How to Back Up and Export a Squarespace Website

Updated September 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

Squarespace has no full-site backup, and the export it does offer is designed for migrating to WordPress rather than for restoring a site. It carries your writing and leaves behind your design, your custom CSS, your code injection and all of your commerce data. This page sets out exactly what is and is not in the file, and the short routine that covers the gap.

Can you back up a Squarespace website?

Not completely, and that is the important thing to understand before you plan around it. Squarespace has no single-click full-site backup. You can export most blog and page content as a WordPress-format XML file, and several things — commerce data, custom code injection, styling and most page layouts — do not come with it.

Squarespace is a closed hosted platform, so there is no filesystem or database to copy the way there is on self-hosted software. What exists is an export designed for migration to WordPress, plus per-area exports for products and contacts. Treating that as a backup is reasonable provided you know precisely what it does and does not contain.

The rows that catch people are images and custom CSS. Images are referenced rather than included, so an export restored elsewhere without the media files produces a site of broken image links; and custom CSS represents most of the visual work on a heavily customized Squarespace site and is simply not in the file at all.

How do you export a Squarespace site?

From the site’s settings, choose Import & Export, then Export, then WordPress as the format. The file is generated in the background and offered as a download when ready.

The export is a WordPress WXR file, which is an XML format. That choice tells you what it is for: moving content to WordPress. It is not a restore file, and Squarespace cannot import it back to recreate a site.

1. Open the site and go to Settings
2. Choose Import & Export Content, then Export
3. Select WordPress as the export format
4. Wait for the file to be prepared — large sites take several minutes
5. Download the .xml file and store it somewhere you will still find it in a year
6. Separately export products from the Commerce panel if you sell anything
7. Separately export contacts and mailing lists
8. Copy the Custom CSS panel into a plain text file
9. Copy header and footer code injection into the same file
10. Screenshot every page at full length, because layout is not in the export

What does the Squarespace export not include, and why does that matter?

Design, commerce data and anything you added as code. Which means an export alone cannot reconstruct the site — it preserves the writing, not the website.

This distinction is the whole point of the page. If your risk is losing the words — years of blog posts, service descriptions, case studies — the export addresses it well. If your risk is losing the site, it does not, and the mitigation is documentation and screenshots rather than a file.

Design and layout

Squarespace stores layout in its own structures, and there is no format that carries them out. A rebuilt site from an export is a content dump that needs redesigning, which is fine for a migration and useless as a disaster recovery plan.

Custom CSS

On a customized site this is a substantial body of work. It lives in one panel, it is not exported, and copying it into a text file takes two minutes. Do it now rather than after an accidental deletion.

Code injection

Header and footer injection frequently contains analytics tags, verification codes, pixel implementations and third-party widgets. Losing it silently breaks measurement in ways that are discovered weeks later.

Commerce data

Products, variants, inventory, orders and customers export separately from the Commerce panel. They are not in the site export and they are usually the hardest data to reconstruct.

Form submissions

Squarespace form entries are not in the export. If forms are your lead capture, connect them to storage — email, a spreadsheet, a CRM — so the record exists somewhere you control.

How often should you export a Squarespace site?

Quarterly for a site that changes slowly, monthly for an active blog, and immediately before any significant redesign or template change.

The trigger that matters most is the last one. Template changes and major layout work are where content is most often lost, and an export taken the hour before is the difference between an inconvenience and a rewrite.

Can you restore a Squarespace site from an export?

No. Squarespace cannot import its own export file to rebuild a site, which surprises people at exactly the wrong moment.

The export exists to move content out to another platform, principally WordPress. Within Squarespace, recovery depends on the platform’s own mechanisms — the trash for recently deleted pages, and Squarespace support in some circumstances. If a full restore is a requirement for your organization, that is an argument about platform choice rather than about backup procedure.

What are the alternatives to the built-in export?

Third-party backup services, a full site crawl saved as static HTML, and disciplined manual documentation. Each covers something the export does not.

None of these is a true backup in the sense of a restorable image, and saying so plainly is more useful than implying otherwise. What they give you is the ability to reconstruct rather than restore, which is genuinely valuable and is a different thing.

The combination that actually protects a business is the last three rows together: the export for the writing, a crawl or screenshots for the design, and a text file holding the custom code. That is twenty minutes a quarter and it removes most of the realistic risk.

What is the fastest way to save a copy of a Squarespace site right now?

Run the export, copy the Custom CSS and code injection into a text file, and take full-page screenshots of every page. Twenty minutes, and it covers the three things you cannot otherwise reconstruct.

If you do nothing else from this page, do those three. The export is the part people know about and the other two are the parts that matter when something goes wrong, because text can be rewritten and a design cannot be remembered.

