How to transfer your blog posts from Squarespace to WordPress, a complete guide

Squarespace is one of dozens, if not hundreds, of proprietary website builders that trap you into their ecosystem by providing zero portability for your website. While they claim that you can move your website at any time (great marketing spin!), the reality is that you can only export the content, not the design and structure, which must be rebuilt in some other tool if you ever wish to leave their ecosystem.

At the very least, Squarespace does indeed make it easy to export the basic content. Let’s get started!

Exporting Content From Squarespace

• Login to your Squarespace account
• In the menu, select Settings > Advanced, and then Import / Export. If the menu isn’t on the screen you can click the arrow in the upper left corner to make the menu appear.
• Select Export. This will open a dialog box where you can choose WordPress to export to
• Wait for Squarespace to create your download link. If you’ve created multiple blogs it will ask you to choose one.
• When the download link is ready, scroll down to the area below the Export button and click Download. This will give you the XML file to import into WordPress.

Importing into WordPress

• If you haven’t done so already, create your hosting account and install WordPress.
• Learn how to avoid timeouts while importing data to WordPress here.
• If you opt to use Tools > Import, Squarespace has formatted the export file as a WordPress compatible XML, so you’ll want to choose WordPress as the import type.
• Do not select the option to import images – this typically does not work with Squarespace because the filename format for images hosted on Squarespace isn’t properly detected. A workaround for this is found below!

Importing Images

We originally used the modified version of the “import external images” plugin on Moe Loubani’s website here, however it doesn’t seem to grab *all* necessary images, so we modified the latest release of the import external images plugin on GitHub to handle this for us.

• Download the import external images plugin zip from GitHub here and install it and activate it.
• Go to Media > Import Images. It will show you the images that still need to be imported.
• Press the button “Import Images Now” and wait maybe 5 minutes and press the refresh button above. You may need to repeatedly press the import button every 5 minutes or so to get all images to import.

Now that you’ve got your content in place you can customize your WordPress theme to make the site look similar to how it did on Squarespace. See our guide to theming WordPress to learn how that’s done.