Outgrown the website builder.

Almost always because the store outgrew a website builder. Squarespace is excellent for design-led sites with a modest catalog, but it constrains variants, apps, shipping logic, subscriptions, and anything B2B. Teams move when commerce becomes the main business rather than a section of the website.

The build is straightforward because catalogs are usually small and clean. The two genuinely hard parts are Squarespace's incomplete data export and the URL structure change, which decides whether your existing rankings survive. Neither is visible from the front end, which is why the migration gets underestimated.

If you sell a handful of products, need no complex shipping or subscription logic, and the site is primarily a brochure with a store attached, Squarespace is doing its job and migration is unnecessary cost. We recommend staying more often than people expect.

Yes, for URLs and templates. The two versions structure pages and collections differently, so the redirect map differs and the export behaviour is not identical. We check which version and template family you are on during the audit rather than assuming.

Squarespace's native export covers pages, blog posts, and basic product data as a WordPress-format XML file. It does not include orders, customers, or full product variant detail. That gap is the single most important thing to understand before planning a Squarespace migration.

Squarespace provides CSV exports for orders and customer profiles from the admin, separate from the site export, and the Commerce API can be used for richer extraction where volume justifies it. We combine those sources and reconcile them rather than relying on the single site export, which would silently drop your entire order history.

Squarespace images are served from its own CDN, so the export references URLs that stop working once you leave. Images have to be downloaded, renamed sensibly, and re-uploaded to Shopify. Keeping meaningful filenames and alt text matters here because image search traffic is real for product-led brands.

Mostly. Squarespace variants map onto Shopify options reasonably well, and Shopify generally allows more flexibility rather than less. Where Squarespace product add-ons or custom form fields were used, those have no direct equivalent and become metafields, line-item properties, or an app, depending on the use.

Squarespace Member Areas have no direct Shopify equivalent. Gated content becomes a customer-tag-driven access model, a membership app, or a separate system. Digital downloads map to a Shopify digital delivery app. Both need deciding early because they change the app stack and the cost.

No. Passwords are stored as one-way hashes and cannot move between platforms. Customer accounts migrate without passwords and customers reset at launch. We plan that communication in advance so it does not look like a security incident.

Not if URLs are mapped properly, but the risk is higher here than in most migrations because the structures differ sharply. Squarespace serves products under a store or shop path with its own item structure, while Shopify uses fixed /products/ and /collections/ prefixes. Almost every product URL changes.

Squarespace product URLs typically nest under the store page slug, and blog posts often carry a date-based or collection-based path. Shopify does not nest products under collections at all. We crawl every indexed URL, map each to its Shopify equivalent, and implement single-hop 301 redirects before launch rather than after a drop.

You do not need to. The redirects live on the new Shopify store once the domain points there, so they are configured on the destination rather than the origin. What matters is that the mapping is complete before DNS changes, because any URL without a destination becomes a 404 the moment you switch.

Blog posts export in the site XML and can be imported into Shopify blogs, but Shopify blog URLs sit under /blogs/{blog}/{article}, which will not match your Squarespace paths. For content-led brands the blog archive is often the largest part of the redirect map and carries a meaningful share of the site's links.

They need extracting and remapping rather than assuming. Squarespace stores SEO titles and descriptions per item, and they do not always come through cleanly in the export. We capture them from a crawl of the live site as well as the export, which gives a reliable source when the two disagree.

DNS changes usually propagate within a few hours. A full registrar transfer can take up to a week because of ICANN transfer locks, particularly if the domain was registered through Squarespace recently. We normally point DNS at Shopify first and transfer the registrar separately afterwards.

Point DNS first. It is reversible in minutes, keeps the two risks separate, and means a rollback does not depend on a registrar. Transferring the registrar can happen calmly a week later once the new store is verified, rather than being tangled into launch day.

No. We build and test on a Shopify staging URL, migrate the data, then point DNS at a low-traffic window. The Squarespace site stays live and reachable until the new store is verified, which keeps rollback to a DNS change rather than a rebuild.

Squarespace Email Campaigns does not transfer, so your list needs exporting and importing into whichever platform you choose, most commonly Klaviyo for Shopify stores. Squarespace forms need rebuilding, and any form submissions you need to keep should be exported before the account lapses.

Usually a few weeks. Catalogs are typically small and data is clean, so the timeline is driven more by design decisions and the size of the content archive than by the store itself. Member Areas or subscriptions extend it because they need architectural decisions rather than data moves.

It depends on catalog size, how much content moves, whether you are redesigning at the same time, and whether Member Areas or digital products are involved. We scope it on a short call and send a fixed proposal before any work starts.

Yes, and for Squarespace migrations it usually makes sense, because you are leaving a design-led platform and a straight visual copy rarely serves the new one well. It does mean the migration and the redesign share a timeline, so we keep the URL mapping work independent of design decisions.

Admin access to Squarespace, your order and customer CSV exports, a note of any Member Areas, digital products, or subscriptions in use, and ideally a crawl of your indexed URLs. Having those ready shortens scoping and surfaces the awkward parts while they are still cheap to solve.

Yes. You own the code, the data, and the platform accounts. Nothing is rented back to you and there is no proprietary layer you cannot maintain without us.