Does Squarespace keep its own backups?

Squarespace maintains its own infrastructure-level redundancy, which protects against their failures rather than against yours.

That distinction matters. Platform redundancy means the service does not lose your site to a hardware failure. It does not mean you can roll back a page you overwrote, recover content you deleted last month, or undo a template change. Those are user actions, and the platform’s resilience does not address them.

How do you migrate from Squarespace to WordPress?

Export the WXR file, import it into WordPress, then rebuild the design and re-upload media — the content moves, the site does not.

Budget for the rebuild rather than expecting a migration. In practice the import lands posts and pages as content, images arrive as external references that need importing properly, and the design is built fresh. Anyone quoting a Squarespace-to-WordPress move as a file transfer has not done one.

1. Export from Squarespace as WordPress format
2. Install WordPress and choose a theme before importing
3. Use the WordPress Importer plugin to bring in the XML
4. Tick the option to download and import file attachments, or images will remain hosted on Squarespace
5. Verify every image actually imported; this step fails quietly on large sites
6. Rebuild navigation, which does not transfer
7. Rebuild the design; nothing about layout comes across
8. Recreate forms and reconnect them to storage
9. Map every old URL to its new equivalent and set redirects before the domain moves
10. Keep the Squarespace site live until the redirects are verified

Step nine is the one that decides whether the migration costs you search traffic. Squarespace and WordPress use different URL structures by default, and a migration without a redirect map loses the accumulated value of every page that ranked. Build it from a crawl of the existing site rather than from memory.

What should you do before changing a Squarespace template?

Export, screenshot every page, and copy the custom CSS — because template changes can rearrange or drop content and are not straightforwardly reversible.

This is the single highest-risk routine operation on the platform. Different template families support different features, and content that has nowhere to live in the new template can be lost rather than hidden. Fifteen minutes of preparation prevents the outcome where a redesign turns into a rewrite.

Squarespace, WordPress and Webflow: what each lets you actually take with you

Squarespace exports text only; WordPress exports everything including a restorable database; Webflow sits between the two. If portability matters to you, that difference is worth knowing before you build rather than after.

This is not an argument that one platform is better. It is a statement of what each commits you to, because the ability to leave is a real feature and it is rarely compared when the platform is chosen.

The row that matters most for this page is the fifth. A self-hosted WordPress site can be backed up completely and restored completely, which is what most people mean when they say backup. Squarespace cannot, and no third-party tool changes that, because the platform provides no route to write a site back in. If a genuine restore capability is a requirement for your organization, that is a platform decision rather than a procedure decision.

How to export a Squarespace site, and what the Squarespace export leaves behind

The Squarespace export produces a WordPress-format XML file. It is a genuine backup of some of your content and no backup at all of the rest, and knowing which is which is the whole point of doing this properly.

When people say they want to export a Squarespace website they usually mean one of two things: taking a safety copy, or moving to another platform. The same export file serves both, and disappoints both in the same way, because a Squarespace site backup built only from the export is missing several categories of content that never appear in the XML.

What the Squarespace export website file contains

Pages, blog posts, text blocks, image blocks and page-level metadata, written into a WordPress-compatible XML that most platforms can read.

What backing up a Squarespace site with the export alone misses

Product and commerce data, form submissions, custom CSS and code injection, and audio, video and album blocks. Each has to be captured separately.

How to export a Squarespace site step by step

From the site menu, open Settings, then Import & Export Content, choose Export, select WordPress, and wait for the file to be prepared before downloading it.

Why a Squarespace export is not a complete site backup

Because it is designed as a migration format rather than an archive. It carries what another CMS can import, not everything your site is made of.

Export is the mechanism, which is why searching for backup finds so little

Squarespace does not present a feature called backup, and that mismatch is why the search results feel unhelpful. What exists is export — and knowing that reframes the question. Searches for export Squarespace, export Squarespace site, export Squarespace website and squarespace export site all describe one operation, and it is the same operation people mean when they search for backup Squarespace site, backup Squarespace website or backing up Squarespace site.

The export produces a WordPress-format XML file. That sounds like a migration tool, and it is, but it is equally the closest thing to a portable copy of your content. It captures pages, blog posts, images referenced in posts and page content, and text. It does not capture your template customizations, style settings, product inventory, or member and commerce data, which is the detail most people discover too late.

So backing up a Squarespace site properly means the export plus a separate record of what the export leaves behind: a copy of any custom CSS, screenshots or notes covering style settings, and a product export if you sell. Treating the XML file alone as a complete backup is the mistake worth avoiding, because it restores your words and not your site.

Frequently asked questions