Moving off Squarespace

The template was the point.
Now it’s the ceiling.

Squarespace is genuinely good at being Squarespace. Trouble starts when you need something it doesn’t do, because you’ll get the same answer every time you ask.

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Squarespace Migration
$ foothills crawl-the-live-site$ foothills reconcile-with-the-export$ foothills design-the-content-model$ foothills decide-the-new-urls$ foothills run-both-then-cut-over

Foothills Digital—Sentrello Premier Partner

  • AWS
  • Azure
  • Google Cloud
  • DigitalOcean
  • On-premises Linux
  • On-premises Windows

Every one of our people holds active certifications on the platforms they work on.

Sentrello is our only partnership. On the clouds, it's our people who hold the certifications. We don't claim a partner tier, and we'll keep saying so until that changes.

Where this usually starts

You’ve run out of platform

No crisis. Just a slow pile-up of things you’ve been told aren’t possible.

  • The export is a WordPress XML file, and it doesn’t carry everything you can see on the site.
  • Your custom code lives in injection blocks, where it’s fragile and invisible to whoever comes next.
  • Squarespace decided your URL structure. You wouldn’t have.
  • The integration your business needs isn’t on the list, and there’s no way to add it.
  • Performance is what it is. There’s no layer you can reach in and tune.

What we do instead

We rebuild the content model, not just the pages

The official export is a starting point, not the truth, so we crawl the live site too and reconcile the two. You end up with structured content on Strapi, Payload CMS or a custom build, hosted somewhere you can actually reach into, with the URLs you’d have picked in the first place. Every old URL redirects to its new home, so nothing gets lost on the way.

How it works

How a Squarespace move goes

  1. Crawl the live site

    Because the export won’t tell you the whole truth. The crawl is the inventory: every page, gallery, block and asset that’s actually published.

  2. Reconcile with the export

    Two incomplete pictures make one complete one. Anything the crawl found and the export missed gets pulled out by hand.

  3. Design the content model

    Types and fields for what you publish, instead of a pile of pages each formatted by hand. You’ll feel the difference in year two.

  4. Decide the new URLs

    For the first time, they’re your call. Old URLs redirect one to one, checked as a build gate.

  5. Run both, then cut over

    The new site goes live beside the old one. Once it’s provably complete, DNS moves.

What comes across

Related

  • Platform Migration

    Applications, infrastructure, the legacy system nobody dares switch off, and every CMS from WordPress to Joomla. However old it is and whatever it’s called, if your business runs on it, we can move it.

    Read more about Platform Migration

  • Application Development

    A two-screen booking tool or the system your whole company runs on. One team from the first whiteboard to the fortieth patch, so nobody inherits code they’ve never seen.

    Read more about Application Development

  • Sentrello

    Sentrello is a self-hosted, source-available unified business management platform. We’re a Sentrello Premier Partner, and our own invoices, net terms and subscriptions all come out of it.

    Read more about Sentrello

What couldn’t you do?

That’s usually the shortest route to a sensible recommendation.

Tell us the thing Squarespace wouldn’t let you build, and roughly how many pages the site has. We’ll tell you where you should land.

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  • What we areSentrello Premier Partner
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