Migrate Your Ecommerce Site from Squarespace When the Shop Outgrows the Template
For Squarespace owners whose shop started as a corner of a beautiful website and is now the business. We explain what Squarespace does well, where stores built on it hit limits, and how we move you to a store built for your catalogue with every URL redirected.
“It's a Big Internet. You've Got To Stand Out.”
No obligation. Tell us what you sell and where, and a person replies.
- Room for the whole catalogue. Products, options and variants modelled the way you actually sell, without a template's caps.
- SEO you can actually control. URLs, structured data, crawl rules and category pages set for your store instead of for every site on the platform.
- Nothing lost in the move. Every product and page URL mapped and 301 redirected, and every product carried across.
Score this for my business
01Custom Ecommerce Website Design
Start here.
Squarespace builds some of the best-looking websites on the internet, and many shops start as a page on one of them. The trouble comes when the shop stops being a page on the website and becomes the business, because Squarespace was designed for the website first. What follows gives both sides a fair hearing and explains how to migrate ecommerce site from Squarespace builds to a store made for your catalogue without losing the rankings you have.
02Custom Ecommerce Website Design
What Squarespace gets right
Squarespace deserves its reputation for design. The templates are polished, typography and images look good with little effort, and a non-technical owner can keep the site up to date without calling anyone. Hosting, security certificates and updates are handled, and nothing breaks because a plugin updated overnight.
For a small catalogue attached to a strong brand, a maker, a photographer, a studio selling a handful of products, it can be all you need. The shop, the blog, the booking page and the brand story sit in one tidy place.
Squarespace is also a step up from the bargain builders we took apart in 2015 in our honest review of Wix for ecommerce: your own domain, editable titles and descriptions, and a sitemap made for you. The limits below have little to do with quality. They come from a platform designed for websites being asked to run a store.
if your shop is small and Squarespace is serving it well, tell us, and we will help you sell more from it before anyone mentions moving.
03Custom Ecommerce Website Design
Built for portfolios first: where the templates stop
Squarespace's editor lets you place blocks anywhere on a page, which is wonderful for an about page. Product and shop pages are a different story: they follow fixed layouts with a limited set of options, so every product in your store is presented the same way, in the order the platform chose.
That matters when products need different treatment. A product with a size guide, a comparison table, a video and a set of related accessories does not fit a template designed for a photo, a price and a button. Owners end up stuffing the description field, or building separate regular pages that link to the product, which splits the content search engines see.
Custom code goes in the slots Squarespace provides
You can add code into the spaces Squarespace provides, but you cannot change the template's own code. Anything the platform does not expose stays out of reach, however much you are willing to pay a developer.
send us the product page you wish looked different, and we will show you how it would be laid out on a store built around that product.
04Custom Ecommerce Website Design
Catalogue and variant limits
Squarespace sets a fixed cap on the number of variants a single product can have and on the number of option types you can combine. A simple catalogue never notices the cap, but a catalogue with sizes, colours, materials and finishes reaches it quickly, and the owner starts splitting one product into several, which confuses buyers and scatters your reviews and search signals.
The same goes for products that need logic rather than a list: a configurator where one choice changes the next, personalisation that changes the price, bundles built from other products, trade pricing for logged-in buyers, or stock held in more than one location. Each becomes a workaround or an outside tool, and every outside tool is another monthly cost and another thing to keep in sync.
send us your full product and option list, including what you plan to add next year, and we will tell you where Squarespace's limits will bite.
05Custom Ecommerce Website Design
Checkout, payments and integrations
Squarespace's checkout is tidy and trustworthy, but Squarespace decides how it works. You choose from a short list of supported payment processors, the steps and fields are largely fixed, and depending on your plan, Squarespace may add its own transaction fee on top of card processing. Check your current plan's billing before comparing costs.
The connections a growing store needs
As a store grows it needs to talk to other systems: inventory and warehouse software, shipping and fulfilment services, accounting, marketplaces and email. Squarespace has an extensions marketplace and an API, but they are much smaller than a store you own, and many connections run through a third-party connector that adds another subscription and another point of failure.
On a store built for you, the checkout and its connections are designed around your business, then tested, which is the work our conversion rate optimization service for online stores does every day.
list the systems your store has to talk to and how they connect today, and we will show you which connections a custom store would make direct.
06Custom Ecommerce Website Design
Speed and SEO control
Every Squarespace page loads the platform's shared scripts and styles, whether that page needs them or not, and you cannot strip them out. Images are handled well, but the weight of the template framework sits on every product page, and on a phone that weight is felt.
What you can and cannot change for search
You can edit page titles, descriptions, URL slugs and image alt text, and a sitemap is generated for you. What you cannot do is edit the robots file directly, control the structured data on product pages in any detail, or change the URL pattern: product pages live under your shop page's address followed by a /p/ folder, so a product URL carries a fixed marker rather than its category.
Category pages are the bigger issue. Many Squarespace shops present categories as filtered views of one shop page rather than as real landing pages with their own copy, so they struggle to rank for the category searches that bring buyers. That is the first thing our ecommerce SEO specialists look at after a move.
ask us to check which of your shop and category pages are actually indexed, and what they rank for today.
07Custom Ecommerce Website Design
What you can take with you, and what you cannot
A closed platform's limits show most clearly when you try to leave it. Squarespace's site export was built mainly to move blog posts and basic pages to WordPress. Store pages and products are not part of it, and neither are layouts or styling.
