Moving an online store is a big decision. You’ve already invested time in your products, content, and search visibility, so switching platforms isn’t as simple as opening a new account and copying a few pages. You need to know what comes with you, what stays behind, and how to make the move without disrupting the business you’ve already built.
For some growing Squarespace stores, Shopify becomes a natural next step. A broader ecommerce ecosystem, more ways to extend store functionality, and tools built around increasingly complex selling operations make the move worthwhile as your needs evolve. The challenge is getting from one platform to the other without losing products, important data, working URLs, or weeks rebuilding the storefront.
This guide walks you through the full Squarespace-to-Shopify migration, from preparing and importing your data to setting up redirects and checking everything before launch.
👉 And if you’d rather spend your time on the migration itself than rebuilding every page from a blank theme, BuildYourStore can help you get a complete Shopify storefront up and running faster, giving you a head start while you focus on bringing the rest of your business across.
Why Switch From Squarespace to Shopify
A platform that worked perfectly when you launched your store may not fit the business you’re running two years later. More products, new sales channels, higher order volume, and increasingly complex workflows all place new demands on your ecommerce software. That’s often when merchants begin considering the move from Squarespace to Shopify.
Squarespace combines website building and ecommerce in one platform, making it an excellent choice for businesses that value polished design and a straightforward setup. But as your store becomes more sophisticated, some practical limitations begin to surface. Product variants are capped at 250 per item, payment gateway options are narrow, and expanding into channels like Amazon or TikTok Shop involves a less unified workflow. Features that work well for a smaller catalog can gradually become points of friction.
Shopify starts from a different premise: ecommerce sits at the center of the platform. Alongside native tools for payments, point-of-sale selling, inventory management, and multichannel commerce, it offers an ecosystem of more than 16,000 apps covering everything from fulfillment and subscriptions to marketing and customer support. As your needs change, adding new capabilities is often a matter of choosing the right tools.
Those differences become more noticeable over time. A growing store may need more flexible product configurations, stronger inventory workflows, additional payment options, or deeper integrations with the software behind fulfillment, marketing, and customer retention. Shopify is built with that kind of flexibility in mind, allowing to expand operations without constantly running into structural roadblocks.
🆕 Beginner’s Tip: Still figuring out whether Shopify fits the way you want to sell? This guide to how Shopify works walks through the platform basics before you commit to moving your store.
Ultimately, this isn’t about deciding whether Squarespace is a good platform. The real question is whether it still matches the way you sell today. If your business has outgrown the setup that once worked well, migrating to Shopify means giving your next stage of growth the infrastructure to support it.
What You Can (and Can’t) Migrate From Squarespace
Before moving anything, it helps to separate your store into two parts:
1️⃣ The data you need to transfer.
2️⃣ The experience you need to recreate.
Products and business records can move between platforms, but your Squarespace storefront won’t simply reappear inside Shopify exactly as it was.
✅️ Data you can migrate
- Products: Titles, descriptions, prices, images, and basic variant information can be exported and moved into Shopify. Always review the imported catalog for missing images, incorrect variants, or formatting issues before publishing.
- Customer and order data: Historical records can be transferred using supported migration methods or third-party services, depending on the data available and the complexity of the store.
- Blog content: Posts can be recreated manually for a smaller archive or moved with migration tools when transferring a larger content library.
- Basic page content: Text and media from important pages can be brought across, although the pages themselves will need to be recreated within Shopify’s structure.
🤷 Data that requires a rebuild
- Theme and layout: Squarespace and Shopify use different theme systems, so your visual design doesn’t transfer as a complete storefront. You’ll need to recreate the experience with a Shopify theme or use a store-building tool to establish a new starting point.
- Custom styling: Squarespace-specific CSS and other customizations may need to be rewritten or adapted for the new theme.
- Navigation and supporting pages: Menus, footer structure, policy pages, and other storefront elements should be recreated and checked in their new locations.
- Extensions and integrations: Squarespace Extensions don’t move directly into Shopify. You’ll need to identify which functions are still necessary and find suitable Shopify apps or native features to replace them.
- Member areas, scheduling, and forms: These workflows may require new apps, integrations, or configuration, depending on how they currently work in your Squarespace store.
🆕 Beginner’s Tip: Your Shopify store will need a new theme, so choose that foundation carefully. Check out this guide to the best Shopify themes in 2026 to find an option that fits your products, brand, and selling style.
How to Migrate From Squarespace to Shopify Step by Step
You already know what can move and what will need a new home. Now it’s time to turn that overview into a migration plan. The process is much easier to manage when you work in sequence, prepare each piece before importing it, and test the new store before pointing customers toward it.
The seven steps below cover the full journey, from setting up Shopify and transferring your catalog to reconnecting your domain and checking that everything works after launch.
💡 First things first: Before you begin, make a simple inventory of everything your Squarespace store depends on: products, pages, blog content, forms, extensions, analytics, email flows, tracking pixels, and other integrations. A written checklist makes it far less likely that an important piece gets left behind.
