Dead Simple Backups vs Squarespace's Built-In Export
Squarespace's export button produces an XML file. Ours produces a zip. They are not two versions of the same thing.
The export
Made for moving content into WordPress. It carries blog posts (one blog at a time) with their text, dates, tags, and categories, and the text of regular pages. It leaves out products, galleries as pages, events, page layouts, styles, custom CSS, and image files (it references images by address). Read Squarespace export limitations for the full list.
Strengths: free, structured, importable into WordPress with dates and categories intact.
Weaknesses: it is not a picture of your site, and it stops being useful the day the Squarespace site is deleted, because the image addresses in it point at Squarespace.
The backup
A copy of the public site as visitors saw it on a date: every page as HTML, a full-page screenshot of every page, and the images, fonts, and stylesheets copied into the zip, so each page opens offline and looks right. Plus a theme report with fonts, hex codes, and integrations. Done monthly, kept for 12 months.
Strengths: complete appearance, product and gallery pages included as pages, images as files, survives the site being deleted, no login needed.
Weaknesses: it is not importable anywhere. Rebuilding is by hand, with the copy open beside you.
Which one you need
- Moving blog posts to WordPress: the export, and a backup for everything else on the site.
- Protecting a site you plan to keep: the backup. The export has nothing to say about a homepage that broke.
- Leaving Squarespace for Webflow, Framer, or a developer: the backup, because those tools cannot read the export anyway.
- Legal or compliance record of what the site said: the backup, with its screenshots.
Take the export whenever you like; it is free. Take the free backup of one page to see the difference.
Q: Is the Squarespace export a backup?
No. It is a content export of posts and page text for WordPress. It does not include the design, product pages, or image files.
Q: Can I restore a Squarespace site from its export?
Only the blog posts and page text, and only by importing into another platform. Squarespace itself does not import its own export back into a site.
Squarespace doesn't give you a copy of your site. We do: every public page, full-page screenshots, images and fonts, in your inbox on the 1st.
Back up my site free