Squarespace to Shopify Migration: Step-by-Step for 2026

A Squarespace to Shopify migration usually goes wrong in one very specific way. You export your products to a CSV, the file downloads without a single error, you import it into Shopify, and everything looks fine. Three weeks later a customer emails asking where all the reviews went.

That's the trap. Squarespace's export never warns you about what it left behind, and the gaps are significant: no reviews, no variant images, no image alt text, no digital products, and a hard ceiling of three variant options per product. Most guides treat the CSV export as the hard part of this migration. It isn't.

The export is the easy part, which is exactly why merchants trust it and get burned. The step that actually decides whether your move goes smoothly is building a "what Squarespace silently drops" list before you ever open the CSV. This guide covers that list, the full URL redirect map, a plan-by-plan cost comparison, realistic timelines by catalog size, and a 30-day post-launch checklist. For the platform-agnostic version, start with our complete guide to migrating to Shopify.

Why are Squarespace merchants switching to Shopify in 2026?

Merchants leave Squarespace when their store outgrows a website builder that happens to sell things. Squarespace is excellent at design and content, and roughly 4.7 million websites run on it, about 2.5% of all websites. The commerce layer is the part that hits a ceiling first.

Shopify is a commerce platform with a website attached, and the difference shows up in operations. Shopify and Shopify Plus together account for about 30% of the US ecommerce market, with nearly 6.9 million active sites globally. That scale is what funds the app ecosystem most Squarespace merchants are actually shopping for.

The specific pain points that trigger the switch tend to be consistent:

• Variant limits. Squarespace's export caps at three variant options, and complex catalogs (size, color, material, engraving) don't fit cleanly.
• App gaps. Subscriptions, wholesale pricing, advanced bundles, loyalty programs, and multi-location inventory are either missing or thin.
• Fulfillment and 3PL integrations. Shopify has native connections to almost every warehouse and shipping tool.
• Reporting. Squarespace's commerce analytics stop being useful once you need cohort or product-level margin data.
• Multi-channel selling. Selling on TikTok Shop, Amazon, Google, and retail POS from one inventory pool is far simpler on Shopify.

None of that means Squarespace is a bad platform. It means the job changed. If your store is now the business rather than a section of your website, the tooling gap gets expensive fast.

What does Squarespace's product CSV export actually include?

Squarespace's product export gives you a CSV containing product titles, descriptions, SKUs, prices, stock levels, variant rows, tags, categories, and product URLs, capped at 10,000 products per export. You'll find it under Products & Services, then your store page, then the export option in the panel menu.

The file uses the same column format as Squarespace's own product import, plus an extra column for pages. That format does not match Shopify's product CSV, so you can't upload it directly. You'll need to remap columns before importing.

Here's what carries over reliably:

• Product name, description HTML, and SKU
• Price, sale price, and stock quantity
• Up to three variant options and their combinations
• Product categories and tags
• Visibility status and the product URL slug
• Product gallery image URLs

The remapping work itself is mechanical but fiddly. Shopify requires a repeating Handle column for variant rows, specific Option1 Name and Option1 Value pairs, and image URLs positioned on the right rows. Our walkthrough on importing products to Shopify from a CSV without errors covers the column-by-column mapping and the validation errors that trip most people up.

One practical tip: export twice. Do a full export at the start of planning so you can audit the data, then a fresh export the night before you import so inventory and pricing are current. Squarespace exports are static snapshots, and they don't sync back.

What won't Squarespace export, and how do you migrate it manually?

Squarespace's export explicitly excludes customer reviews, featured images, product image alt text, and additional product information. It also can't export digital products at all, and it drops any variant option beyond the third. Every one of those gaps has to be closed by hand or by an app.

This is the checklist worth building before you touch anything else.

Reviews

Reviews don't export, full stop. Shopify's own Squarespace migration documentation confirms this and points merchants to third-party review apps instead. Your options are to scrape your live product pages into a CSV before you take the site down, or to rebuild reviews through a review app's import feature.

Do this before you shut off Squarespace. Once the store is gone, so is the review content. Our comparison of the best Shopify review apps including Judge.me, Loox, Yotpo, and Okendo breaks down which ones accept CSV imports and how their schema markup differs.

