Jul
27

Moving from SquareSpace to WordPress

by Rob Pickering on 2010 July 27

: How-To

On July 20th, I moved my personal blog site, robpickering.com from SquareSpace to WordPress.  This article is about why I did it and then how I performed the task, maintaining all of my posts, post dates, migrating authors, and most importantly, keeping all of my user comments.  I’ll also discuss some of the downsides and what you’ll lose (and how to get it back).

The Why

SquareSpace is a great personal website hosting company.  They have an amazing platform and lots of options for building yourself a web presence, be it a blogging platform, or just a standard website.  However, those tools come at a price:  the inability to have complete control over your environment.  If their tools cannot do something you want, then you can’t do it.  If you want a certain widget (say a Tag Cloud) on your blog, forget it, there is no Tag Cloud widget.  Want to add Mint analytics to your blog?  Or *any* analytics besides the built in SquareSpace ones?  Probably not without a lot of work.

After a friend of mine asked me to solve a problem he was having with SSH support in WordPress, I found out that I liked the platform.  So, I setup a WordPress installation and began configuring it for my personal blog.  I eventually decided I liked it better than SquareSpace and tried to figure out how to move it.

Migrating from SquareSpace

SquareSpace does an excellent job in supporting a variety of ways of getting your site INTO their platform.  However, the support for leaving their platform is a bit limited, but can be made to work with some effort.

The first thing you’ll want to do is export all of your content.

Exporting Content

SquareSpace names each of your Blog pages a Journal.  You can have multiple Journal pages on a site, each with its own navigation tab.  Unfortunately, each Journal has to be exported individually.  I figured that the place to look for exporting your data would be under the Website Management area, probably under Data & Media.  There’s even a Data Snapshots selection.  Unfortunately, that’s just for making a backup of your data, a dead end.

To export your Journal (and all of the comments for all posts) you actually have to edit each page (repeat steps for each Journal):

  1. Log into your SquareSpace site
  2. Change into Structure Editing Mode
  3. Select configure this page to edit the page settings
  4. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the Journal Page Configuration options to Data Export and click Export Blog Data

    This will download a <information>.export.txt.html file, which is actually a Moveable Type formatted HTML file representing your Journal page, including Content, Authors, and Comments.

Now that you have your Journal exported, it’s time to import it into your WordPress site.

Preparing to Import

The only preparation you have to perform, prior to importing your Journal, is that any authors you had on your SquareSpace site should be created BEFORE you import your Journal.  However, WordPress will prompt you for author mappings when you import, so you could just assign all posts to your main account then update the posts after the fact.  Alternatively, WordPress WILL automatically create new accounts for you as it imports, if you want.  That’s better than SquareSpace will do for you.

Importing your Journal

To import your Moveable Type export file follow these steps:

  1. Access Import under the Tools menu
  2. Select MoveableType and Type Pad

    Note:  If you haven’t installed the Plugin previously, WordPress will prompt you to install it now, go ahead
  3. Click the Choose File button, and select the <information>.export.txt.html file you downloaded above
  4. Assign your Authors, or have WordPress automatically create them
  5. WordPress will now print a list of each article it imports, if it prints nothing, it imported nothing

You’ve now moved almost all of the content of your site from SquareSpace into WordPress.  Yea, almost…

The Bad News

There are two pieces of bad news I have to tell you about now.  The first isn’t too bad:

All of your Posts will have the same Status they had on SquareSpace, so if they were Published, they’re now Published on your WordPress site.  You’re probably going to want to immediately go edit every article and change the status of them to Draft.  That’s because…

None of your images/media have been exported or imported.

This isn’t an insurmountable task, but you’ll have to manually download all of your media from SquareSpace, and then manually re-upload it into your Posts in WordPress.  Fortunately for me, I have a Macintosh, so I just dragged each of my images out to my Desktop, then re-uploaded them into my articles.  This is by far the worst part of the process, so I’m open to other suggestions folks may have.

Note:  It may not appear that your Posts are missing images.  This is most likely because the images are being loaded from your old site, as the references are still pointing there.  You can leave this alone, but once you move the domain name, they’ll most likely break.  So, re-uploading is your best bet.

Tagged as: blogging, howto, squarespace, wordpress

  • http://www.sarahainsworth.com sarah ainsworth

    thank you so much for posting this! could not have done it without this tutorial!!! i have a mac as well so i will be just dragging and reposting the images. but still amazed at how fast the process was of moving all the text!

    thanks again, sarah

    • http://robpickering.com Rob Pickering

      Sarah, you are very welcome. Thank you so much for reading the article and I’m glad it helped you move your blog. If you liked it, please RT, Digg, Stumble, or Buzz it so others can find it as well. Thanks again for reading!

  • Samantha

    Rob, thank you so much! I’m with Sarah – I couldn’t have done it without your help! I had been trying a couple of different things with the same unsuccessful results, then I followed your instructions and it took me all of 1 minute to get it done!
    Thanks again!

    • http://robpickering.com Rob Pickering

      Samantha, glad it worked out so well. Welcome to WordPress. I’ll be doing a series of articles on WordPress now that I’m using this platform.

  • http://www.gettingunstuckllc.com Terrie Wurzbacher

    I echo the above comments, Rob. I’ve been looking for how to do this for 2 years plus. You’ve made it so easy for me now. The pictures will be a problem but not insurmountable. Thanks so much!

    Terrie

  • http://rowboatmedia.com Cynthia LaLuna

    Thanks so much for this great tutorial! I’ve been searching for a good way to do this for months.

