The Best Ways to Back Up a Squarespace Site, Compared

Squarespace has no backup button and no downloadable copy of your live site. What it has is version history on individual pages, which covers an accidental edit and nothing else. So "backing up Squarespace" means choosing one of six approaches, and they are not interchangeable.

This page is written to be useful even if you pick something other than us. We built one of these options, and we will say where it is the wrong choice.

1. Squarespace's own export

Free, built in, and narrower than people expect. Settings, then Import and Export, gives you a WordPress-format XML file. It contains blog posts, basic pages and some text. It does not contain your design, your fonts, your layout, most page types, product data, or your images in any usable arrangement.

Use it if you are moving to WordPress and want the words. Do not mistake it for a copy of your site. What the export leaves out.

2. Duplicate the site inside Squarespace

Free, complete, and stuck where it is. Duplicating gives you a perfect copy of the site including design. The copy lives inside your Squarespace account as an unpaid trial site, so it expires, and if your account itself is the problem, the copy goes with it.

Good for a safety net before a redesign. Not an offsite backup, because it is not offsite.

3. Save pages by hand from your browser

Free, exact, and only sane for a handful of pages. File then Save Page As, or Export as PDF, captures a page properly. For a five-page site before a risky change this is completely reasonable and costs nothing.

It does not scale to fifty pages, and nobody keeps doing it every month.

4. A crawler: HTTrack or SiteSucker

Free or cheap, thorough, and technical. HTTrack is free on Windows and Linux, SiteSucker is a paid Mac app. Both walk your site and save the pages and assets to your hard drive.

They are genuinely good tools. The catch is that they run on your computer when you remember to run them, the output of a modern JavaScript-heavy site can be patchy, and neither takes screenshots, so you get files without a record of what the page looked like. A closer comparison.

5. The Wayback Machine

Free, public, and not yours. The Internet Archive may already have crawled your site. It is worth checking, and it has saved people who had nothing else.

It is not a backup. Coverage is partial and unpredictable, you do not control when it crawls, pages behind any friction are missed, and you cannot rely on a specific page from a specific month being there.

6. A scheduled offsite service

Paid, automatic, and the only option that runs without you. This is the category we are in. Every month, every public page is saved as HTML with its images, fonts and styles, a full-page screenshot is captured of each page, and a private link arrives by email.

It costs money, and it does not do everything. It cannot see member-only or password-protected pages, it does not hold your commerce orders or customer data, and it is not a restore button: putting a page back is a copy and paste job, not one click. If what you need is a one-click rollback inside Squarespace, no third party can give you that, including us.

Which one to pick

• Moving to WordPress: the built-in export, plus one of the others for everything the export drops.
• About to redesign, technical enough: duplicate the site, or run HTTrack or SiteSucker the day before.
• A few pages, one risky change: save them by hand. It is free and it works.
• You will not remember to do it again: a scheduled service, ours or anyone's, because the value is entirely in it happening without you.
• Already lost the site: check the Wayback Machine first, then your designer, then Squarespace support.

If you want to see what a saved copy of your own site actually looks like before deciding, you can back up one page free with no account. It takes about a minute and you get the files.