Squarespace Export Limitations: What the Export Leaves Out

Squarespace's export lives under Settings and produces an XML file in a WordPress-flavored format. It is useful for exactly one job: moving blog posts and simple pages into WordPress. People discover its limits the day they need something else from it.

What the export includes

• Blog posts from one blog, with their text, dates, tags, and categories.
• Regular pages' text content.
• Some galleries, as lists of image references.

What it leaves out

At the time of writing, the export does not include:

• Product pages and store content. Products, variants, prices, and product images do not export.
• Event, album, and index pages. Squarespace's own page types have no WordPress equivalent, so they are skipped.
• Page layouts and sections. You get text, not the arrangement of blocks and sections that made the page look the way it did.
• Styles, fonts, colors, and custom CSS. None of the design travels.
• Images as files. The export references images by address on Squarespace's servers. If the site is later deleted, those references point at nothing.
• A second blog. Only one blog collection exports at a time.
• Member areas, form submissions, and settings. These live outside the page content.

What this means in practice

If you are moving to WordPress and mainly care about posts, the export saves typing. For anything else, it is not a copy of your site. A site with a shop, a portfolio, or a carefully laid out homepage comes out of the export as a few paragraphs.

What to use instead

For a record of the site as visitors saw it, crawl the public pages. Dead Simple Backups saves every public page as HTML, takes a full-page screenshot of each, and copies the images, fonts, and stylesheets into the zip, so each page opens offline and looks like the original. The theme report lists the fonts and hex codes. Product pages and galleries are captured as pages, which is what a developer rebuilding them needs.

Do both if you are migrating: the export for post data, the crawl for everything the export leaves out.

Q: Does Squarespace export include images?

It includes references to image addresses on Squarespace's servers, not the image files. The addresses stop working if the site is deleted.

Q: Can I export my Squarespace store?

Products can be exported as a CSV from the Commerce area, which covers the data but not the product pages' design or images. The site export does not include store content.