I wrote a piece recently arguing that most broken Wix sites are not Wix's fault — the platform ships collections, dynamic pages and schema controls, and whoever built the site simply never opened them. That article is here, and the short version is that it was an operator problem.

Squarespace is a different situation, and it deserves a different answer. Some of what people need from it genuinely is not there. And the way out is narrower than almost anyone realises when they sign up.

Squarespace makes the best-looking default output of any builder on the market. I will give them that once, at the top, and then spend the rest of this explaining why we will not build a client's business on it.

Your content has to fit their shapes, or it does not go in

Squarespace organises content into collections, and the list of collection types is fixed. Blogs and blog posts. Courses and lessons. Calendar pages and events. Portfolios and projects. Store pages and products. Videos. Galleries and albums on older versions.

That is the list. You cannot define your own.

Which is fine, right up until your business does not fit one of those shapes. If you have thirty services, or twelve locations, or forty staff bios, or a catalogue of equipment that is not a store — there is no collection for that. Squarespace has no equivalent of a custom content type with fields you define.

So one of two things happens. Either somebody hand-builds thirty pages, and you are back to the problem from the Wix article where changing a phone number means editing thirty pages and missing four. Or somebody bends the blog collection into a services directory, which mostly works and quietly puts your service pages into a structure search engines read as articles.

This is the real difference between the two platforms. On Wix the capability exists and gets skipped. On Squarespace, past a certain kind of business, it does not exist at all. Nobody tells you that during the trial, because during the trial you have four pages and everything fits.

And there are hard walls, with numbers printed on them

The collection ceiling is a design decision. These are literal caps, published in Squarespace's own documentation:

  • 1,000 pages per site — with 400 named as the point beyond which they warn your site may load slowly.
  • 60 projects on a portfolio page.
  • 200 products on a 7.0 store page.
  • 60 blocks per layout page and 20 sections per page, both recommended maximums.
  • 10 pages recommended inside a dropdown menu.
  • And pages you have disabled still count against the 1,000.

Most small sites never come close, and if yours is five pages this paragraph is not about you. But a contractor running a page per trade per town, a manufacturer with an actual catalogue, or anybody doing the kind of local SEO that needs real coverage does not operate comfortably under those numbers — they operate against them. Finding the ceiling in year three, with the content already written and the rankings already earned, is an expensive way to learn where it was.

Structured data comes with a plan attached

Squarespace generates structured data automatically for the things it already understands — products, blog posts, events. That covers a lot of sites.

When you need markup it does not generate on its own, the route is code injection, and code injection is available on the Core, Plus and Advanced plans rather than the entry tier. So "add proper LocalBusiness markup to your site" can turn out to mean "move up a billing plan first."

Sit with that for a second. A piece of your technical SEO — telling search engines what your business is and where it is — is gated behind a billing tier. Not behind difficulty, not behind expertise. Behind a plan upgrade. Nobody mentions it during the free trial, and you will not find out until somebody competent looks at your site and tells you.

Now read their export page

This is the section I would most like every Squarespace owner to sit with, because it is the one with real money in it. All of the following is Squarespace's own documentation, not my characterisation of it.

Squarespace does have an export. It produces an .xml file intended for WordPress. What comes with you:

  • Layout pages
  • One blog page, with its posts
  • Text blocks and image blocks
  • Galleries, on version 7.0

What stays behind, in their words: "other page types (including album pages, cover pages, index pages, info pages, calendar pages, portfolio pages, and store pages)." Plus content in page-specific headers, footers and sidebars. Additional blog pages beyond the first. Dropdowns. Audio blocks. Product blocks. Video blocks. Drafts. Style settings. Custom CSS.

Read that list against a real site for a second. Your store does not export. Your portfolio does not export. Your events do not export. Your styling does not export. On a Squarespace site built to Squarespace's strengths, a meaningful share of what you actually paid for is on the second list.

And then there is the line that stops most people cold: "It's not possible to export content from one Squarespace site and import it into another."

You cannot move a Squarespace site to Squarespace. That is not a competitor talking. That is their help centre.

So why don't we build client businesses on it?

Not because it looks cheap. Squarespace's problem is the opposite of the one I described in the Wix piece — its defaults look good, and a Squarespace site rarely embarrasses anybody.

The problem is that the part you liked is the part that cannot leave. The design, the styling, the page types that made it feel worth the money — those are the exact items on the do-not-export list. You are renting the thing you thought you bought.

For most of our clients we are the outside IT and marketing department — the domain, the hosting, the site, the listings, the analytics, all of it. To do that job you have to be able to get at the thing. So we build on WordPress, and increasingly on static builds served from the edge; this site runs on Astro with a Git-backed CMS deployed to Cloudflare. Both are files and a database, and there is always a way in.

Past a certain point on Squarespace, nobody can get at it. Not the owner, and not the agency the owner hired. The store, the portfolio and the styling are not being withheld from you by anybody. They simply do not come out.

The second reason is the ceiling above. When a client needs thirty services modelled properly, or a portal, or data that has to talk to something else, I do not want to be the person explaining that their platform does not do that and the fix is starting over.

If you are on Squarespace right now

Do not panic and do not let anybody sell you a rebuild before they have looked. A lot of this is fixable where it sits.

  • Use the real collection types properly. If your services are currently thirty hand-built pages, and a portfolio or blog collection genuinely fits their shape, moving them into one is a real improvement in both maintenance and structure.
  • Fill in the SEO settings. Titles and descriptions are per page. Most neglected sites have never had them set.
  • Check what plan you are on before anyone quotes you for schema work, so the cost of the plan is in the conversation rather than a surprise later.
  • Reconcile your listings. Name, address and phone identical everywhere they appear online. Costs nothing, and it is frequently the thing holding back local visibility.

And if you are planning to leave eventually, plan it honestly. Budget to rebuild, not to migrate. Your text and one blog come across; the design and most of the specialised pages get made again. That is not a disaster, it is just a number, and it is much better to know it now than to find out during the quote.

The point

To their credit, Squarespace documents all of this honestly. The caps, the fixed collection types, the export exclusions — it is all published, in plain language, on their own help centre. They are not hiding anything.

They are simply relying on the fact that nobody reads it until it is too late to matter.

Ask the question before you build, not after: if I want to leave in three years, what exactly comes with me? Any platform, any agency, mine included. If the person selling to you cannot answer that in plain language, that is your answer. The method behind that is here.