    I don’t see any mention of categories – do categories move over with the export?
    Cynthia LaLuna recently posted..Why We Love Designing Websites for Lawyers

    • http://robpickering.com Rob Pickering

      Cynthia,

      You’re very welcome on the article, I’m glad it helped out. Yes, Categories and Tags will both move across, so no worries there. If you don’t like them, WordPress will also give you the ability to convert Categories to Tags and vice versa.

      -Rob
      Rob Pickering recently posted..OSX Hints and Tips

  • http://mamataraj.wordpress.com tara

    A big thanks for this. I was helping out a local non-profit move their blog – and I’ve never done anything like this before. You explained this so well. Thank you!

  • http://www.thejerichoroad.com Jan McKenzie

    Rob, I’ve been with SqSp for four years. Their stability is strong, they have great support, and are feature-rich in many respects. I would feel like leaving a friend. Just today I was having a formatting issue in the editor and they responded within *minutes*! But I didn’t like the solution they offered: write everything in our editor.

    However, for reasons similar to your own, I’m contemplating a move. And as I said above, I have cut and paste problems with SqSp, which they want to blame on the processor, be it Word or some other common brand. I don’t like the aesthetics of their editing space, nor it’s limited function set. Never have.

    I need to write somewhere else and paste it in. (I prefer writing in full-screen mode, in a clean space). If they cannot accept simple paragraph formating from Word, Pages, or WriteRoom without glitches, then I’ll have to make a change.

    Now that I’ve read your piece, I’m even more inclined to pack my bags. I appreciate the help. Thanks.

  • http://jenericholmer.com Eric Holmer

    Thanks for the walkthrough!

    Back when I first signed us up for squarespace, WordPress wasn’t half of the CMS it is today. I have tried to stick with squarespace but since most of the other sites I create are now in WordPress it just makes sense…

  • http://www.personaldevelopmentgodsway.com Doug Addison

    I have the business level of Sq Sp and like the fact it was easy to get a community website for my book up in a just a day. The downside is that I cannot do email campaigns without a lot of effort.

    How did you export you users?

  • Seth

    Can I transfer an entire website (theme included) into square space?

    • http://robpickering.com Rob Pickering

      Seth, to my knowledge, no. You cannot transfer your entire WordPress site, including Theme, into SquareSpace. Themes are in fact one of the reasons I moved from SquareSpace to WordPress, plug-in variety being one of the other reasons.

      That said, SquareSpace provides some tutorials on migrating from WordPress:

      Importing WordPress Entries – This allows you to move your Posts via the Web
      Importing from WordPress – This talks about doing file-level exports from WordPress and Imports into SquareSpace

      Hope that helps.

  • http://www.audiospeedlearning.com/blog Segovia Smith

    Great post Rob, thanks so much… and to everyone who’s frustrated with the image export options for SquareSpace (or should I say the lack there of!) I setup a quick tutorial of my own that includes and example spreadsheet and an Apple Automator script. Hope this helps someone else out there stuck in the same boat.

    http://www.audiospeedlearning.com/squarespace-wordpress
    Segovia Smith recently posted..SquareSpace to WordPress

  • http://www.pitch-university.com/ Diane Holmes

    Excellent article.  Thank you, Rob!  You’ve made my day.

  • http://twitter.com/BusyDating Busy Dating

    Thank you so much for this article!!! I have been searching for a while on how to move from SS to WP. Great post!

  • Tanya

    Thank you!!! You are a lifesaver.  

  • Anonymous

    Awesome I’m about to make the jump from squarespace as well, I jus dont like how there are no plugins

  • http://downtocode.net Dariusz

    Thanks for this one, exactly what I was looking for.

  • Alswank

    Does this still work?  I dont see the Export Blog Data after clicking the configure this page button…

    • http://robpickering.com Rob Pickering

      Unfortunately, I no longer have a SquareSpace account to confirm or deny this…perhaps another commenter can let us know if SquareSpace was losing so many people that they disabled the exporting.  I doubt they did, but you never know.

  • http://twitter.com/cooksmarts Jess Dang

    THANK YOU! I just had to do the same thing for my blog. Keeping website @ Squarespace but blog needed a lot more functionality.

  • http://HugeGamer.com/ Dynamite jack

    Thank you so much for writing this. It helped me A LOT.

  • http://www.risingshining.com/ Kelsey

    THANKS! I’m actually trying to convert to Typepad and it sounds like I have to convert from Squarespace to WordPress and WordPress to Typepad. I didn’t find the Squarespace staff to be overly helpful in giving details about exporting and their help articles and quite unhelpful. Thanks very much for writing this!

    • http://robpickering.com Rob Pickering

      Kelsey, you shouldn’t have to.  The export I use for this article is TypePad, so it natively exports in that format.

  • Elizabeth

    Thank you for all the info. I have been with SquareSpace since 09 and they were by first blog. unfortunatly they just don’t scale but as an amazing solution for the beginner.

    Any (new) ideas on how to migrate all my images? We are at over 180+ images… I blog a lot.

    Thanks!

    • http://robpickering.com Rob Pickering

      Elizabeth, another commenter, Greg, just posted an article that also takes care of the images, check it out here:  http://www.keleko.com/2012/importing-squarespace-into-wordpress/

  • http://jasonekim.com/ Jumbo

    Thanks for posting this. I am moving from Squarespace to WordPress and this was super helpful

  • http://twitter.com/PaulTheBookGuy Paul The Book Guy

    Thank you, saved me a lot of time. You rock.

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