Squarespace has an Export Site button. It hands you a tidy XML file. It looks like your website in a box.
It is not. There are no products in it. No orders. No customers. And if you run more than one blog, only one of them is in there.
That file is the single most expensive misunderstanding in this migration, because people cancel their Squarespace plan while holding something they believe is a backup of their store.
I spend most of my time on Magento, WooCommerce and BigCommerce migrations rather than Squarespace ones. But the failure mode is identical on every platform I have moved a store off, and it is always the same mistake: somebody trusts the export button instead of checking what came out of it. So check what came out of it.
What that XML file actually contains
The site export is a WordPress-format XML. Not a Shopify format. A WordPress one. Which tells you something about who it was built for, and it was not you.
Inside it you get your layout pages, your text and image blocks, and one blog page with its posts and comments. That is broadly it.
What is not inside it: your store pages. Your products. Your orders. Your customers. Any blog beyond the first one. Your drafts. Your styling. Your custom CSS.
And here is the kicker. Shopify has no importer for that XML anyway. There is no screen where you upload a WordPress-format file to Shopify and get a store. So the one file Squarespace calls a site export is a file Shopify cannot read.
So where is your store?
In three other places, each a separate export you have to go and find.
Products come out as their own CSV, from the Commerce area. Physical and service products only. Digital and download products cannot be exported at all. If you sell files, they get re-uploaded by hand or pulled through the API. There is no third option.
That product CSV also leaves things out, and the omissions are irritating. No customer reviews. No variant images. No image alt text. So even the export that does contain your products does not contain your product photography properly, and your alt text, which you wrote for accessibility and for image search, is simply gone.
Orders come out as a separate CSV from the Orders panel. Fine to export. The problem is on the other side: Shopify has no native order import. None. You are using a third party app or the API, and most apps will only bring across fulfilled orders.
Customers come out of the Contacts panel. Then you hit a paperwork problem. Shopify’s customer import expects ISO province and country codes, and Squarespace does not give you those. Shopify’s customer importer also has no column mapping, so your file has to match its template exactly. That is a spreadsheet afternoon nobody quotes for.
Your reviews are not coming
Shopify’s own migration documentation says it plainly. You cannot export or migrate reviews from Squarespace to Shopify.
They are not in the product CSV. They are not in the XML. They are not coming.
And this costs you more than it looks like it does. Reviews are what put star ratings into your Google results. The stars come from structured data that needs real reviews behind it. Lose the reviews and every product listing you had them on gets duller in search overnight. Your position may not move at all. Your click-through rate will.
Pick your Shopify reviews app early and start gathering into it before you cut over, not after.
The blog images time bomb
Say you get your blog out of that XML and into Shopify. It looks fine. You check a few posts, images are there, you are happy.
Those images are still being served from Squarespace’s CDN. The XML carried the URLs, not the files.
Cancel your Squarespace plan and every image in every post goes blank at once. Not immediately, not with a warning. Just one day, blank.
Do not cancel Squarespace until every image is re-hosted on Shopify and the links are rewritten. Keep paying for a month or two after launch. It is the cheapest insurance in the whole project.
The URL trap you have to test
Squarespace product URLs look like /shop/p/blue-mug. The store page slug comes first, then a mandatory /p/, then the product. You cannot remove that /p/ on Squarespace 7.1. It is baked in.
Now the awkward part. Shopify keeps a list of reserved paths that you are not allowed to create redirects from. That list includes /cart, /orders, /services, /apps, and /shop.
If your Squarespace store page is at /shop, then every product URL you own starts with a path Shopify treats as reserved.
I want to be straight with you about what I know here. I know the restriction exists on the bare path. I have not been able to confirm from Shopify’s documentation whether it also blocks sub-paths like /shop/p/blue-mug. That is a very different situation, and it is the difference between a minor annoyance and losing the link equity on every product page you own.
So test it on a development store before you promise anyone a redirect plan. Set up one redirect from a /shop/p/ path and see whether Shopify accepts it. Ten minutes of testing beats a confident guess, and this is exactly the sort of thing a migration quote will not have thought about.
