Website builder
Moving your website off Squarespace
Squarespace makes handsome websites, and if you like how yours looks we can keep that look exactly. What we change is what sits underneath it: the speed, the search visibility, the ownership, and the ceiling you eventually hit.
Where you actually stand
Squarespace deserves credit for documenting its export honestly, which is more than most of its competitors do. It will produce a WordPress-format XML file. That file is a content dump, and Squarespace publishes precisely what it does not contain.
Not included: your style settings. Not included: your custom CSS. Not included: album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio and store pages. Not included: audio blocks, product blocks or video blocks. Not included: content in page-specific headers, footers and sidebars. And if you run more than one blog, only one of them exports.
Read that list against your actual site and you will usually find that the export covers your text and your images, and almost nothing else. The design you chose Squarespace for is the part that does not travel.
Your content is yours. The template is theirs.
Squarespace’s Terms of Service are straightforward about this, and again, they deserve credit for the clarity. Your content stays yours. The service and the templates do not.
So when a Squarespace site is described as "yours," what is meant is the words and the pictures. The design is licensed for as long as you are a customer.
“Your User Content stays yours, except for the limited rights that enable us to provide, improve, promote and protect the Services.”
“Squarespace owns the Templates. You may not use any Template in any way…that competes…with the Services.”
What this costs you day to day
The export leaves the design behind
Style settings and custom CSS are both on Squarespace’s own excluded list. Whatever you or your designer spent time on visually does not come out in the file.
Whole page types simply do not export
Index, portfolio, gallery, calendar, cover and store pages are excluded. On a design-led site those are frequently the most important pages you have.
You are sharing a performance budget
Squarespace loads a substantial front-end framework on every page regardless of what that page needs. On mobile that is the difference between a fast site and an adequate one, and you have no lever to pull.
Cancel and the site disappears behind an expiry notice
Stop paying and visitors get a "Website expired" message at your domain. Your content is preserved and you can reactivate, but as far as your customers are concerned the business has gone dark.
Customisation stops where the platform stops
Code injection covers a lot of ground, until the day it does not. A genuinely custom booking flow, calculator or integration eventually runs into a wall that no amount of injected JavaScript gets through.
How the rebuild works
Six steps, and your involvement is deliberately minimal. We handle the technical side, bring you recommendations, and come to you when a decision or an approval is genuinely needed. You review the finished site before it goes live.
- 1
We audit your current website
We review your existing site — pages, content, SEO, functionality and structure. We identify what should be improved, updated or dropped, rather than copying over things that were never working.
- 2
We rebuild the site in Next.js
Your branding and content carry over, but the site is rebuilt from the ground up in Next.js. That removes the database and plugin dependencies behind most performance, security and maintenance problems.
For Squarespace specifically: We rebuild your Squarespace design as real components — the same typography, spacing and layout, without the framework underneath it. If you like your current site, "keep it looking exactly like this" is a perfectly good brief, and it is one we get often.
- 3
We improve it while we rebuild it
This is the part people underestimate. We are not handing you a newer version of the same website. We look for real gains in navigation, page layout, calls to action, mobile experience, content and SEO.
- 4
We preserve your SEO
Existing URLs, page titles, metadata and redirects are all accounted for in the transition. The goal is to move platforms without giving up the search visibility you have already built.
- 5
We test everything before it goes live
Desktop and mobile, every form, every piece of functionality, all content reviewed — checked and working before we touch anything in production.
- 6
We launch
Once you approve it, we move the new site into production. From your side the transition should be uneventful, and your visitors should never see an interruption.
What comes with you
- Every page, including the types Squarespace will not export
- Your full design — type, colour, spacing, layout
- All blog posts, not just the one blog the export allows
- Gallery and portfolio pages, rebuilt properly
- Existing URLs, preserved or 301 redirected
- Your domain, transferred into your name
You own what we build. In writing.
Every rebuild is delivered with a Certificate of Ownership and IP Assignment: a signed document assigning you the copyright in the site code and the content we produce for you, and recording the transfer of the repository, the domain and the hosting account into your name. You are not licensing your website from us. If you ever leave, you take the whole thing with you — the code, the content, the domain, the repository and the deployment history.
- Full copyright assignment in the site code and the content we write for you.
- The Git repository transferred to an account you control, with its full history.
- The domain in your name, at a registrar of your choosing.
- Hosting in your own Vercel account if you want it there — we can manage it, but ownership sits with you.
- No proprietary page builder, no template licence, and nothing that stops working if you stop paying us.
Questions people ask about leaving Squarespace
- Squarespace has an export. Is that not enough?
- It depends what you want back. Squarespace’s own help documentation lists what the XML export excludes: style settings, custom CSS, and album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio and store pages, among others. Only one blog exports. In practice you get text and images, and you rebuild everything else — which is what we do anyway, from the live site, so nothing is lost.
- Can you make the new site look exactly like my Squarespace site?
- Yes, and it is a common request. We rebuild the design faithfully as components. It will look like your site and load considerably faster, because there is no platform framework loading behind it.
- What happens to my domain?
- If your domain is registered with Squarespace you can transfer it out, provided it is not inside one of the standard 60-day lock windows that follow a registration, a transfer, or a registrant contact change. Cancelling your site does not block the transfer. We manage the process.
- I have a Squarespace store. What happens to it?
- Worth a conversation before you commit. Store pages are on the excluded list for export, so product data needs handling deliberately. Depending on your catalogue we will either rebuild commerce into the new site or connect a dedicated commerce backend. Either way you are not left retyping products.
- Will my SEO survive?
- Yes. Every URL is preserved or redirected, metadata comes across, and the new site serves fully-rendered HTML with structured data — which usually improves how both Google and AI answer engines read your pages.
Sources
Every claim made about Squarespace on this page comes from Squarespace’s own published documentation. Read them yourself. We would rather you did.
Also worth reading
Wix
Wix documents it plainly: there is no way to export your site, and their content may not be migrated off Wix.
Read the Wix pageWeebly
Still running, but Square now steers new customers to Square Online. A platform on maintenance is a platform to plan around.
Read the Weebly pageWebflow
The most portable builder on this list — genuinely. But the export drops your CMS, your forms and your commerce.
Read the Webflow page
Start by finding out where you actually are
The free scan tells you what your site is built on, what is slowing it down, what search engines and AI answer engines can currently read, and roughly what a rebuild would cost.
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