Step 1️⃣: Set up your new Shopify store
Your new store needs to exist before you import anything into it. You have two realistic paths here.
The manual route starts with creating a Shopify account, choosing a theme, and customizing the layout, navigation, branding, and key pages to fit your business. This gives you full control over every decision, but building a polished storefront while planning the rest of the migration can add days (or weeks) to the process.
If you’d rather start with more of that foundation already in place, AI tools like BuildYourStore offer a faster route. Choose a niche, and its AI generates a customizable Shopify store in a couple of minutes, complete with a professional theme, ready-made product pages, and pre-selected products. You can then adapt the storefront to your brand and focus on bringing your existing catalog and business data across.
The goal is to create a solid destination for the data, content, and customer experience you’ll move and rebuild in the next steps.
Step 2️⃣: Export your product data from Squarespace
With your Shopify store ready, it’s time to gather the data you’re bringing with you. Start by exporting your product catalog from Squarespace and saving the original file somewhere safe. You’ll be editing a copy in the next step, so keeping an untouched backup can save you plenty of trouble if something goes wrong.
From your Squarespace dashboard, go to Settings → Advanced → Import/Export, select Export, and download your product data as a CSV. For order records, head to Commerce → Orders, where you can export Pending, Completed, or Canceled orders separately.
📢 Heads Up: Review and close out pending orders before exporting your records. Moving data while orders are still in progress can create inconsistencies between platforms, so it’s better to complete or document them before the migration.
Once the files are downloaded, don’t rush to upload them into Shopify. Squarespace and Shopify structure product data differently, so think of your export as the source material for the migration, not necessarily the finished import file. The next step is making sure that the data is ready for its new destination.
Step 3️⃣: Edit your CSV file for Shopify’s format
Now you have the data, but it still needs to speak Shopify’s language. The two platforms organize product information differently, so this step is about matching your Squarespace export to the structure Shopify expects before importing anything.
Here’s how to prepare the file:
- In your Shopify admin, go to Products → Import and download Shopify’s sample product CSV template.
- Open the Shopify template and your Squarespace export in Google Sheets, ideally as separate tabs in the same spreadsheet.
- Move the data from your Squarespace file into the corresponding Shopify columns. Some common mappings include Product URL → Handle, Default Vendor Name → Vendor, Categories → Type, and Stock → Variant Inventory Qty. Use Shopify’s official Squarespace migration mapping guide as your main reference, since import requirements can change over time.
- Remove fields that aren’t part of Shopify’s template and check each row for missing or incorrectly formatted information before saving the final CSV.
A few fields deserve extra attention. Shopify’s product CSV uses grams for product weight, so if your Squarespace listings use pounds, multiply each value by 453.6 before importing.
Pricing fields should contain plain numbers without currency symbols, commas, or unnecessary spaces. You may also need to complete fields such as Vendor and Type manually when the original export doesn’t contain usable information for every product.
💡 Pro Tip: Work from a copy of your original export and keep the untouched file somewhere safe. CSV cleanup often involves several rounds of editing, and having the source data available makes it much easier to recover from a misplaced column or formatting mistake.
Step 4️⃣: Import products into Shopify
Your files are prepared. Now it’s time to start filling the new store. Products, customers, and historical orders serve different purposes in Shopify, so don’t treat the migration as one large upload. Move each data set separately and review the results before continuing to the next.
Start with your product catalog. In Shopify, go to Products → Import, upload the reformatted CSV, and review the import details before confirming. You can deselect Publish new products to all sales channels to keep the imported catalog private while you check product titles, descriptions, prices, variants, inventory, and images.
Customer records require their own import process. Depending on the migration method available for your store, you can use Shopify’s supported migration tools or a third-party service to bring customer information across. Before moving on, check that names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other important fields have landed in the correct places.
Historical orders need extra planning. If you want previous purchases available in Shopify for reporting, customer service, returns, or other operational needs, you may need a specialized migration app (Matrixify, for example) or a service capable of importing order records.
For catalogs over the 2,000-product export cap, or for stores that want tighter control over field mapping across all three data types at once, tools like Matrixify or Cart2Cart connect to both platforms directly and handle bulk transfers, typically for a fee based on catalog size.
Step 5️⃣: Set up URL redirects
Your products may have moved, but search engines and external websites still know them by their old addresses. Because Squarespace and Shopify use different URL structures, an old product page such as /shop/product-name may now live at /products/product-name. Without a redirect, visitors following the original URL can land on a 404 page instead of the new destination.
Start by protecting the URLs that already have value:
1️⃣ Find your important URLs: Use Google Search Console to identify pages receiving organic traffic, review backlinks pointing to your store, or crawl your Squarespace site to collect existing URLs.
2️⃣ Map old pages to new destinations: Match each Squarespace URL with its closest Shopify equivalent. Prioritize product pages, collections, blog posts, and any other content that already attracts visitors or backlinks.
