How to Migrate from Wix to Squarespace

Wix and Squarespace both promise a polished website without touching code, but they attract different owners. Businesses usually leave Wix for Squarespace when they want cleaner editorial design, better native blogging and email tools, tighter e-commerce, or simply a platform that feels less cluttered as their brand matures. The good news: this is a same-category move (one hosted, closed platform to another), so you are not wrestling with servers or databases. The catch: Wix and Squarespace do not talk to each other, and there is no one-click importer between them, so almost everything is a manual or semi-manual rebuild.

That reality shapes the whole project. Your content, page structure, URLs, and design all have to be recreated inside Squarespace, and your search rankings only survive if you plan the transition deliberately. Done carelessly, a Wix-to-Squarespace move can tank traffic for months because URL slugs change and old links start returning 404 errors.

This guide walks through exactly what changes, what breaks, and the step-by-step process to migrate cleanly, including how to preserve SEO with a proper 301 redirect map so you keep the rankings you have already earned.

Why businesses move from Wix to Squarespace

Most owners do not switch platforms on a whim. The common drivers we hear are concrete and worth naming before you commit:

• Design and templates: Squarespace is known for tightly art-directed, editorial templates that look premium out of the box. Owners in hospitality, creative services, and retail often feel Wix templates look busier and harder to keep consistent.
• Built-in blogging and email: Squarespace has a stronger native blog (categories, tags, RSS, AMP) and Squarespace Email Campaigns, so you consolidate tools rather than bolting on Wix apps.
• Commerce structure: If you sell products, subscriptions, or digital downloads, many merchants prefer Squarespace Commerce's inventory and checkout flow.
• Cleaner content model: Squarespace's collections (blog, products, events, portfolios) enforce more structure than Wix's free-form editor, which pays off as a site grows.
• Wix lock-in frustration: Wix does not let you export your site or even reassign a template, which pushes owners to look elsewhere when they want a fresh start.

If your real goal is a visual overhaul rather than the platform itself, treat this as a website redesign and migration at once so you only rebuild pages a single time.

What changes and what breaks

Set expectations early, because "it looked fine on Wix" is not a guarantee on Squarespace. Here is the honest breakdown:

• Content: Text, images, and blog posts must be moved manually or via limited tools. Squarespace can import a blog from a WordPress-format XML file, so many teams route Wix blog content through an intermediate export rather than copying posts one by one. Body copy and images on standard pages are recreated by hand.
• URLs: This is the big one. Wix and Squarespace generate different slug patterns, and Wix historically used #! hash URLs on older sites. Nearly every page will get a new address, which is why redirects are non-negotiable.
• Design: Nothing transfers visually. Fonts, colors, spacing, and layouts are rebuilt in Squarespace's editor. Custom Wix code or Velo functionality has no equivalent and must be re-implemented.
• Wix apps: Bookings, membership areas, forms, and third-party Wix App Market apps do not carry over. You map each to a Squarespace-native feature (Acuity Scheduling, Member Areas, native forms) or a new integration.
• SEO signals: Meta titles, descriptions, image alt text, and structured data all have to be re-entered. Squarespace exposes most of these, but they start blank.

Because so little transfers automatically, the safest approach is to treat the new site as a fresh build informed by an inventory of the old one. If your Wix site relies on booking, membership, or custom logic, factor in custom development and integrations so those functions are not lost in the move.

Step 1: Audit and export your Wix content

Start by cataloging everything before you build anything. Crawl your live Wix site (Screaming Frog or a similar tool) and export a full list of URLs, page titles, and meta descriptions. This inventory becomes your build checklist and your redirect source list.

• List every page, blog post, product, and landing page with its current URL.
• Note which pages earn organic traffic and backlinks (pull this from Google Search Console and Google Analytics) so you protect your highest-value URLs first.
• Download all images at full resolution; Wix serves optimized versions, so grab originals where you can.
• Export blog content. Wix does not offer a clean native export, so use its RSS feed or a third-party migration tool to produce a WordPress-compatible XML file that Squarespace's importer can read.

