Export Your Squarespace Website: What Moves, What Doesn't

Sooner or later, most Squarespace owners ask the question: can I export my Squarespace website and take it somewhere else? The honest answer is “partially,” and the parts that don’t come with you are bigger than most people expect. This is a plain-English squarespace export website guide: what the official export actually contains, what stays behind, and what a real migration looks like when you want out.

We help businesses move off rented platforms for a living, so we read the fine print so you don’t have to. Everything below about the export itself comes straight from Squarespace’s own documentation.

What Squarespace’s Export Actually Gives You

Squarespace offers a single export format: an .xml file formatted for WordPress. That detail matters, because it means the export was designed for one specific destination, and even there it only carries part of your site.

According to Squarespace’s documentation, the export includes:

• Layout pages
• One blog page, with its posts and up to 1,000 comments per post
• Text blocks and image blocks
• Text from embed blocks (with minimal structure)

That’s the whole list, and the limitations hiding in it deserve a second look. If you run more than one blog, only one of them exports. If your pages rely on Squarespace’s layout system, what arrives on the other side is content stripped of its design.

What Stays Behind

Squarespace’s own list of what cannot be exported is longer than the list of what can:

• Product and store pages (your entire commerce catalog)
• Album, cover, index, info, calendar, and portfolio pages
• Audio blocks and video blocks
• Page-specific headers, footers, and sidebars
• Any blog beyond the first one
• Draft posts
• All style settings and custom CSS, meaning the entire look of your site

And one more limitation worth reading twice: Squarespace states that you can’t export content from one Squarespace site and import it into another Squarespace site. The export exists for leaving to WordPress, badly, and for nothing else.

This is vendor lock-in working exactly as designed. Nothing about it is hidden; it’s documented honestly. But the practical effect is that the longer you build on the platform, the more of your work exists in a form you can’t take with you.

So How Do You Actually Leave Squarespace?

The XML file is a starting point for your text content, and that’s about it. A real migration is a rebuild, and treating it as a rebuild from the start produces a far better outcome than trying to squeeze a design out of an export that doesn’t contain one. The process we run looks like this:

1. Inventory everything. Pages, posts, products, images, forms, integrations, and the URLs they live at. The export covers a slice of this; the rest gets captured directly from the live site before anything changes.

2. Rebuild on a stack you own. For most business sites that means a modern static framework (we build on Astro) deployed to hosting you control, with the source files in your own repository. The result loads faster than a builder site and has no monthly platform fee attached. The meal-prep company we moved off a builder platform went from a sluggish rented site to a 99/100 PageSpeed score, in two weeks, with about $12,000 a year in recurring costs eliminated.

3. Preserve your search equity. Every old URL needs a permanent redirect to its new home. Google’s site-move documentation is explicit that properly implemented 301 redirects carry your ranking signals to the new URLs, so a migration done carefully doesn’t cost you the SEO you’ve built. Skipping this step is how migrations earn their scary reputation.

4. Move the surrounding pieces. Domain, email, forms, and analytics each have their own small migration, and they’re also where platform entanglements hide. Map them before you cancel anything.

Is Leaving Worth It?

It depends on what Squarespace is costing you, and the subscription is usually the smallest line. The real costs are the design work you can’t take with you, the features you bend your business around, and the compounding fact that every improvement you make deepens the hole. We walk through that math in our 2026 small business website checklist, but the short version: if your website is a brochure you rarely touch, staying is fine. If it’s a growth asset you invest in monthly, you’re building equity on land you rent.

The good news is that the move gets no easier by waiting, and the destination has never been better: owned stacks today are faster, cheaper to run, and fully portable.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Can I export my Squarespace website?

Partially. Squarespace provides an official export as a WordPress-formatted .xml file containing your layout pages, one blog with its posts, and your text and image blocks. It does not include store pages, multiple blogs, audio or video blocks, page-specific headers or footers, draft posts, or any of your style settings and custom CSS, so the visual design of your site cannot be exported at all.

Does the Squarespace export include my online store?

No. Squarespace’s documentation lists product and store pages among the content types that cannot be exported in the site export. Product data has to be handled separately during a migration, and anything built with commerce-specific blocks needs to be rebuilt on the destination platform.

Will I lose my Google rankings if I leave Squarespace?

Not if the migration is done properly. Google’s own site-move documentation confirms that permanent 301 redirects from your old URLs to the new ones carry ranking signals through a migration. The key is mapping every existing URL to its new equivalent and implementing the redirects at launch, which is standard scope in any professionally run migration.

Can I move my Squarespace site to another Squarespace account?

No. Squarespace explicitly states that content exported from one Squarespace site can’t be imported into another Squarespace site. The export exists solely in a WordPress-compatible format, which says a lot about how the platform thinks about your ability to move.

What’s the best platform to move to from Squarespace?

It depends on your needs, but for most business sites we recommend an owned stack: a modern framework like Astro with source files in your own repository, deployed to hosting you control. It removes the monthly platform fee, typically loads dramatically faster, and most importantly it’s portable, so you’re never locked into a single vendor’s export policy again. WordPress is the path of least resistance for the XML file, but it trades one set of platform dependencies for another.