Migrating from Squarespace to Webflow without losing your rankings

Webflow publishes an official guide for leaving Squarespace, and it opens by setting expectations.

Migrating from Squarespace to Webflow is a rebuild, not a transfer.

There is no import button, and since that warning comes from the vendor selling the move, it is worth planning around.

That framing is useful because a rebuild has a budget, a sequence, and a finish line. The transfer people imagine, where a site slides from one platform to another intact, does not exist, and planning for it is how migrations go wrong.

We run every migration on one principle, which is that almost everything in a rebuild is recoverable. Copy can be pasted again, photos can be downloaded again, and a layout can be rebuilt, usually better, since the old design is often why you are leaving.

The exception is your Google traffic. A Houston business that spent years earning its rankings holds them at specific URLs, and those URLs stop existing on launch day. The URL and redirect map decides whether that traffic survives, and it is the one part of the move that cannot be redone later. The rest of the rebuild is work you can schedule and price.

What Squarespace hands you on the way out

Squarespace’s own export documentation keeps the list of what you can take short. The .xml export carries layout pages, one blog with its posts, text blocks, image blocks, and gallery pages.

The list of what will not export is longer. It includes store pages, portfolio pages, index pages, cover pages, any blog beyond the first one, product and video blocks, drafts, style settings, and custom CSS.

Squarespace explains why in the same export documentation.

Not everything will export, as many features rely on our platform’s JavaScript and CSS.

Images are the biggest gap. The same documentation is direct about it.

It’s not possible to export images or uploaded videos from your site in bulk.

So you download them one at a time from the Asset library, and Webflow’s guide repeats the warning with one piece of practical advice, which is to budget time for it.

The receiving end adds a limit of its own. Webflow has no site importer of any kind, and its own pricing-page FAQ says “you can only develop websites in Webflow.” Content re-enters through CMS Collections, typed in or imported from a CSV file you build yourself.

So the words and pictures survive the move with patience. What does not move by itself on either platform is the set of addresses Google actually ranks. That part gets planned first.

Rankings live at addresses

Google does not rank your site as one unit. It ranks pages at specific addresses, and every address either changes platforms with you or stops working. The bridge between the old address and the new one is the 301 redirect, the permanent forward that tells browsers and search engines a page moved for good.

Google’s site-move documentation answers the usual fear directly.

301 and other permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank.

The redirect itself does not cost you rankings. The damage comes from an old URL that has no redirect at all.

Google also names the failure it sees most often, which is redirects pointing “to the wrong (non-existent) URLs on the new site.” A redirect that lands on a 404 page preserves nothing. The visitor and the crawler both reach a dead end.

So the first deliverable of a migration is a spreadsheet, not a design. It lists every URL on the old site in one column and the page it becomes in the other. Build it from your site’s sitemap and from Search Console, which shows the pages actually earning clicks.

One shortcut will hurt you. Pointing every old page at the new homepage looks tidy. Google treats the result as a pile of soft 404 errors, and it warns against redirecting many old URLs to “one irrelevant single URL destination, such as the home page of the new site.”

The map also outlives launch. Google’s guidance is to keep redirects “for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year.” If you keep your custom domain, you can skip one step. The Change of Address tool applies only when the domain itself changes, not the platform behind it.

Building the map into Webflow

Webflow keeps redirects under Site settings > Publishing > 301 redirects, and adding them requires a paid Site or Workspace plan. Each rule pairs the old path with where it now goes.

Old path:       /old-page
Redirect to:    /new-page

A blog rarely needs a rule per post, because a wildcard moves the whole folder. The (.*) in the old path captures everything after the folder name, and %1 drops it into the new path.

Old path:       /blog/(.*)
Redirect to:    /posts/%1

Two capture groups work the same way, so /blogs/(.*)/(.*) can land at /articles/%1/%2. Webflow sets no hard cap on redirects but recommends staying under 1,000, because every rule ships to each visitor’s browser with the site. Wildcards are how a big site keeps its list to a few dozen rules.

For bulk entry, the same panel imports a CSV with two columns, old path and new path, up to 16 MB. That is a different file from the CMS-content CSV that imports blog posts, which has its own 4 MB cap. After any import, redirects take effect when you publish the site.

We read every cap and requirement in this post from the two vendors’ own documentation in August 2026. Vendors change these numbers without much notice, so confirm them on the linked pages before you build the map around them.

Redirect rules that fail silently

Webflow documents every one of these, but most people only read redirect documentation after a redirect fails. Here they are in one place. Check for them before launch.

First, a CSV import replaces every redirect on the site. Webflow’s own documentation carries the warning.

New imports overwrite all existing redirects.

The safe routine is to export what is there, merge your new rows into that file, and import the combined file.

Second, order matters, because redirects run oldest first. A broad wildcard added early swallows every URL a later, more specific rule was meant to catch. Enter the specific rules before the wildcards.

Third, a trailing slash before a query string fails silently. Webflow strips that slash before it evaluates the rule, so the redirect never fires. Nothing tells you.

Works:          /slug%?param%=value
Never fires:    /slug/%?param%=value

Those % signs are Webflow’s escape character. Special characters in an old path, including ? and =, each take a % in front. New paths need no escaping.

Fourth, redirects do not cross language folders. A rule for /old-url does nothing for /es/old-url. A site with locale subdirectories needs its own rule in each one.

There is also a gap neither vendor documents. If you built redirects inside Squarespace’s URL mappings panel, they do not come along. We checked both vendors’ documentation for a converter into Webflow’s format and neither mentions one, so those rows get rebuilt by hand too.

Launch order, and the year after

The order of the launch matters more than its speed, and Webflow’s guide puts it in one line.

Redirects should be added before your domain cutover to prevent traffic loss during launch.

The redirects go in first. Then the site gets published and tested, and the domain moves last.

The first weeks after launch look noisy, and that is expected. Google recrawls the site more heavily than usual, and for a medium-sized site it takes a few weeks or more to start showing the new URLs. Watch Search Console for crawl errors during that period rather than reacting to every ranking movement.

One leftover causes more damage than any redirect bug, and that is the noindex tag or robots.txt block that hid your staging site, still live on launch day. Google lists it first among the mistakes it sees, so check it as part of the launch itself.

Planning the rebuild around the map

If you are still weighing the move itself, we compared the two platforms in Webflow vs. Squarespace, and made the wider case for Webflow as the marketing-site platform in Webflow vs. WordPress.

If the decision is made, the order of operations matters most. A migration run well starts with the redirect spreadsheet and ends with rankings that hold through the move, and that is the outcome to plan for.

Our website migration service builds the redirect map first, before design work starts, and keeps it live through the year Google needs. The rebuild is planned around the map.

If you want help scoping the move, get in touch with the list of pages your site ranks for today. We will walk you through what has to happen to each one.

Frequently asked questions

Can I transfer my Squarespace site directly to Webflow?

No. Webflow’s own migration guide calls the move “a rebuild, not a transfer,” and no automated converter exists. Squarespace exports one blog and basic text and image blocks to an .xml file, images come down one at a time, and the layouts are rebuilt in Webflow.

Do 301 redirects hurt Google rankings after a migration?

No. Google’s documentation states that 301 and other permanent redirects do not cause a loss in PageRank. What costs rankings is a missing or wrong redirect, meaning an old URL that dies in a 404 instead of forwarding to the new page. Keep redirects live for at least a year.

How many 301 redirects does Webflow allow?

Webflow sets no hard cap but recommends 1,000 as the practical ceiling, since every rule ships to visitors’ browsers with the site. Wildcard rules that move a whole folder in one line keep the count down. Adding redirects requires a paid Site or Workspace plan.

Do I need Google’s Change of Address tool for this migration?

Only if your domain changes. Google’s documentation says the tool applies to moves from one domain or subdomain to another. If you keep the same custom domain and change only the platform behind it, your 301 redirects and an updated sitemap carry the move.