How to Back Up a Squarespace Blog

Squarespace has no backup button for a blog. The two things it does offer are an XML export of one blog page and a 30-day window to restore deleted posts, and neither gives you a copy of the posts as readers saw them.

A real blog backup has three parts: the post text, the images, and the layout. Here is how to get each, using Squarespace's own tools where they work and a crawl of the public site where they do not.

What Squarespace gives you

The export. Squarespace's Exporting your site page says one blog page exports, with all of its posts and up to 1,000 comments per post, along with text blocks and image blocks. A second blog page does not export. Neither do drafts, audio, video, or product blocks, style settings, or custom CSS. The file is XML in WordPress's format, and images arrive as links to Squarespace's servers, not as files.

Deleted posts. If a post is deleted, it sits in Deleted Posts at the bottom of the blog page's panel for 30 days, per Restoring deleted pages and blog posts. A restored post comes back as a draft. After 30 days it is gone.

The RSS feed. Every blog page has a feed at its address followed by ?format=rss, per Finding your RSS feed URL. It carries recent posts, which makes it handy for a feed reader and not much use as an archive.

Nothing else. There is no version history. Squarespace's Troubleshooting lost content page says there is no auto-save or revision history, so a post you overwrite and save is replaced.

Method 1: Run the export every few months

Go to the site's settings, find Import and Export, and export. Keep the XML file with a date in the name. It is the only structured copy of your posts, with titles, dates, categories, and tags, and WordPress can import it directly.

What it misses: images as files, a second blog, drafts, and the design. If the site is deleted or the subscription ends, the image links in the file stop working. Download the images separately if they matter.

Method 2: Keep the originals outside Squarespace

Write posts in a document first, keep the image originals in a folder, and paste into Squarespace. This is free and it works for the posts you write from now on. It does nothing for the years of posts already published, and it does not record how the posts looked.

Method 3: Copy the public blog as readers see it

A crawl of the public site saves each post's page as HTML, with a full-page screenshot and the images, fonts, and stylesheets it uses. This is the copy you open when a post vanishes, when a redesign breaks old layouts, or when you leave Squarespace and need to rebuild.

Dead Simple Backups does this on the 1st of every month. Paste the site's address and it saves every public page, blog posts included, as HTML plus a screenshot, with a plain-text copy of each post for pasting into whatever comes next. It also lists which pages were added, removed, or edited since the previous month, which is how you notice a post that disappeared. It reads the public site only: draft posts and anything behind a password or member login are not included, and it cannot load posts back into Squarespace. Restoring means pasting the text back in and re-uploading images.

A blog with hundreds of posts

Squarespace creates a page for every post, plus pages for each tag and category. A blog with 400 posts is well over 400 pages. Make sure whatever you use to copy it does not stop at a small page count. We save every public page a visitor can reach, up to 4 GB per backup.

What to keep, and how often

• The XML export, quarterly or before any big change, because it is the only copy WordPress can import.
• Image originals, as you publish, because no export includes them as files.
• A public-site copy, monthly, because it is the only record of how posts looked and the fastest way to get text and images back.

If you want to see what the public-site copy looks like before setting anything up, paste one post's address into the free preview on our homepage. You get that page as HTML with a full-page screenshot in about a minute, no account needed.

Q: Does Squarespace back up blog posts automatically?

No. Squarespace keeps the live site, restores deleted posts for 30 days, and exports one blog page as XML on request. There is no automatic copy you can download, and no version history for a post you overwrote.

Q: Can I export all my Squarespace blog posts with images?

The export includes the posts of one blog page and links to the images, not the image files. To keep the images you download them separately or copy the public pages, which saves the image files alongside each post.

Q: How do I recover a deleted Squarespace blog post?

Open the blog page's panel, click Deleted Posts at the bottom, and restore it. This works for 30 days after deletion and the post comes back as a draft. After 30 days, the only source is a copy made before the deletion.

Q: Can I import a blog backup back into Squarespace?

Squarespace imports content from WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr. It does not import HTML pages, so a copy of the public blog is rebuilt by pasting, not imported.