Recently tried to migrate my blogs from Wordpress (Self Hosted) to Squarespace and failed to make it work out for me.
The EtherealMind and Packet Pushers websites are burning a LOT of CPU cycles due to HTTP requests and our hosting provider requires even more money to handle the load. (Bandwidth is cheap, but CPU/Memory isn’t - even with a world class CDN in front of the site) Some checks into the logs files are showing that a lot bandwidth is burned by marketing companies and vendors scanning my blog for “sentiment analysis” etc.
My Squarespace experience wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good:
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My first import from Wordpress failed because the URL redirection setup failed. My second and third imports failed as well. My fourth import with tech support also failed.
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URL Redirects do NOT work because Squarespace enforces dates in the URLs. Which is not cool.
For example, the original URL of my blog was http://gregferro.com/ode-to-melancholy.html but Squarespace wants to force it to http://gregferro.com/content/2011/12/26/ode-to-melancholy.html
In my view, the date should not be in the URL. Where the “content” is the name of the of a category. Problem with the category too when you don’t wan’t that there either.
- Squarespace does not support DisQus comments - therefore it’s unwise to have a blog that needs comments. Although Squarespace has a comments system, I’m not sure I want to learn another one - that’s why I chose DisQus in the first place.
Disqus supports Squarespace, but Squarespace wants to force you into their ecosystem. Not happy about that.
- Squarespace doesn’t import any pages from Wordpress, only posts.
On the bright side, Squarespace does import your graphics/ images inside your posts but they are not available for future use ie. they do not appear in the graphic picker for new posts. Again, not a show stopper.
In the end, I got a refund because these things are all problems. The failed import broke my faith in the product. The lack of flexibility in the URL format meant changing hundreds of blog post links and damaging the SEO standing of the blog.
If I was starting a completely new blog, then Squarespace might be ok. But moving out of SquareSpace to another platform could be a problem because the data is limited to their formats.
So not a bad experience, but not a good one either. The product otherwise looks OK to me. Your mileage may vary.