A methodical audit is the difference between a smooth cutover and weeks of cleanup. Our website migration SEO checklist covers exactly what to capture at this stage.

Step 2: Build and populate the new Squarespace site

Now rebuild inside Squarespace while your Wix site stays live and untouched. Work on a Squarespace trial or a site on the built-in .squarespace.com preview domain so the public never sees a half-finished build.

• Choose a template family (Squarespace 7.1 uses a single flexible system with Fluid Engine) and set global fonts, colors, and site styles to match or upgrade your brand.
• Recreate your main pages, keeping the same information architecture where it makes sense so redirects map cleanly one-to-one.
• Import the blog via the WordPress XML file, then spot-check formatting, images, and author/date fields.
• Rebuild functionality with native features: forms, Acuity for bookings, Member Areas for gated content, and Squarespace Commerce for products.
• Re-enter SEO metadata on every page and post, and set clean, descriptive URL slugs deliberately rather than accepting defaults.

If the site is large or business-critical, a professional web development team can parallelize the rebuild and catch structural issues before launch.

Step 3: Map and prepare 301 redirects

This step protects your rankings, so do not skip or rush it. A 301 redirect is a permanent signal that tells Google a page has moved, passing the old page's authority to the new URL. Without it, every changed Wix URL becomes a 404, and the rankings and backlinks tied to it evaporate.

• Build a two-column redirect map: every old Wix URL on the left, its new Squarespace URL on the right.
• Squarespace supports 301 redirects in Settings under URL Mappings, using its arrow syntax (for example /old-page -> /new-page 301).
• Prioritize pages with traffic and backlinks; make sure none are left pointing nowhere.
• Watch for Wix's legacy #! hash URLs, which cannot be redirected server-side the normal way; you may need canonical tags or on-page handling for those.

Get this right and search engines transfer your equity to the new site within a few weeks. A dedicated website migration service can build and QA the full redirect map so nothing valuable is dropped.

Step 4: Connect your domain and launch

Only point your domain once the Squarespace build is fully populated and reviewed. Launch is mostly a DNS operation:

• In Squarespace, add your custom domain and follow its instructions to update DNS records (or transfer the domain from Wix, though pointing DNS is usually faster).
• Update A records and the CNAME as directed; DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate globally.
• Confirm SSL is active so the site loads over HTTPS with no mixed-content or certificate warnings.
• Publish the Squarespace site and verify the live domain resolves to it, not to the old Wix pages.

Launch during a low-traffic window so any hiccup affects the fewest visitors.

Step 5: Test, verify, and monitor

The work is not done at launch; the first two weeks decide whether rankings hold. Verify everything methodically:

• Spot-check a sample of old URLs from your redirect map and confirm each returns a 301 to the correct new page.
• Submit your new Squarespace sitemap in Google Search Console and request re-indexing of key pages.
• Crawl the live site to catch broken internal links, missing images, and orphaned pages.
• Confirm forms, bookings, and checkout actually submit and reach you.
• Reconnect analytics and Search Console, then watch coverage errors, impressions, and rankings closely for 4 to 6 weeks.

Expect a small, temporary dip as Google recrawls; with clean redirects, traffic typically recovers within a few weeks.

Timeline and cost, realistically

Because there is no automated importer, a Wix-to-Squarespace migration is a rebuild, and the effort scales with page count and functionality. A simple brochure site of a handful of pages might take a focused week or two. A content-heavy site with a blog, e-commerce, and bookings is realistically a three-to-eight-week project once you include design, content re-entry, redirect mapping, testing, and a monitoring window.

On cost, DIY is your time plus Squarespace's subscription (billed annually, tiered by whether you need commerce features). Hiring help varies with scope; at eSEOspace's $80/hour rate, a straightforward migration lands far below the cost of losing organic traffic to a botched cutover. The most expensive path is almost always the one that skips redirects and QA, then spends months clawing back rankings. Invest in the mapping and testing, and the platform switch pays for itself in a cleaner, better-performing site.