Leaving Squarespace is mostly straightforward, with one wrinkle that catches people: Squarespace may also be your domain registrar. It bought Google Domains in 2023, so a large number of owners now have their website and their domain registration in the same account without ever having chosen that. It changes one step of the move and none of the outcome. You can keep the domain, keep your email, and have a new site live the same afternoon. Here is the whole path, including the honest case for staying put.
Should you actually leave Squarespace?
Squarespace has the best design templates in the business and that is not a small thing. If you enjoy laying out your own site, you use the design controls, and the annual price feels fair against what you get, staying is a perfectly good decision and this post is not for you. The reasons owners do leave are consistent. Editing means finding the right block in the editor rather than clicking the thing on the page, so small updates get postponed and the site drifts out of date. The plan is billed annually, so the real cost lands as one uncomfortable charge. And the pieces that matter for getting found, particularly whether AI assistants recommend you when someone asks for a business like yours, are simply not part of the product. If your site looks good and does nothing, that is the signal.
What do you need before you start?
- Your Squarespace login, and confirmation of whether your domain is registered at Squarespace or somewhere else. Settings, Domains shows you which.
- Your current site address, which is all a modern builder needs to bring the content across.
- A list of your pages and their exact addresses, so you can match them on the new site.
- Where your email is hosted. Squarespace resold Google Workspace to many customers, so check Settings, Email before assuming.
- Exports of anything stored rather than published: contacts, form submissions, order history, and Acuity appointments.
How do you move a Squarespace site, step by step?
- Import your site by pasting its address. Your copy, photos, services, testimonials, contact details, and the structure of your pages come across as pieces you can edit by clicking them.
- Match your page addresses to your Squarespace ones. If a page lives at /about today, keep it at /about. This protects your existing rankings and takes seconds at build time.
- Rebuild what is a system rather than a page: your contact form destination, booking if you use Acuity, and your store catalog if you sell.
- Point your domain at the new site. Two DNS records, changed in Squarespace's own DNS Settings screen if your domain is registered there, or at your other registrar if it is not.
- Verify from your phone on cellular data: the bare domain, the www version, the padlock, and a test email to your business address.
- Cancel Squarespace last, about a week later. Note that Squarespace bills annually and refunds are limited, so check your renewal date before assuming cancelling saves you money this month.
What happens if Squarespace is your domain registrar?
Nothing bad, and you have two options. The simplest is to leave the domain registered at Squarespace and just change its DNS records to point at your new site. Squarespace keeps a normal DNS management screen under Settings, Domains, DNS Settings, and pointing a domain away from Squarespace hosting while it stays registered there is entirely supported. You would be paying Squarespace only the domain renewal, typically around twenty dollars a year as of July 2026, rather than a website plan. The second option is to transfer the domain to another registrar later, once the site move is finished and settled. Doing them separately is the point: never move the domain registration and the website in the same week, because if something looks wrong you want to know which change caused it.
What comes across and what does not?
Your pages come across well. Importing by URL brings the copy, the photos, the services, the testimonials, and the contact details, plus the colors, fonts, and section layout as editable pieces rather than a blank template. If you sell, a catalog of up to 30 products can be extracted too, though those products stay staged until you connect Stripe, at which point they land in your store. What does not come across is anything that is a system or a record: Squarespace Member Areas, code injection and custom CSS, your Acuity appointment history, and your stored customer and order data. Booking on the new site is a feature you turn on and connect to Google Calendar, not history that migrates. Export your records while you still have a Squarespace account, because that data lives in their database rather than on your website.
Will you lose your Google rankings?
Not if you keep the domain and match your page addresses, which is why step two above matters more than it looks. Rankings belong to your domain and its individual pages, not to Squarespace. A page that stays at the same address and gets better content reads to a search engine as an improvement, not a disappearance. The more interesting question is what happens next. Squarespace sites tend to be beautiful and quiet, heavy on imagery and light on the plain answers that both search engines and AI assistants actually quote. Once updating the site is a click rather than a project, publishing the pages that answer real customer questions becomes something you will actually do, and that is where the traffic difference usually shows up.
