What Happens to Your Site If You Cancel Squarespace?

If you cancel Squarespace, the site stays online until the end of the period you have paid for, then goes offline. Visitors see a "Website expired" page instead of your site, and you do not get a copy of the pages when that happens.

Here is what Squarespace keeps, what it deletes, and what to do before you press the button. The facts are from Squarespace's Cancel your website subscription and Reactivating a site pages.

What happens on the day

Canceling stops automatic payments and takes the site offline when the paid period ends. Squarespace keeps the site's data so you can reactivate it by logging in and resubscribing. You can still log in after it expires to manage billing, domains, and past commerce data such as orders and customers.

The public site is gone. Every page shows the expired message, and search engines drop the pages from their results over the following weeks.

What happens after 30 days

Squarespace's reactivation page says that content on a site expired for more than 30 days may be permanently deleted, and that content which does not reappear after reactivation is not recoverable. Treat 30 days after the site goes offline as the last day the content exists at Squarespace.

What you do not get

• No download. Squarespace does not send you a zip of the site. The export in the settings is an XML file of one blog page's posts and page text, without layouts, product pages, image files, or styles.
• No restore later. Reactivating within the window brings the site back as it was. After the window there is nothing to bring back, because Squarespace has no import for site copies.
• No public copy. Search engine caches fade, and the Wayback Machine holds whatever it happened to crawl. Neither is a copy of your site.

What stays yours

• The domain, if it is registered through Squarespace, does not expire with the site. It keeps auto-renewing on its own date, per What to do with your domain if you cancel your website. Decide whether to keep it, transfer it, or turn off its renewal.
• Other subscriptions such as Google Workspace, Email Campaigns, and Acuity Scheduling are separate and keep billing until you cancel them.
• The account. You can log in, see invoices, and reactivate.

Before you cancel

1. Copy the public site. Every page as HTML with a full-page screenshot and the images, fonts, and stylesheets. This is the only complete record of what the site said and how it looked. Do it while the site is online; there is nothing to copy afterward.
2. Run the export if you have blog posts you may move to WordPress. It is the only structured copy of them.
3. Export products as a CSV from the commerce area if you have a store, and download any form submissions and mailing lists.
4. Note the address of every page so you can set up redirects on the next site.
5. Download invoices and turn off auto-renew on anything you do not want to keep paying for.
6. Plan the domain. Point it at the new site, or at a placeholder, before the old one goes dark.

Dead Simple Backups does step 1 in one run: paste the site's address and every public page is saved as HTML plus a screenshot, with images and fonts, and emailed to you as a private link. If you are leaving for good, take the copy and cancel us too; you keep every backup you have received. It reads only what a visitor can see, so password-protected and members-only pages are not included, and it cannot put the site back into Squarespace. It is what you rebuild from.

If you might come back

Reactivate within 30 days and the site should return as you left it, though Squarespace says it can take a few hours for content to repopulate. Past that, assume it is gone and rebuild from your copy.

To see what a copy looks like before you decide anything, paste any page into the free preview on our homepage. It takes about a minute and needs no account.

Q: Does Squarespace delete your site when you cancel?

Not immediately. The site goes offline at the end of the paid period and can be reactivated. Squarespace says content may be permanently deleted once the site has been expired for more than 30 days.

Q: Can I download my Squarespace site before canceling?

Not from Squarespace. The export is an XML file of posts and page text. To keep the site as visitors saw it, copy the public pages as HTML and screenshots while it is still online.

Q: What happens to my domain if I cancel Squarespace?

A domain registered through Squarespace stays yours and keeps renewing on its own schedule. You can keep it, transfer it to another registrar, or turn off auto-renew.

Q: Can I reactivate a canceled Squarespace site?

Yes, by logging in and resubscribing. Within 30 days the content should come back as you left it. After that it may have been permanently deleted.