publish an RSS feed, which Wix documents as carrying up to twenty of the most recent posts — useful if your archive is small, a sample if it is not. For anything longer, open each post and copy the text.
5. Images. Download them from the live site or from your own originals. There is no bulk media export.

Step two: write down every URL before you change a thing

Your Wix URLs are about to stop existing. Every link anyone has ever built to you, every bookmark, every citation in somebody else’s article, points at a path that will return an error the moment the domain moves.

Build a two-column list — old path, new path — covering pages, blog posts, product pages and anything you once linked from an email. You can pull most of it from your own sitemap at /sitemap.xml, and the rest from the pages list in the Wix editor. Do not rely on memory; the pages you forget are usually the old campaign landing pages, which are exactly the ones with links pointing at them.

The full method, including how to do this without crawling software, is in build the redirect map.

Step three: build the Squarespace site privately

Squarespace gives every new site a fourteen-day trial, and its own migration guide recommends what we would recommend anyway: keep the in-progress site private with a site password so you never have two live versions of your business competing in search results.

Work through your inventory page by page. When you paste text across from Wix, paste it without formatting — carrying HTML from one builder’s editor into another’s is how you end up with invisible span tags that break your styling three weeks later. Squarespace’s own guide makes the same point.

Two things to resist. Do not try to reproduce the Wix layout pixel for pixel; you chose a new platform partly because its editor works differently, and fighting it wastes the hours you needed for redirects. And do not rebuild pages nobody visits. A migration is the one legitimate opportunity to delete a third of your site, and the URL map is where you record that decision as a redirect rather than a deletion.

Step four: move the store, if there is one

If you sell physical products, the Wix products CSV is your source file, and Squarespace can import products from a .csv. The two formats are not identical, so expect to re-order columns and rename headers to match what Squarespace expects. Squarespace documents a ceiling of 10,000 products per store page on version 7.1 and 200 on version 7.0, which is far above what most stores need but worth knowing if you have a large catalogue.

Variants, images and inventory counts are where CSV transfers go wrong quietly. After the import, spot-check ten products against the old store — price, variant list, stock number, image order — before you trust the other four hundred.

Digital products do not export from Wix at all, so those are rebuilt manually along with whatever delivery mechanism you were using.

Step five: set the redirects on the Squarespace side

This is the step with the largest consequences and the smallest amount of work.

The panel you want is URL Mappings, which sits under Settings and then Advanced. Each rule goes on its own line, written as /old-path -> /new-path 301; every address in it needs its leading slash, and any rule missing the arrow or the response code is skipped without complaint.

Paste in your entire map. All of it, including the rows where the new path is a category page because the old page is not being rebuilt. A redirect to a sensible parent page is enormously better than a 404.

One thing worth stating plainly, because it is the most common misunderstanding in the whole subject: redirects only work on the platform that is currently answering for your domain. Wix’s URL Redirect Manager is a real and useful tool, but the moment your domain points at Squarespace, nothing Wix holds is consulted by anybody. Set the redirects on the receiving end. Setting them on the old builder the night before achieves nothing at all.

Step six: move the domain, and mind the mailbox

Two separate decisions, often conflated. You can transfer the domain’s registration to Squarespace, or point it at Squarespace by changing its DNS records while the registration stays at Wix. Both work. Pointing is faster and reversible; transferring consolidates your billing.

If you transfer, ICANN’s sixty-day lock is the constraint that will decide your timing. Wix documents that the lock applies to domains recently registered, recently transferred, or whose contact details were recently changed, that it applies in both directions, and that Wix itself cannot lift it. Wix also notes that a completed transfer locks the domain again for a further sixty days. If you are inside a lock window, point the domain now and transfer it later; there is no penalty for doing it in that order.

Before you change any DNS record, copy the existing ones — specifically the MX records and any TXT records. If your business email is delivered through Wix’s Google Workspace resale, replacing your record set without re-entering the MX entries stops mail being delivered, and the first you will know is a customer asking why you ignored them. Wix’s own documentation confirms that a site plan and a business email are separate subscriptions and are cancelled separately, which is exactly why they can fall out of step. Full sequence in the DNS cutover.

Step seven: what to check before you cancel Wix

Do not cancel on launch day. Squarespace’s own migration guide puts cancellation at the end of its sequence, after the new site is online, and there are practical reasons beyond caution: you may still be pulling images from the old site, and you will certainly find a page you forgot.

Before you close the account, confirm all of the following.

• Twenty old URLs, picked at random from your map, each land on the right new page with a 301.
• Every product’s price, variant list and stock figure matches the old store.
• Contact forms submit and the notification actually arrives in an inbox you read.
• Your email still works — send one from an outside address and reply to it.
• You have downloaded your contacts, orders and any images you still need.

Then turn off auto-renewal on the Wix plan, and separately check whether your domain and your business email are on their own subscriptions that need their own attention. They usually are.

This route is one of several covered in the full plan for switching website builders, which has the order of operations and the platform-by-platform table of what comes out.