How to Migrate from Squarespace to Wix

Squarespace and Wix are both hosted, all-in-one website builders, but they solve for different priorities. Squarespace leans toward polished, template-driven design with tighter guardrails, while Wix trades some of that structure for pixel-level drag-and-drop freedom, a larger app ecosystem, and features like Wix Studio, Velo development, and native multilingual tools. If you have outgrown Squarespace's editing constraints or need functionality it doesn't offer natively, moving to Wix can make sense.

The catch is that there is no one-click importer between these two platforms. Squarespace does not hand you a portable copy of your design, and Wix cannot ingest a Squarespace site wholesale. In practice this is a rebuild-and-remap project: you extract what content you can, recreate the layout inside Wix, and carefully preserve the URL and SEO signals that took years to earn. Done carelessly, a migration tanks rankings for months.

This guide walks through exactly what transfers, what breaks, and the step-by-step process to move from Squarespace to Wix while protecting your search visibility.

Why Businesses Move from Squarespace to Wix

Most switches are driven by a specific limitation rather than a vague dissatisfaction. Common reasons include:

• Design freedom. Squarespace snaps elements to its grid and fluid layout system; Wix (especially the Editor and Wix Studio) lets you position elements anywhere, which appeals to teams that want a custom look without hand-coding.
• App ecosystem. The Wix App Market offers hundreds of third-party apps for bookings, events, memberships, and marketing that go beyond Squarespace's built-in blocks and limited extensions.
• Native features. Wix bundles multilingual (Wix Multilingual), a more flexible Automations tool, Velo for custom code and databases, and granular member/login areas out of the box.
• Pricing and bundling. Some businesses prefer Wix's plan structure, free-tier entry point, or the way commerce and marketing features are packaged.

If your real goal is a substantially different site rather than a like-for-like copy, treat this as a website redesign and migration combined, and plan the information architecture up front instead of porting old mistakes.

What Transfers, What Changes, and What Breaks

Setting expectations early prevents nasty surprises at launch. Here is the realistic picture:

• Blog posts and basic content: Squarespace can export a WordPress-format XML file containing pages, blog posts, text, and some images. Wix's importer can pull blog posts from that file, though formatting and embeds often need cleanup.
• Design and layout: None of it transfers. Squarespace templates and style settings have no equivalent in Wix, so every page is rebuilt visually from scratch.
• Products and store data: Squarespace commerce, orders, and customer records do not migrate cleanly. Products usually need a CSV rebuild or manual re-entry, and order history stays behind.
• Squarespace-specific features: Member Areas, scheduling (Acuity), donations, and code blocks won't carry over and must be recreated with Wix equivalents.
• URLs: Squarespace and Wix use different URL structures (for example, Squarespace's /blog/post-title versus Wix's /post/post-title), so most addresses change, which is the single biggest SEO risk.

Because so much is rebuilt rather than moved, the migration is as much a content and QA exercise as a technical one. Our full website migration SEO checklist covers the audit steps that catch these gaps before launch.

Step 1: Audit and Export Your Squarespace Content

Before touching Wix, inventory everything on the current site. Crawl your Squarespace domain with a tool like Screaming Frog to capture every live URL, page title, meta description, and internal link. Export your analytics and Search Console data so you know which pages actually earn traffic and rankings; those are the ones you must protect.

Then export what Squarespace allows: go to Settings → Import & Export Content and download the WordPress XML export. Note that this export is partial. It typically includes one blog page, basic pages, and text, but excludes product pages, style, index pages, audio blocks, product blocks, and most custom code. Manually document anything the export misses so nothing quietly disappears.

Step 2: Build and Configure the New Wix Site

Set up your Wix site while the Squarespace site stays live. Choose between the standard Wix Editor (simpler, template-based) and Wix Studio (responsive, better for agencies and complex layouts). Recreate your site structure first, matching your old page hierarchy and navigation so you can map redirects one-to-one later.

• Rebuild each page's layout, then paste in content from your export or the original pages.
• Re-upload images at full resolution and set descriptive alt text as you go.
• Recreate forms, buttons, and calls-to-action with Wix equivalents, and reconnect any integrations (email marketing, chat, analytics).
• For stores, rebuild the catalog via CSV import or manual entry and reconfigure shipping, tax, and payment settings.

If your move involves custom functionality, databases, or a CRM connection, Velo can handle a lot, but complex logic is often better scoped as a dedicated custom website and CRM development effort rather than shoehorned into the builder.

Step 3: Preserve SEO With Per-Page Settings and 301 Redirects

This is where migrations are won or lost. For every page, carry over the title tag, meta description, and heading structure from Squarespace into Wix's SEO settings (SEO Basics panel per page). Keep URL slugs identical wherever Wix lets you, to minimize the number of redirects needed.

For every URL that does change, create a 301 (permanent) redirect from the old Squarespace path to the new Wix path. In Wix, add these under Settings → SEO → URL Redirect Manager. A 301 passes the majority of the old page's ranking signals to the new URL and prevents visitors and Google from hitting dead 404s.

• Build a complete 301 redirect map in a spreadsheet: old URL, new URL, one row per page.
• Redirect old URLs to the closest matching new page, never dump everything to the homepage.
• Watch for structural changes like /blog/ becoming /post/ and redirect the whole pattern.
• Preserve or recreate your XML sitemap and confirm the correct canonical tags are set.

Step 4: Connect Your Domain and Launch

When the Wix site is fully built, redirects are mapped, and everything is proofed, point your domain to Wix. You can either transfer the domain registration to Wix or, more commonly, update the DNS records (or nameservers) at your current registrar to point at Wix's servers. Expect DNS changes to propagate for anywhere from a few minutes to 48 hours.

Launch during a low-traffic window and keep the Squarespace site's billing active for a short overlap in case you need to reference the original. Once the domain resolves to Wix, immediately verify the site in Google Search Console for the new setup and submit your fresh sitemap so Google recrawls quickly.

Step 5: Test, Monitor, and Fix Post-Launch

Launch is the start of the monitoring phase, not the end. In the first days and weeks:

• Re-crawl the live site and confirm every 301 redirect resolves correctly with no chains or loops.
• Check Search Console's Coverage and Page Indexing reports for spikes in 404s or excluded pages.
• Test every form submission, checkout, booking flow, and integration end to end.
• Verify analytics is tracking and compare organic traffic and rankings against your pre-migration baseline.
• Confirm mobile rendering and Core Web Vitals, since Wix and Squarespace serve markup differently.

A temporary ranking dip while Google reprocesses the new URLs is normal; a sustained drop after several weeks signals a redirect or indexing problem worth investigating fast.

Realistic Timeline and Cost

For a small brochure site of five to fifteen pages, a careful DIY migration takes roughly one to three weeks of part-time work, most of it spent rebuilding pages and mapping redirects. Content-heavy sites with hundreds of blog posts, an active store, or custom functionality can run one to three months and genuinely benefit from professional help.

Cost depends on who does the work. DIY means only your Wix subscription plus your time. Hiring a specialist for a professionally managed move, done at eSEOspace's $80/hour rate, typically lands in the low-to-mid four figures for a standard business site, scaling with page count, store complexity, and redesign scope. If you want the rebuild and SEO preservation handled end to end, our website migration services cover export, redirect mapping, and post-launch monitoring so your rankings survive the move.