Can you export a Squarespace site? What is actually in the file
Yes, and it is an .xml file with less in it than most people expect. One blog page, layout pages, text and image blocks — and no design at all, because style settings and custom CSS are on the list of things that do not export. Here is what is in it, the four other exports you also need, and the order to do them in.
Squarespace does have an export. That is the good news, and it is genuinely more than Wix offers. The rest of the news is that the file contains less than the word "export" suggests, and the gap is almost entirely the part you paid a designer for.
Everything below is from Squarespace's own help centre, read on 27 September 2026. I fetched the page rather than trusting a summary of it, which turned out to matter: a search result confidently listed portfolio and store pages as exportable, and Squarespace's own page lists them under what does not export.
What is actually in the file
The export is a single .xml file, in the shape WordPress imports.
Read the right-hand column twice. Three things on it decide whether this is an export or a souvenir.
Your design is not in it. Style settings and custom CSS are both on Squarespace's own list of what does not export. Whatever you get out, it will not look like your site — you are exporting words and pictures, and rebuilding the appearance from scratch wherever you land.
One blog page. If your site has several, you choose a primary one and the others stay. Posts bring up to 1000 comments each, which is generous, but a site built around multiple blogs does not come out whole.
Most page types do not export at all. Squarespace names them: album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio and store pages. If you are a photographer whose site is portfolio pages, or a shop whose site is store pages, the export is missing the actual site. Gallery pages do export, but only on version 7.0.
Also missing: anything in page-specific headers, footers and sidebars, plus audio, video and product blocks, dropdowns, and drafts.
Images come out one at a time
This is the one that costs a real afternoon. There is no bulk image download. Squarespace's answer is the Asset library, one file at a time.
For a site with forty images that is forty clicks, and it is the single slowest job in the whole move, so start it before you need it rather than on the day you are switching.
The exports that are not the site export
The .xml is one of five things to collect, and the other four are in different places:
- Products export to
.csv, up to 10,000 of them. - Commerce orders export to
.csv, and can be auto-exported to Google Drive. - Mailing lists export individually as
.csv. - Contacts export from the Contacts panel, and this one includes customers, subscribers, members and donors together.
That last file is worth more than the pages are. Pages can be rewritten in an afternoon. A contact list cannot be recreated at all.
The order to do it in
The domain goes last for the same reason it always does: the old site keeps serving until you point the name somewhere else, so there is no reason to be offline in the middle of a move. And the redirects are their own job — do them before anybody notices the URLs changed, not after.
A site whose design is already a file. Class-based HTML and CSS, published with no JavaScript by default. DragGo vs Squarespace.
Squarespace to WordPress, honestly
The .xml is built for WordPress, so the import itself usually works. What arrives is your text and your image blocks, in WordPress's own structure, with none of your styling — and some things, linked PDFs among them, appear in the file and still will not import.
So plan it as "move the content, rebuild the look" and it goes fine. Plan it as "move the site" and the first hour is a disappointment.
The useful thing to take from this
A real export answers two questions, and every builder's marketing only answers the first: can I get my content out, and can I get my site out. Squarespace answers yes to the first and no to the second, clearly and in writing, which is more than some competitors manage.
The practical consequence is simple. If you might ever leave, keep your design decisions written down somewhere that is not the builder — the palette, the typefaces, the spacing. Those survive any export, because they were never in the file in the first place. Which builders export what, and what each one drops, is the shorter way to compare before you commit.