Leaving Squarespace? Unlike Wix, Squarespace actually gives you an export file — but it covers far less than most owners assume: one blog page, basic text pages, and no galleries, no index pages, no products, and no images. Your domain, your written content, and your Google reviews all make the trip regardless. This guide breaks down what Squarespace's export genuinely contains, what has to be recreated by hand, and how the WorkspaceCMS free-rebuild process closes the gap between the two.
Squarespace's Export: Real, But Smaller Than It Looks
Squarespace deserves credit for offering an export at all — it produces an XML file in WordPress format that another system can read. But the fine print matters more than the feature. The export includes your standard text pages and exactly one blog page (if you run multiple blogs, you choose which one survives). It excludes product pages, album and event pages, index and gallery pages, audio and video blocks, and custom CSS. Most importantly, it doesn't contain your images — the file merely references image URLs still hosted on Squarespace's servers, which go dark when your subscription ends.
So the honest framing is this: Squarespace's export is a useful head start for text content, and nothing more. Every Squarespace migration — DIY or professional — still involves a rebuild, because the layouts, the design system, the galleries, and the media all have to be recreated on the destination platform. The export shrinks the typing; it doesn't move the site.
That's also why the WorkspaceCMS process doesn't lean on the export file alone. The build team migrates content from your live site — the complete, rendered version of every page — so nothing the export skipped gets lost in translation.
The Full Inventory: Export, Rebuild, or Untouched
Every asset on a typical Squarespace business site falls into one of three buckets:
| Asset | Bucket | What actually happens |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | Transfers fully | You own it. Point DNS at the new site, or transfer the registration out of Squarespace entirely. |
| Text pages | Export + rebuild | Covered by the XML export and re-laid-out in the new design. |
| Blog posts (main blog) | Export + rebuild | Text comes through the export; images are re-captured from the live site. |
| Additional blogs | Rebuild only | The export takes one blog page. Others are migrated manually from the live site. |
| Images and media | Rebuild only | Not in the export. Pulled from the live site or your originals, then re-optimized. |
| Galleries and index pages | Rebuild only | Excluded from the export; recreated as sections in the new design. |
| Forms | Rebuild only | Recreated in the new platform's form builder. Export your submission history first. |
| Scheduling (Acuity) | Replaced | Booking is available on WorkspaceCMS Growth and Premium plans. |
| Template, fonts, custom CSS | Left behind | Squarespace design isn't portable. The new site gets a new design with your branding. |
| Google reviews & Business Profile | Untouched | These live with Google. A platform change never affects them. |
| Domain email | Untouched | Google-hosted business email (or similar) rides on your domain's DNS and carries over. |
Notice the pattern: the things you'd cry over losing — domain, words, images, reviews, email — all survive. The things left behind are Squarespace's scaffolding, and scaffolding is the part a rebuild replaces anyway.
Your Domain and Email: The Clean Handoff
If your domain is registered through Squarespace, you have two options at switch time. The fast path is pointing its DNS at the new site while leaving the registration where it is — that's all a launch requires. The complete path is transferring the registration to another registrar, which Squarespace supports through a standard unlock-and-authorization-code flow (with the usual ICANN rule that a domain can't change registrars within 60 days of registration or a prior transfer). Neither path risks your email: if you use Google's business email service — which Squarespace itself resells — your mailboxes ride on DNS records that get carried over during the switchover.
In the WorkspaceCMS sequence, the domain move is the final step. Your rebuilt site goes live at a preview address first, you approve it, and only then does the domain switch over — per the launch process, most people finish connecting their domain in under 5 minutes. Your Squarespace site stays live until that moment, so there's no gap and no downtime.
What the Rebuild Recreates (and Improves)
Everything in the "rebuild only" bucket is handled by the build team, not by you. The free rebuild covers standard marketing sites — pages, photos, and blog posts migrated, branding reapplied — and the launch build includes copywriting, so pages that were thin on Squarespace get properly written rather than pasted across. You answer a questionnaire on day one; the team maps your existing site, writes and lays out the pages, and hands you a finished site to review with one revision round included.
Two functional replacements worth planning for. First, forms: Squarespace forms don't migrate, but the form builder included on every WorkspaceCMS plan recreates them — and before you cancel Squarespace, export your form-submission history, because it doesn't come along automatically. Second, scheduling: if your clients book through Acuity, note that online booking is a Growth and Premium feature, so appointment-driven businesses should choose their tier accordingly on the pricing page. Anything genuinely custom — member areas, niche integrations, database work — sits outside the free-rebuild scope and gets a separate written quote before any work starts.
