Squarespace to Shopify migration without losing your rankings

A store migration is mostly a redirect project with some data entry attached. Get the redirects right and the search traffic follows you. Get them wrong and you spend six months explaining to the owner why sales dropped after the "upgrade".

This is the process we use. It assumes you've already decided Shopify is the right platform; if you haven't, read our comparison first.

What moves cleanly, what doesn't

Before you plan anything, know what Squarespace will give you.

Products. Squarespace exports products to CSV from Commerce, then Inventory. You get titles, descriptions, SKUs, prices, variants, stock, tags and image URLs. The column layout is not Shopify's, so it needs remapping before Shopify's importer accepts it. Product descriptions come out as HTML with Squarespace's own classes in it; clean those up or your product pages will carry stray styling.

Product images. The CSV contains Squarespace CDN URLs. Shopify's importer will fetch images from URLs, but Squarespace's URLs sometimes carry a ?format= parameter that breaks the fetch. Strip the parameters and use the base URL. Do this while the Squarespace site is still live; once you cancel, the images are gone.

Customers. Exportable from Contacts. Names, emails, addresses and marketing consent. Passwords do not migrate on any platform; customers will need to reset on first login, and you should tell them.

Orders. Exportable to CSV. Shopify doesn't import order history natively. If you need it in Shopify for customer service, an app like Matrixify does it. Most clients keep the CSV for records and start fresh.

Discount codes, gift cards. Discount codes are recreated by hand; there are rarely many. Outstanding gift card balances are the one thing that can hurt: export the list, issue equivalent Shopify gift cards, and email the holders. Don't skip this; it's a legal liability in most places.

Blog posts and pages. Squarespace exports blog content as a WordPress-format XML file. Shopify's blog needs an app or manual entry to import it. Pages don't export at all in a usable form; they're rebuilt in Shopify's theme editor. For a store with a big content library, this is where most of the hours go.

Reviews. If you used a Squarespace-compatible reviews tool, check whether it has a Shopify export. If reviews were native Squarespace product reviews, they don't move. Screenshot them before you leave.

Subscriptions. Active subscriptions on Squarespace do not transfer. Customers must re-subscribe on Shopify. Plan the communication.

Design. Nothing. The Shopify theme is a new build.

The URL map

This is the part that protects your rankings.

Squarespace product URLs look like /shop/p/product-name or /store-page-name/p/product-name. Shopify's are /products/product-handle. Squarespace categories are /shop?category=Hats; Shopify's are /collections/hats. Blog posts move from /blog/post-title to /blogs/news/post-title. Pages usually go from /about to /pages/about.

Build a spreadsheet with every old URL and its new one. Sources for the old list: the Squarespace sitemap (/sitemap.xml), Google Search Console's pages report, and a crawl with Screaming Frog. Include everything that has ever had a click or a backlink, not just what's in the current navigation. Old blog posts and discontinued products with links pointing at them still matter; redirect discontinued products to the nearest collection.

The redirects live on Shopify, because after cutover the domain points there and Squarespace's URL mappings no longer run. Shopify imports redirects by CSV under Online Store, then Navigation, then URL Redirects. Two columns: Redirect from, Redirect to. Relative paths.

Don't redirect everything to the home page. Google treats mass home-page redirects as soft 404s, and you lose the page-level ranking you were trying to keep.

Keep the handles the same where you can. If the Squarespace slug was linen-shirt-white, make the Shopify handle linen-shirt-white. The redirect still needs to exist because the path prefix changes, but the closer the match, the less churn in Google's index.

Order of operations

1. Freeze content on Squarespace. Announce internally that no product or page changes happen from this date. Migrating a moving target is how things get missed.
2. Export everything. Products, customers, orders, gift cards, the blog XML, the sitemap, and a full-site crawl. Store the exports somewhere safe.
3. Build the Shopify store on the .myshopify.com domain. Theme, navigation, pages, policies, shipping zones, taxes, payment set-up, apps. Import products and customers. Nobody sees this yet.
4. Import the redirect map. Test twenty of them on the .myshopify.com domain by hand.
5. Set up Shopify's SEO fields. Titles and meta descriptions on products and collections don't come across in the product CSV in a usable way; re-enter the important ones. Alt text on images: same.
6. Place test orders. Card, PayPal, any local methods, a discount code, a gift card, a refund. Check that notification emails send from your domain.
7. Verify the Shopify store in Search Console and connect Google Analytics. Do this before cutover so you have a baseline the day it goes live.
8. Lower DNS TTL. A day before cutover, set the TTL on your domain's A record to 300 seconds so the switch propagates fast.
9. Cut over. Change the A record and CNAME (or the nameservers, if Shopify manages DNS) to Shopify. Add the custom domain in Shopify and set it as primary. Wait for SSL, usually under an hour.
10. Immediately after: submit the new sitemap in Search Console (/sitemap.xml), request indexing of the home page and top ten pages, and crawl the live site to check redirects return 301 and not 404 or 302.
11. Keep Squarespace alive for 30 days, not serving the domain. You'll find something you forgot to export. You always do.
12. Cancel Squarespace after the month, downloading a final export first.

What to expect in search after

A properly redirected migration shows a small dip in the first two to four weeks while Google recrawls, then recovery. If rankings are still down at week eight, something is wrong, and it's almost always one of: redirects returning 302 instead of 301, a chunk of URLs missing from the map, product pages that lost their title tags, or the new theme rendering key content in a way Google reads differently (for example, descriptions inside a collapsed tab that loads via JavaScript).

Monitor in Search Console: the pages report for new 404s, and the performance report filtered to the old top 50 URLs versus their new equivalents.

Timeline and cost

For a store with up to 200 products, a small blog and a standard theme, the migration is three to five weeks and costs USD 4,000 to 9,000 with us, including the theme build. Larger catalogues, custom theme work, B2B set-up or multi-currency push it up; a full Shopify build for a complex store runs USD 15,000 to 40,000, migration included.

The migration alone, without theme work, is rarely worth doing, because the point of moving was the capability, and the capability lives in the build.

Two things clients regret

Cancelling Squarespace before the images were fetched. Not telling customers that their passwords wouldn't carry over. Both are ten-minute problems if you know about them and week-long problems if you don't.

Questions we get

Do I lose my Google reviews or Business Profile? No. Those are attached to your business and domain, not the platform. Update the website link if the URL structure of your home page changes, which it shouldn't.

What about email and the domain? If Squarespace was your registrar, the domain can stay there and point at Shopify, or transfer to another registrar. Email (Google Workspace) is unaffected by the website move as long as you copy the MX records exactly into whatever manages DNS after cutover.

Can I keep the same design? The look, yes, rebuilt as a Shopify theme. The Squarespace design files don't transfer. Most clients use the move to refresh anyway.

Will my old URLs keep working forever? As long as the redirects stay in Shopify. Don't delete them after a year to tidy up; old links on other sites keep sending people.

Should I migrate during a quiet season? Yes. Not November. Not the week before a launch. Pick a period with the lowest sales and the fewest campaigns, and give yourself a week of buffer after cutover.

Can you migrate a store I built myself? Yes. Self-built stores usually have more irregularities (duplicate products, inconsistent variants, missing SKUs), which adds cleanup time. We'll quote after looking at the export.