Moving off Squarespace
The best-looking defaults of any builder. A Squarespace site that has been left alone still looks composed three years later, which is not true of most things on this list.
Stay on it when: A portfolio or a brochure, where consistent design matters more than doing anything unusual.
If that describes you, close this tab — you have your answer and it cost you nothing. What follows is for everyone else.
Press export and see what arrives.
The export is a WordPress-format file and it is partial by design. It covers a single blog and basic pages; product, event, album and index pages, along with any custom styling or injected code, are not part of it. It is a genuine head start on the text and a poor description of the site — which is the usual shape of an export from a platform where the design is the product.
What comes with you
- One blog's posts, in WordPress format
- Basic pages and their text
- Images, once they are pulled from the URLs referenced
- The URL structure, for redirects
What gets rebuilt
- The design, which is the template rather than your content
- Commerce, if there is any
- Anything the template did not anticipate and got injected code instead
- Page types the export does not cover
Deliberately no item counts, plan tiers or quoted limits anywhere on this page. Those change on somebody else’s release schedule, and a stale specific is worse than no specific on a page whose whole claim is that you can check it yourself.
What Squarespace charges you that isn’t on the invoice
The same lock-in as Wix, and anything the template did not anticipate is a fight. Custom behaviour gets bolted on with injected code that breaks quietly the next time the platform updates.
You need it to do something the template has no opinion about.
It is slow, and nobody can say why
Usually plugin sprawl, uncompressed images, or a builder rendering everything client-side. Measurable before and after, which makes it the easiest of the four to justify.
Nobody can change it without calling somebody
Either the platform makes editing dangerous, or the person who built it left. This is a structure problem, and it is fixed by deciding who should be able to change what before anything is rebuilt.
The annual bill keeps growing
Plugin licences, platform tiers, seats you are not using, a retainer for changes you could make yourself. Worth adding up over three years before comparing it to a one-off build.
You have realised you cannot leave
The most expensive one, and the one people discover latest. It is also the only one on this list that gets worse the longer you wait, because everything you publish in the meantime is published into somebody else's database.
What a Squarespace migration actually involves.
The export gives us the writing; a crawl gives us everything the export left behind, including the URL list. The rebuild is where a Squarespace migration usually earns its money — the constraint that made the template look composed is the same one that made every unusual requirement a fight, and it is gone afterwards.
Every URL, redirected
Old addresses 301 to their new home, generated from the crawl rather than typed — so the rankings and inbound links you already paid for survive the move.
Measured on both sides
Load time, Core Web Vitals and accessibility recorded on the existing site before anything is touched, and again after. It is the one project where the improvement is a number rather than an opinion.
Instrumented on arrival
Named conversion events wired at build, so the new site can tell you which page did the work — which the old one almost certainly could not.
In your accounts
Repository, hosting, domain and analytics in your name. If the reason you are leaving is that somebody else held them, the migration is not finished until that is not true.
Most sites should not migrate. If yours should, it is a known job at a known price.
A migration is $4,800 and takes 2–3 weeks, published like every other figure on this site. The free assessment can also tell you to keep what you have — that outcome is on the page too.