Galleries and index pages — the export's biggest blind spot — are usually where Squarespace sites carry their real visual value: portfolios, project showcases, before-and-after collections. In the rebuild, those become designed sections of the new site rather than one-to-one clones of Squarespace's gallery blocks. In practice that's an upgrade: the new layouts are built for speed and mobile behavior rather than assembled from stacked content blocks, and every image in them gets descriptive alt text during the build's alt-tag sweep, which most Squarespace galleries never had.
Before You Cancel: The Five-Step Exit Checklist
The single most important rule of leaving Squarespace is sequencing: migrate everything first, cancel second. A lapsed subscription takes your image URLs, your form history, and your live reference site down with it. Five steps, in order:
1. Pull the XML export from your Squarespace settings while your account is active — it's the head start for text content, even if the rebuild team works primarily from the live site.
2. Export your form submissions. Contact-form and inquiry history lives only in your Squarespace dashboard. Download it as a spreadsheet now; it cannot be recovered after cancellation.
3. Gather your original images where you have them — originals beat re-captured web versions for quality. Anything you can't find gets pulled from the live site during the rebuild.
4. Confirm your domain access. Verify you can log into wherever the domain is registered — Squarespace or a third-party registrar — before launch week, not on launch day.
5. Keep the subscription running until your new site is live on your domain and you've confirmed the redirects work. One extra month of Squarespace is cheap insurance; a dead reference site mid-migration is not.
Hand those five items to the build team and the rest of the migration happens on their side of the table.
Protecting Your SEO Through the Move
Squarespace imposes recognizable URL patterns — blog posts under /blog/post-title, dated archives, category paths. Your new site will use its own structure, and the difference between a safe migration and a traffic dip lives in the redirect map. The WorkspaceCMS migration checklist inventories every indexed Squarespace URL and builds one-to-one 301 redirects in a redirect manager with conflict detection, so no old URL dead-ends and no two rules collide. Page-level meta is carried over or improved, JSON-LD structured data is added (an area where Squarespace's defaults are thin), and the sitemap and llms.txt are generated as part of the SEO foundation included on every plan.
The result, in most cases, is a net SEO gain within a quarter: identical domain, equal-or-better content, faster page loads, and materially richer structured data. Squarespace sites are handsome, but they're rarely fast — and page speed is one of the first things the free checkup on the switch page will score for you.
One more signal worth carrying forward: your backlinks. External sites that link to your Squarespace URLs — directories, press, partners — will never update those links, and with a one-to-one redirect map they never need to. The credit forwards automatically. The five-minute manual job is updating the links you control yourself: your Google Business Profile website field, social bios, and any paid listings, so your busiest entry points land on the new URLs directly.
Leaving Squarespace FAQ
Does Squarespace let me export my whole website?
Partially. Squarespace exports an XML file containing your text pages and one blog page — but not product pages, galleries, index pages, event pages, custom CSS, or your images (the file only links to images still hosted on Squarespace). A complete migration always combines the export with a manual pass over the live site, which is what a managed rebuild does for you.
What happens to my images when I leave Squarespace?
They need to be re-captured, because the export file doesn't include them — and once your subscription lapses, Squarespace-hosted image URLs stop resolving. During a rebuild, images are pulled from your live site (or your original files, if you have them) and re-optimized for the new platform before your old site ever goes offline. The sequencing matters: migrate first, cancel second.
Can I keep my Squarespace domain and email?
Yes to both. A domain registered through Squarespace can be pointed at your new site immediately and optionally transferred to another registrar afterward. Google-hosted email on your domain continues working because it's attached to your domain's DNS, not to your Squarespace website subscription — the records are carried over at switchover.
Will leaving Squarespace hurt my Google rankings?
Not when the move includes a full redirect map. Rankings attach to your domain and content, both of which transfer. Each indexed Squarespace URL gets a 301 redirect to its new equivalent, meta data carries over, and the new site typically ships better structured data and faster load times than Squarespace produced. Brief fluctuation is normal; lasting losses trace back to skipped redirects, not the switch itself.
What replaces Acuity Scheduling after the move?
Online booking is built into the WorkspaceCMS Growth and Premium plans, which covers the appointment-booking role Acuity plays on most Squarespace sites. If your booking workflow is unusually complex, flag it during the free checkup — anything beyond standard scheduling is scoped honestly, in writing, before the rebuild begins.
Related Reading
- Switching from Wix: What Actually Transfers (and What Gets Rebuilt)
- How to Switch From WordPress to a Managed CMS
- Managed Website vs. DIY Website Builders: The Real Cost Comparison
Find Out What Your Squarespace Site Is Leaving on the Table
Squarespace got you a good-looking site. The question in 2026 is whether it's a fast, well-structured, AI-readable one — and that's a 20-second test. Run the free checkup on the switch page, browse the live builds at /demos to see what the rebuild standard looks like in your industry, and compare the flat plans at /pricing. The rebuild is free, your old site stays live until the new one takes over, and everything worth keeping makes the trip.