Variant images and alt text

Gallery images export as URLs. Featured images, variant-specific images, and alt text do not. On a 40-product catalog that's an afternoon of re-uploading. On a 400-product catalog with five colorways each, it's a project.

This is where migrations stall out, and it's the specific reason a lot of merchants abandon the CSV route halfway through. If you'd rather not hand-rebuild variant data in a spreadsheet, Migratify pulls products into Shopify from a live product URL across 100+ platforms, bringing titles, prices, images, variants, and collections with them. It skips the reformat step entirely, and its Magic Edit feature can rewrite titles and descriptions during the import. There's a free tier for testing, so it's worth a trial run on ten products before you commit to the spreadsheet path.

Digital products and subscriptions

Digital products can't be exported at all, and neither can variant options past the third. You'll need to download your original files from wherever you created them, then rebuild each digital product in Shopify with a delivery app.

Subscriptions are worse, and almost no migration guide mentions them. Active subscription contracts do not transfer between platforms because the payment tokens belong to your old processor.

You will need to email your subscribers, apologize, and ask them to re-subscribe on the new store. Plan a discount incentive and expect to lose some of them. Run this over two to three weeks with reminders rather than a single announcement.

Customers and order history

Squarespace lets you export orders as CSV from the Orders panel and contacts from the Lists & Segments panel. The contact export leaves out internal notes and saved addresses, though it does include the last used shipping address for customers who bought physical products.

Shopify accepts customer CSV imports, but passwords cannot be migrated because they're encrypted outside Shopify. Every customer will need to reset. Order history has no native importer either, so you'll want an app like Matrixify, which handles products, orders, customers, blog posts, redirects, and metafields in one place. If you're weighing tools, our tested rundown of the best Shopify migration apps compares them on data coverage and failure modes.

How do Squarespace and Shopify URL structures differ (and what's the redirect map)?

The two platforms use completely incompatible URL patterns, so every single product, category, blog post, and page URL changes. Squarespace 7.1 nests products under your store page slug with a fixed /p/ segment, while Shopify uses flat /products/ and /collections/ paths. Without redirects, every ranked page on your old store returns a 404.

Here is the mapping, pattern by pattern:

• Products: Squarespace uses your store page slug plus a mandatory /p/ segment, so /shop/p/blue-mug or /store/p/blue-mug. Shopify uses /products/blue-mug. The Squarespace URL slugs documentation confirms the /p/ segment can't be removed in 7.1.
• Categories: Squarespace category pages are filtered views living under the store page slug, like /shop/hats. Shopify's equivalent is /collections/hats.
• Store page: /shop or /store maps to /collections/all, or to whichever collection you make your main shop page.
• Blog posts: Squarespace uses /blog/post-title by default, but the post URL format is configurable and many sites run date variables, producing /blog/2024/06/12/post-title. Shopify uses /blogs/news/post-title, where "news" is the blog handle.
• Static pages: Squarespace serves /about at the root. Shopify serves /pages/about. This one catches people because the old URL looks like it should still work.

Check your actual blog URL format before writing rules. If your Squarespace blog uses date variables, a single wildcard rule won't cover it and you'll need per-post redirects.

To build the list, crawl your live Squarespace site with a tool like Screaming Frog, pull the Pages report from Google Search Console for anything with clicks or impressions in the last 16 months, and grab your Squarespace sitemap.xml. Deduplicate those three sources into one master URL list. Anything with a single impression in the past year gets a redirect.

Shopify has a native tool for the import. Go to Content > Menus, click URL redirects, then Import and upload a CSV following the format in Shopify's URL redirect documentation. The form itself takes two values per rule, redirect from and redirect to, so your CSV needs those two columns. Load them before you switch DNS, not after.

Use permanent server-side redirects, and keep every one of them single-hop. Google's redirect documentation recommends a permanent server-side redirect whenever a URL changes, with 301 and 308 as the status codes that signal a permanent move. Point each old URL straight at its final destination rather than at another redirect. Chains also add latency for real shoppers, which is reason enough on its own. There's more detail in our guide on preventing SEO traffic loss when migrating to Shopify.