3️⃣ Create your 301 redirects: Add redirects from each old URL to its new Shopify destination. For larger stores, you can bulk-import them via CSV instead of creating each redirect individually.
4️⃣ Test before moving on: Open a sample of your most important old URLs and confirm that each one reaches the intended Shopify page. After launch, keep monitoring 404 errors to catch anything the original map missed.
Avoid sending every removed URL to the homepage. A product page should redirect to the same product or its closest relevant alternative, while an old category page should lead to the corresponding collection whenever possible.
A careful redirect map helps preserve the value of the visibility your store has already earned while giving shoppers a smooth path to the new site. Handle this before taking the Squarespace storefront offline, not after traffic starts finding broken pages.
Step 6️⃣: Transfer or connect your domain
Your store may be ready, but customers still need a way to find it. The final technical step is deciding what to do with your existing domain. You have two options:
- Connect your domain: Keep the domain registered with your current provider and update its DNS records to point to Shopify. This is usually the faster option and lets you keep your existing registrar while launching the new store.
- Transfer your domain: Move the domain registration entirely to Shopify so both your store and domain are managed from the same dashboard. This approach is more centralized, but it typically requires the domain to have been registered for at least 60 days and an authorization code from your current registrar.
DNS changes aren’t immediate. It can take 24 to 48 hours for the new records to propagate worldwide, so don’t disconnect your Squarespace site until you’ve confirmed that your domain is correctly resolving to the new Shopify storefront.
Step 8️⃣: Test Before You Launch
Before announcing the new store or sending paid traffic to it, take the time to test the experience from beginning to end:
- Complete a full test purchase: Browse the store, add products to the cart, finish checkout, and confirm that order confirmations, payment processing, and notification emails all work as expected.
- Test on different devices: Review the storefront on both desktop and mobile. Pay special attention to navigation, product pages, and checkout, since most ecommerce traffic now comes from smartphones.
Post-Migration Checklist
Your store is live. But there are still a few final checks worth making. These small details are easy to overlook during a migration, yet they’re often the first things customers notice when something isn’t working as expected.
✅ Update your links: Review email signatures, social media bios, paid ads, and third-party integrations to make sure they’re pointing to your new Shopify URLs instead of your old Squarespace pages.
✅ Restore your product reviews: Reviews don’t transfer automatically, so import them with an app such as Judge.me or Loox to bring back valuable social proof from day one.
✅ Monitor your SEO performance: Check Google Search Console and your analytics dashboard regularly during the first few weeks after launch to identify 404 errors, indexing issues, or unexpected traffic drops before they become bigger problems.
✅ Reconnect your essential integrations: Confirm that email marketing, analytics, payment gateways, shipping apps, live chat, and any other tools your business depends on are working correctly in the new store.
⭐ That’s it! Your Shopify store is ready to welcome customers. Keep an eye on performance during the first few weeks, continue refining the experience, and let real customer behavior guide your next improvements.
Frequently Asked Questions
How hard is it to move from Squarespace to Shopify?
Moving from Squarespace to Shopify isn’t a one-click process, but it’s manageable with a structured plan. Most of the work involves preparing your data, rebuilding parts of the storefront, and testing everything before launch. For smaller stores, the migration is usually straightforward when completed step by step.
Can I transfer my Squarespace domain to Shopify?
Yes, you can transfer your Squarespace domain to Shopify or simply connect it by updating your DNS records. Both options work well; the best choice depends on whether you want to keep your current domain registrar or manage everything directly through Shopify.
Will I lose my SEO rankings when I migrate?
You shouldn’t lose your SEO rankings when migrating if the process is handled correctly. Setting up 301 redirects and preserving key SEO elements helps search engines understand where your content has moved. While some ranking fluctuations are normal, monitoring Google Search Console can help you identify and fix issues early.
How long does a Squarespace to Shopify migration take?
A Squarespace to Shopify migration typically takes one to two weeks for a small store. Larger catalogs, custom functionality, or multiple third-party integrations can extend that timeline. Ultimately, the duration depends on the amount of data you’re migrating and how much of the storefront needs to be rebuilt.
Is BuildYourStore really free?
Yes, BuildYourStore is completely free to use and doesn’t require a credit card. It generates a customizable Shopify store with a professional theme, preloaded products, and a free .store domain at no cost. Your only ongoing expense is your Shopify subscription once you’re ready to launch.
Start Selling on Shopify After Migrating From Squarespace
Moving from Squarespace to Shopify is an opportunity to give your store the ecommerce infrastructure it needs to keep growing. By planning the migration carefully, transferring your data, protecting your SEO, and testing everything before launch, you can make the switch without losing the momentum you’ve already built.
If recreating your storefront feels like the biggest obstacle, the right tool can take care of that part for you. BuildYourStore uses AI to generate a Shopify store in minutes, so you can spend less time designing pages and more time transferring your products, content, and customers with confidence.
⚡ Start your Shopify store with BuildYourStore and make your next move about growth, not rebuilding.
Looking to go deeper? These guides are a natural next stop on your learning journey:
