If you’re migrating your Squarespace blog posts to WordPress, it’s possible you’ve encountered a little quirk (like me, no I’m not the quirk, the blog migration is, focus please) with the export process. You’ve followed the export instructions carefully and after importing into WordPress, hey presto, there are absolutely no blog posts there. What the?
Squarespace like to pretend the whole process is simple but they fail to explain a very important point about exporting blog posts – as a technical writer this makes me very grumpy! Harrumph!
The problem happens when the SS home page is also the blog page (which is pretty common). The export file won’t export any of the blog posts. Yes, you could try and repeat the process a million times like a chimp, but sorry that won’t change the result.
Here’s what you need to do.
1 – Create a new blog page.
2 – Move all your blog posts (called collections) to this new page.
3 – Export this new blog page – side note: while SS casts some shade on WP for not supporting multiple blogs, you can easily achieve the same effect by setting up multiple blog pages in WP that display all blog posts (filtered by category, author etc).
4 – Import into WordPress.
Migrations are never as simple or as clean as we would like to imagine, and even after importing successfully there’ll be tidy up work to be done.
And images are a whole other thing – I have a complicated process of extracting all the image links from the export file, using an image download extension in chrome to grab the images from Squarespace, optimise them and then upload to the WordPress media library. I then use a ‘find and replace’ plugin to update the WordPress tables to point to the uploaded images. Fun!