How much does this matter? A study of 1,052 domain migrations found that just 22.8% got back to their pre-migration traffic baseline within 90 days, and the median recovery took 304 days. Roughly one in four. The migrations that bounced back fast shared one trait above all others: correct 301s at scale, with no chains and no orphaned pages.

How do Squarespace Commerce plans compare to Shopify plans?

Shopify is the cheaper platform at almost every tier once you account for transaction fees, which is the opposite of what most merchants assume. Shopify Basic and Squarespace Basic both list at $25 a month, but Squarespace Basic adds a 2% commerce fee on every order and Shopify does not. The comparison also has one genuine surprise that most guides get backwards, covered below.

Squarespace's 2026 plans on monthly billing run:

• Basic: $25/mo, plus a 2% commerce transaction fee on top of payment processing
• Core: $39/mo, no commerce transaction fee
• Plus: $65/mo, no commerce fee and lower card rates
• Advanced: $139/mo, lowest card rates

Shopify's 2026 plans on monthly billing run Basic at $25, Grow at $65 (this is the plan formerly just called "Shopify"), and Advanced at $399, with Plus starting at $2,300. Shopify charges no extra platform fee when you use Shopify Payments. Bring a third-party gateway instead and you pay 2%, 1%, or 0.6% depending on your tier. Ignore the $1-a-month intro promo when you budget, because it expires after three months.

On the features that actually change your operations:

• Transaction fees: Squarespace Basic's 2% commerce fee is the single most expensive line item at low plan tiers. Shopify charges nothing extra on Shopify Payments at any tier. On $20,000 in monthly revenue, that 2% is $400 a month, which is more than the annual cost of Shopify Basic every single month.
• Abandoned cart recovery: Available on all Squarespace selling plans and all Shopify plans. Shopify's is more configurable and integrates with email apps.
• Subscriptions: Native on Squarespace from Basic upward. On Shopify, subscriptions come through apps like Shopify Subscriptions or Recharge, which means more setup but far more control over billing rules and dunning.
• Real-time carrier shipping: Here's the reversal. Squarespace unlocks carrier-calculated shipping at Core ($39/mo), while Shopify's pricing page lists live third-party shipping rates on Advanced ($399/mo) and Plus only. If live rates matter to you, budget for that.
• App ecosystem: Not close. Shopify's App Store is the reason most of these migrations happen.

Two things worth checking before you build a budget. Both platforms discount annual billing, so compare annual-to-annual rather than one platform's annual rate against the other's monthly. And if you sell in person at markets or a physical shop, Shopify POS syncs the same inventory pool as your online store, which is a category of functionality Squarespace only partly matches.

My honest read: price is no longer the reason to stay on Squarespace. If your store is small, stable, and you genuinely don't need apps, the migration effort is the thing that isn't worth it, not the subscription difference. Once you need subscriptions with real dunning rules, wholesale pricing, or a 3PL integration, the platform gap decides it for you.

What are the step-by-step stages of a Squarespace to Shopify migration?

A Squarespace to Shopify migration breaks into seven stages, and they have to run in order because each one depends on the last. The two stages people skip are the pre-export audit and the staging-site verification, which is also where most failed migrations trace back to.

1. Audit and inventory everything. Count products, variants, digital products, active subscriptions, reviews, blog posts, and static pages. Export your GSC Pages report. Note anything on the "won't export" list from earlier. Our Shopify migration checklist is a good starting template for this stage.
2. Set up Shopify and pick a theme. Start the trial, configure your store's currency, weight units, and tax settings, then install and configure your theme before importing anything. Theme choices affect how product metafields and media display.
3. Export from Squarespace. Products CSV from the store page, orders CSV from Products & Services > Orders, contacts from Lists & Segments. Download your images at full resolution while you're there.
4. Reformat and import products. Map Squarespace columns to Shopify's format, or bypass the spreadsheet with a migration app. Import in batches of a few hundred so errors are easy to isolate.
5. Rebuild what didn't transfer. Variant images, alt text, featured images, digital products, reviews, and collections. Shopify allows three options and up to 2,048 variants per product, and its variants documentation recommends a third-party app if you need more than three options. Apps like Optionize cover that case for made-to-order or heavily configurable products. The mistake to avoid here is rebuilding a fourth Squarespace option as a separate product. It splits your reviews and inventory across two listings and doubles the URLs you have to redirect later.
6. Build and load redirects. Map every old URL to its new destination and import the CSV under Content > Menus > URL redirects. Do this before the domain switches.
7. Test, then cut over. Place real test orders including a refund, check tax and shipping calculations, confirm notification emails render, then point your domain. Note that Squarespace applies a 60-day lock on domains registered or transferred in, so if you're inside that window, point DNS at Shopify and complete the registrar transfer later.

