How To: Import/Export Within Squarespace

Background

Squarespace provides nearly zero support for its long time customers wishing to upgrade from 7.0 to 7.1 or transfer their content between versions.

There’s currently not an automatic way to upgrade your version 7.0 site, […] you can rebuild your content
— Squarespace August 2023

3.5+ years and still no help. Worse still: if you try to export and then import from Squarespace (using WordPress format), you’ll discover it fails 🤦:

• WORDPRESS Import complete. Status: Failed
• com.squarespace.v6.business.content.exceptions.InvalidContentItemException: urlId cannot be null: …

Rebuilding the site by hand is miserable and slow/expensive. However, you can speed it up a bit.

Summary

1. Good: You can get all your images 🎉
2. Good: You can can also transfer Squarespace pages (not just Squarespace “Blog” posts), though the formatting may fail.
3. Meh: Although my solution below is the fastest method I have found, there may be other methods.
4. Bad: This method seems to fail to connect the images. Although all images will be broken, it is still much faster to fix them rather than rebuild a blog.

Solution

1. To “fix” the broken export, we’ll create a Free WordPress.com site temporarily. Note: Squarespace advises that the self-hosted WordPress may not work. We MUST use WordPress.com.
2. Export your content from Squarespace (in the WordPress format)
3. Import a Squarespace blog export to your temporary WordPress site (this will also copy all your images). WordPress.com admin > tools > import > WordPress > upload the XML file created by Squarespace. Note: one of the blog exports will also contain your Squarespace pages (non-blog pages)!
4. Export from WordPress.com admin > tools > export. You have two options here: 4a) If you want to import only the blog, use filter dropdown > select “Posts”. 4b) If you click “Export All”, it will also include “pages”.
5. Import the file from WordPress.com to Squarespace. Note: it aggregates everything into a new single blog on Squarespace (without categories).
6. Export media from WordPress.com admin > tools > export > Export Media Library > Download (assuming your images are broken as mine were)
7. Upload the images to Squarespace assets. (you may want to move them out of the year/month folders first to make the upload process easier). Once uploaded, you can fix the broken images.
8. Delete the posts on WordPress and repeat for each of your Squarespace blogs. Note: trashed posts will be exported from WordPress. You can either “Permanently Delete” each post in WordPress, or use a filter to batch delete after import in Squarespace.
9. All done. You can delete your free WordPress.com site

Also, please do the community a favor and reach out to Squarespace to ask them to take better care of their long time customers. They are the only ones who can make this process much less cumbersome, and they ought to.

Bonus

You can also transfer your products using the import/export feature within SquareSpace.

1. Export from Squarespace
2. Remove the Product IDsand Variable IDs
3. Create the store in the new site using the same slug as the old
4. Import