You’ve decided to move from Squarespace to Showit. Maybe you’re tired of fighting Squarespace’s templates every time you want something to look a specific way, or maybe you’ve seen what other business owners in your industry have built and you want that kind of freedom.

Then the fear kicks in: what happens to everything you’ve already built? Your blog posts, the page that finally started ranking, the link a podcast host shared last year.

The short answer is that it all comes with you, if the move is handled properly. Here’s what that actually involves.

First, what does “migration” really mean?

Moving from Squarespace to Showit isn’t like moving from one WordPress theme to another. There’s no button that transfers your site over. Squarespace and Showit are completely separate platforms, so your website gets rebuilt in Showit and your content gets carried across.

Three things move separately:

• Your domain. It stays yours. You’ll point it at Showit instead of Squarespace when you launch.
• Your pages. Your copy and images get moved over as your new site is built. There’s no automatic import for these.
• Your blog posts. These can be imported, because Showit uses WordPress for blogging. More on that below.

The piece most people don’t think about, and the piece that actually protects your search rankings, is your URLs.

Why URLs matter more than anything else

Google doesn’t rank your website. It ranks individual pages, at individual addresses.

If your services page lives at yoursite.com/services today and your new Showit page lives at yoursite.com/what-i-offer, Google sees the old page as gone. Anyone clicking your old link from search results hits an error page, and the ranking that page built up over the years doesn’t transfer on its own.

The fix is straightforward, and it’s two rules:

1. Keep the same URL wherever you can. Showit lets you set each page’s address, so if your Squarespace page was /services, name the Showit page /services. Nothing else needed.
2. Redirect anything that changes. A 301 redirect tells Google the page moved permanently, so visitors land in the right place and most of the ranking value follows.

That’s the whole strategy. Everything below is how to carry it out.

The migration, step by step

1. Make a list of every URL you have now

Before anything gets built, you need to know what exists. Visit yoursite.com/sitemap.xml — Squarespace generates this automatically, and it lists every page and post.

If you have Google Search Console set up, the Pages report is even more useful, because it shows which URLs actually get traffic. Those are the ones that matter most.

Put them all in a spreadsheet. You’ll use it twice: once to plan your new site, and once after launch to check nothing broke.

2. Export your content

In Squarespace, go to Settings → Import & Export and export your site. You’ll get a WordPress-compatible file (a .wxr file) containing your pages and blog posts.

Two things to know: Squarespace only exports one blog, so if you have several, you’ll need to handle the extras manually. And product pages, album pages, and event pages don’t export at all.

Whatever doesn’t export gets copied over by hand. Tedious, but not complicated.

3. Plan your URLs before you design

This is the step people skip, and it’s the one that costs them.

Take your spreadsheet and add a column for the new Showit URL of each page. Match the old address whenever you can. When you can’t — because you’re combining three thin pages into one, or finally fixing a URL that never made sense — write down where that old URL should redirect to instead.

Send each old URL to the closest matching page, never to your homepage. A redirect to the homepage tells Google the old page has no real replacement, and you lose most of the value.

Don’t want to build the spreadsheet? Migration is handled for you in Website in a Week.

4. Import your blog

Showit blogs run on WordPress, which is why your Squarespace export is in WordPress format. In your WordPress dashboard, go to Tools → Import, install the WordPress importer, and upload your export file.

Then check your permalinks under Settings → Permalinks. This is where blog rankings usually get lost. Squarespace blog posts typically live at /blog/post-name, while WordPress often defaults to a date-based structure like /2026/07/09/post-name/. Either set your permalinks to match your old structure, or redirect every post individually using a plugin like Redirection.

Also check your images after importing. They don’t always come across cleanly.

5. Build the site in Showit

Now the fun part. Your design gets built, your content goes in, and each page gets the URL from your spreadsheet.

While you’re there, carry over your page titles and meta descriptions, or improve them. These are what show up in search results, and there’s no reason to lose the ones that were working.

6. Set up your redirects

Redirects get handled in two places, depending on what you’re redirecting.

Your pages go through Showit. In the Showit app, open the Site panel on the left, click Site Settings, click Edit next to your domain, then click the gear icon in the Update Domain window. Add the old page slug and where it should point, and click Add.

One rule catches people here: a redirect only works if the old page isn’t live. If a Showit page still exists with that name, Showit shows the page instead of following the redirect. Delete or unpublish the old page first.

Your blog posts go through WordPress, using the Redirection plugin. This is the side that takes the most time if you have years of posts, and it’s why blog migration is usually treated separately.

A couple of details worth knowing: your destination can be just the slug (about) or a full URL, but if the destination has more than one slash in its path, use the full URL. And URLs aren’t case-sensitive in Showit, so you don’t need separate redirects for capitalized versions.

7. Launch, then check your work

Point your domain at Showit, and don’t cancel Squarespace until you’ve confirmed everything resolves correctly.

Then, in the first week:

• Submit your new sitemap in Google Search Console
• Test a handful of old URLs from your spreadsheet and confirm they land on the right pages
• Watch the Pages report for “Not found (404)” errors over the next few weeks

Will your rankings drop?

Expect some movement. A small dip for a few weeks is normal after any migration, because Google has to recrawl your site and re-evaluate every page. It usually recovers, and often improves, since Showit sites tend to load faster and be easier to structure well.

A big, sustained drop means something specific went wrong, almost always a missed redirect. That’s why the spreadsheet matters.

What nobody can honestly promise you is that your rankings won’t change at all. Anyone who does is overselling. What a careful migration does is remove every avoidable reason for them to fall.

How long does this take?

For a straightforward 5-page site with no blog, the migration piece adds very little to a website build. Most of the work is designing the new site, not moving the content.

Blogs are what add time. A blog with 50 posts means 50 URLs to check and potentially 50 redirects to set up, which is why blog migration is usually handled separately.

Doing it yourself vs. handing it off

If you’re comfortable in Search Console, know what a 301 redirect is, and have a small site, this is absolutely something you can do yourself. The steps above are the whole process.

If your site has years of content, or the thought of touching DNS settings makes you want to close your laptop, this is a good thing to hand off.

Thinking about making the move?

When you book a Website in a Week with me, the backend transfer is handled for you. I map your old URLs, set up the redirects, carry over your page titles and descriptions, and connect your domain to Showit, so you never have to open Search Console or touch a DNS setting.

Your blog is the one piece that’s separate: blog design and migration come with The Elevated, or you can add them to your Website in a Week.