If any of this is beyond your comfort level, hiring out is a legitimate answer. Our guide on choosing a Shopify migration service without costly mistakes covers what to ask before you sign.

How long does a Squarespace to Shopify migration actually take?

Timeline scales with catalog complexity, not calendar guesswork, and the biggest driver is how many products have multiple variant images. A 50-product store with simple variants is a weekend. A 2,000-SKU catalog with color-specific photography and active subscriptions is four to eight weeks.

Rough brackets based on catalog size:

• Under 50 products, simple variants: 2 to 4 days of focused work
• 50 to 300 products with variant images: 1 to 2 weeks
• 300 to 1,000 products, plus reviews and order history: 3 to 5 weeks
• 1,000+ products, subscriptions, or digital goods: 6 to 10 weeks

The variables that stretch these estimates are predictable. Rebuilding variant images by hand is the single largest time sink. Subscription migration adds two to three weeks of customer communication on its own. Custom Squarespace design work that has to be reproduced in Liquid adds a week or more, and reviews add a few days if you have to scrape them.

Build in a quiet week. Don't migrate during your peak season, and don't migrate the week before a product launch. Our breakdown of the Shopify migration timeline and how to speed it up goes deeper on which stages can run in parallel.

What should you check in the first 30 days after launching on Shopify?

The first 30 days determine whether your rankings recover in three months or three quarters. Verify redirects, resubmit sitemaps, reconcile inventory, and watch Search Console daily for the first two weeks. Expect some turbulence and know what "normal" looks like before you panic.

Search Engine Journal's analysis of post-migration traffic notes that a normal temporary dip runs 10 to 30% and stabilizes within two to six weeks. A drop beyond 30 to 50%, combined with falling indexed page counts and no stabilization after four weeks, is a real problem that needs investigation rather than patience.

Week 1

• Add and verify a Google Search Console property for the new setup, then submit your Shopify sitemap at /sitemap.xml
• Spot-check 20 to 30 of your highest-traffic old URLs in a browser. Confirm each returns a single 301 to a live page, not a chain and not a 404
• Check canonical tags on product pages, especially products in multiple collections. Shopify can generate /collections/x/products/y variants that need canonicalizing
• Place a full test order on the live domain, including a discount code and a refund
• Confirm order confirmation, shipping confirmation, and abandoned cart emails send with correct branding
• Verify GA4 and any ad platform pixels fire on purchase events

Weeks 2 to 4

• Reconcile variant counts and inventory against your final Squarespace export. Our walkthrough on reconciling inventory counts after migrating to Shopify covers the reconciliation query that catches silent drops
• Run a crawl of the new site for broken internal links, missing alt text, and thin or duplicated descriptions
• Fix duplicate products, orphaned variants, and inherited tag mess. The post-migration product data cleanup guide walks through the usual offenders, and a bulk editor like Edify makes the fixes faster with preview and undo
• Compare Search Console coverage counts week over week. Indexed pages should climb, not fall
• Send account invites so returning customers can set passwords, and email your former subscribers about re-subscribing
• Test your refund and return flow end to end, including the customer-facing return request if you enabled self-serve returns
• Keep your Squarespace site paid and accessible until at least day 60 in case you need to pull something you missed

Watch your support inbox in these weeks too. A spike in "I can't log in" or "where is my subscription" tickets is the fastest signal that something in the customer or subscription migration didn't land, and it will reach you well before any analytics dashboard shows it.

One last thing. Save your original Squarespace product data, images, and page content in a folder somewhere permanent. Not on a laptop desktop, and not in a browser download folder. You will need it at some point in the next six months, and by then the old site will be gone.