Moving My Blog from Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1: Squarewebsites Plugins Chrome Extension is a Blog-Saver!
Note: This page contains some affiliate links to squarewebsites.org but all opinions expressed are my own.
I’ve had a website and blog with Squarespace since 2008. In that time, I survived the transition from V5 to V6 in 2012, and over time accumulated more than 1000 blog posts here as they went to V7.0. In early 2020, Squarespace announced the release of V7.1. And, shockingly, they provided NO UPGRADE PATH. When I got some time in August 2021, I checked in with Squarespace support and they still had no way to transfer my site. I checked again early in 2023, and still no way to transfer. Come on, Squarespace!
Not wanting my site to be stuck in a dead-end version, I searched around for a consultants on Squarespace Marketplace and I mostly got “we’re not interested in that kind of work” rejections, or quotes for tens of thousands of dollars that were way, way out of my budget for this little personal site. And these quotes were so expensive because the only option the consultants had was manually recreate each 7.0 blog post, one by one, in V 7.1.
As an author, photographer, and educator, this site is an important 15-year personal archive for me, and stuck in a dead-end proprietary 7.0 system, I started searching for an alternative platform. I exported my site out of Squarespace into Wordpress, but Squarespace stingily doesn’t even export images! Depressed, and unwillingly stuck and locked into Squarespace, I figured I’d have to do the site transfer myself, and maybe hire a friend to do the cutting and pasting for me. And then searching around, I stumbled across a post from Blue Hills Digital mentioning a Chrome plug in from SquareWebsites.org.
SquarespaceWebsites Tools PRO
This little Chrome extension from SquareWebsites Plugins features a scary disclaimer, “Disclaimer: This chrome plugin uses undocumented Squarespace API! So you use it at your own risk..“
This disclaimer didn’t give me a whole lot of confidence, but the site goes on further to say:
This tool lets you import and export pages between Squarespace 7.0 and Squarespace 7.1 sites and enables some additional tweaks.
You can copy Pages and List collections like Blog, Gallery, Album, Events or custom (Dev) collections including content inside. You can also use this plugin to import/export your Commerce Products between different Squarespace sites.
So, I created a new Squarespace 7.1 trial site, and downloaded the SquarespaceWebsites Tools PRO extension into Chrome. It was a little confusing at first, but I watched their training video and jumped into my old 7.0 site and pressed the button to copy. It started churning and copying stuff, and I figured I’d let it run in this little test and see what happened. As I said, I have over 1000 blog posts going back 15 years, and so it took a while and I went off and did other things and let it work. After a couple hours It completed, and then I went to the new trial 7.1 site I had created and pressed the “Create From Data” button and it started working. After a couple hours it was still working, so I left and let it run as I went off to run errands. When I came back, it was finished (I’m not exactly sure but I think it took about 4 hours).
Incredible Functionality
Reading all the doom and gloom about all the limitations moving from Squarespace 7.0-7.1, I honestly wasn’t expecting much from a test of this little utility that uses an undocumented Squarespace extension. But wow, it worked unbelievably well. My first little test run ended up creating the entire site you are reading now. With a few clicks, it brought over just about everything: Every page, all the structure, every blog post, every image, every gallery. The date entries were all correct. The URLs were the same. The cross links all work (aside from some ancient ones that were broken before). It seems the only thing that this incredible little plugin didn’t transfer was ancient blog post comments, but I don’t have that many of those anyway and I can live with that.
I can not recommend this plugin strongly enough. It works very well, it never crashed, it just did exactly what it’s supposed to do, and honestly did the job that Squarespace should be doing itself. I reached out to the consultants who had quoted me $20-30,000 to transfer my site, and they were like “wow, I can’t believe I have never seen that tool before” and they said they were planning to use it themselves.
I can not thank the developers at Squarewebsites plugins enough!