If it turns out to be blocked, your fallbacks are a redirect app that handles patterns, or handling it at the theme or edge level. Neither is impossible. Both need to be scoped in, not discovered on launch night.
The rest of the redirect map
Everything else is more ordinary. Products go to /products/handle. Pages pick up a prefix and become /pages/about. Your blog becomes /blogs/news/post-name.
Check your blog URL format before you assume it. Squarespace lets you configure whether the date is in the post URL, so plenty of sites are running /blog/2024/03/12/my-post rather than /blog/my-post. Crawl the live site and look. Do not guess.
And do not do the thing everyone does when they run out of patience, which is to redirect anything unmatched to the homepage. Google treats a bulk homepage redirect as a soft 404 and passes no value through it. You would be better off letting those pages 404 honestly than pretending you handled them.
Google’s own advice on site moves is worth internalising. Expect ranking fluctuation while it settles. A medium site takes a few weeks for most pages to reindex. And keep your redirects live for at least a year. Not a month. A year.
The variant ceiling that pushes people off Squarespace
Squarespace allows up to six options per product and 250 variant combinations. That number is a hard wall and it is why a lot of stores end up moving.
Five sizes times ten colours times six finishes is 300 combinations. Squarespace will not take it. You are splitting the product into several products and confusing your customers, or you are leaving money on the table.
Shopify allows 2,048 variants per product, raised from 100 back in October 2025. So on combinations, Shopify wins by a mile.
But there is a catch and it runs the other way. Shopify allows only three options per product. Squarespace allows six. So if your product genuinely has four or five dimensions, Squarespace was more flexible than Shopify on that specific axis, and moving forces a decision. One of those dimensions has to become a metafield, or a line item property, or a separate product.
Work out which of your products have more than three dimensions before you migrate, not after. It is a merchandising decision and no tool will make it for you.
Be honest about what you are giving up
Squarespace is better than the internet gives it credit for, and I would rather you moved with your eyes open.
It has native reviews, native subscriptions, and abandoned cart recovery. Most articles telling you to leave claim it does not. They are wrong. The real limit on abandoned carts is that you get one email at a fixed delay, not a proper sequence, and that is a fair reason to want more, but it is not the same as not having it.
Its blogging is genuinely better than Shopify’s. Shopify’s blog is an afterthought and you will feel that if you are a content-led business.
Member areas and courses are built in on Squarespace. Shopify has no native equivalent, so if you sell memberships, that whole part of your business is a rebuild on a third party platform, and your existing subscribers cannot be transferred. They have to re-subscribe. Model that churn honestly before you decide.
And Squarespace is cheaper at low volume, especially once you count the Shopify apps you will end up paying for monthly to replace things Squarespace gave you in the box.
Move because you need the app ecosystem, the checkout control, real multi-currency, or the catalog headroom. Those are good reasons. Do not move because a blog post told you Squarespace has no reviews.
The order I would work in
- Crawl the live Squarespace site. Every URL, title and meta description. Do this while it still exists.
- Take all three exports: products, orders, contacts. Do not assume the XML is doing any of that.
- List your digital products separately. They are not in any export and they are all going to be re-uploaded by hand.
- Test a
/shop/p/redirect on a Shopify dev store. Find out now, not later. - Find every product with more than three option dimensions and decide what happens to the extras.
- Choose the reviews app and start collecting.
- Re-host every blog image on Shopify and rewrite the links.
- Launch on passwordless customer accounts so there is no password migration and no reset wave.
- Load your redirects the same hour you point the domain.
- Keep paying for Squarespace for a month or two. Until every image is re-hosted and the traffic is stable, that site is your only backup.
The short version
A squarespace to shopify move is not hard because the platforms are complicated. It is hard because the export you were handed is not the export you thought you had, and half the things you assumed were in it are not.
Get your data out properly, while the old site is still up. Test the redirect trap before you scope. Do not cancel until the images are re-hosted.
Do those and the rest is ordinary work. Skip them and you will be rebuilding your own website from memory, with your blog images already gone.
If you want someone to look at your catalog and tell you where the landmines are before you start, that is the sort of thing I do.