- Products leave through a separate product spreadsheet export, with images re-collected from the live site where needed.
- Customers and orders have their own exports and come across to the new store with their history.
- Passwords never move between platforms, so returning customers set a new one.
- Reviews depend on how they were added, through an extension, an embedded widget or a built-in feature, and each exports differently.
- Page design does not export at all, so it is rebuilt, which is a good moment to rebuild it properly.
Images live on Squarespace's servers
Your product photos are served from Squarespace's own image servers instead of your domain, and they usually carry machine-made file names. Any image search traffic you have is tied to addresses you do not own. On the new store, images are re-hosted on your domain with descriptive file names and alt text, so image search works for you from the first day.
ask for an export check before you decide; we will tell you exactly what leaves cleanly and what needs rebuilding.
08Custom Ecommerce Website Design
What your Squarespace shop gains as a custom store
On a custom store, the catalogue, the checkout and the SEO are shaped by your business instead of by a template. The design process, from research through wireframes, prototype and test index, is set out on our custom ecommerce website design page. In practice, these are the changes owners feel first.
- Products get the options they need. Variants, configurators, personalisation and bundles are modelled the way you sell instead of split across duplicate listings.
- Every product page fits its product. Size guides, comparison tables, video and related items sit on the product page itself, where buyers and search engines expect them.
- Category pages become landing pages. Each category has its own address, copy and structure, built to rank for the searches that bring buyers.
- The checkout and payment provider are your choice, along with the connections to inventory, shipping, accounting and email.
- Pages load only what they use, so the product page is quick on a phone.
What you give up is the all-in-one simplicity of one monthly plan covering everything. We set out hosting and upkeep before any work starts, so you compare like with like.
tell us the three things you would change about your shop tomorrow if the platform let you, and we will show you how each works when the store is built for you.
09Custom Ecommerce Website Design
How we move a Squarespace store without losing rankings
A Squarespace move has one extra step most owners forget: the domain and the email. Many owners registered their domain through Squarespace and run their business email through it as well. We plan the domain transfer or DNS change so the website moves and your email keeps arriving, without a gap on either.
- URL map. We crawl the site and list every URL: products, shop pages, category and tag views, blog posts, pages and any URL mappings you have already set up, flagging the ones that bring traffic.
- 301 redirects. Every old URL gets a permanent redirect to its closest new page, with filtered shop views pointed at the right new category.
- Data export. Products and images, customers, full order history and reviews, pulled from each of Squarespace's separate exports and checked against the live site.
- Test index. The complete new store on a private, unindexed address with every page listed, checked against the URL map before launch.
- Parallel run. Squarespace keeps trading while the new store is tested with real products, test-mode payments and your real shipping rules.
- Cutover. Final orders and customers synced, domain pointed at the new store, redirects live, search engines notified, then daily checks on crawl reports, rankings and orders.
In the first weeks after launch we compare the old URL list against what search engines are crawling, fix any redirect that lands on the wrong page, and check that product structured data is being read. We count a migration as finished once rankings and orders have settled, which is usually some weeks after launch day.
The same plan, adapted to each platform, runs for stores leaving WordPress and WooCommerce, merchants stepping off Shopify, and brands building their own store beside Amazon.
10Custom Ecommerce Website Design
What we would measure for your business.
The parts of this page we will not guess at.
The live site has never published a price for anything. Rather than invent a plausible-looking number, each item is here and blank until it is set.
Get these lines filled in for your business. It takes what you sell, where, and your site.
11Custom Ecommerce Website Design
The questions that come up every time.
Is Squarespace good for ecommerce?
For a small shop attached to a strong brand site, it can be. The templates are polished, the editor is easy, and hosting and security are handled. It becomes a poor fit as the store grows: large catalogues with many options, products that need custom logic, integrations with inventory and fulfilment systems, and stores that depend on search traffic to category pages all push against the limits of a platform designed first for good-looking websites.
Will I lose my Google rankings if I move away from Squarespace?
Not if the migration is run carefully. We crawl your site and list every URL, including product pages, shop pages, category and tag views, blog posts and pages, then give each one a 301 redirect to its closest page on the new store. Everything is checked on a private test index before the domain moves, and after cutover we watch crawl reports, rankings and orders closely so any gap is fixed quickly.
Why does Squarespace's own export not include my products?
Squarespace's site export was designed mainly to move blog content and basic pages to WordPress. Store pages and products are not part of that file, so products leave through a separate product spreadsheet export, and orders and customers through their own exports. Layouts and styling do not export at all. We use each of those exports and rebuild the page content and design on the new store, which is why the URL map is drawn up before anything else.
Can my customers keep their accounts?
Customer records and order history can be exported and imported, so your customer list and their purchase history come across. Passwords never move between platforms, from Squarespace or anywhere else, so returning customers set a new one the first time they sign in. We write the reset email with you so it is clear, branded and expected rather than alarming.
Is Squarespace better than Wix for SEO?
Squarespace gives you more sensible SEO basics than the bargain builders we criticised in 2015: your own domain, editable titles, descriptions and URLs, and an automatic sitemap. But it shares the core problem of any closed template builder. You can only change what the platform exposes, and structured data, crawl rules and URL structure are largely decided for you. For a brand site that is often fine. For a store competing on product and category searches, it is a limit.
Ask yours. The form reaches the people who would be doing the work.
12Custom Ecommerce Website Design
The pages that sit either side of this one.
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