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Everything I learned switching my blog from Squarespace to WordPress.
I used Squarespace to host my blog for a couple of years, but recently made the decision to move from Squarespace to WordPress self-hosted using Bluehost.
The reason I made the move over wasn’t because I was unhappy with Squarespace, but because I knew there had to be a better way of blogging.
In a way, I didn’t want to be writing this article because it’s the same thing you read in every single post about how to start a blog.
I thought, surely there’s another way to start a blog that doesn’t include having a self-hosted WordPress site.
But nope. Turns out, I finally made the move from Squarespace to WordPress. And here’s why I did it.
Why I made the move from Squarespace to WordPress
Squarespace is a great, user-friendly hosting provider for your blog. It’s super simple to set up websites, install themes and edit your content.
When it comes to the aesthetics of my blog, and the use of Squarespace, I have no complaints. It takes no time to create a really good-looking, professional website without needing to know how to code.
As someone who didn’t have much experience with coding or anything technical, Squarespace made having a blog really simple.
The main issue I had with Squarespace was the price. Their basic plan starts at £10, but you actually end up paying a few pounds more than that with VAT.
I think that this is too high for any beginner blogger to justify. Unless you’re making enough money to cover these costs, it’s not worth it. Especially when there’s plenty of other services that are a lot more affordable.
Then if you want to start monetizing your blog you have to bump up your plan to one of their business plans, which takes the cost just over £25 a month. If you want to use Google Ads or services like Skimlinks, you can’t do this on the basic plan.
I didn’t have a problem with paying this, but I just knew there had to be a cheaper way to run my website.
And there was, through a self-hosted WordPress site.
How to move from Squarespace to WordPress
Now that we’ve gone over all of the reasons why I moved to WordPress, let’s talk about how I moved my blog over as it’s not the simplest process. I’ll break it down into a timeline to help you with all of the steps that I took before I was ready to relaunch my website.
If you scroll to the end of this post, I’ve also included the checklist I used when relaunching my blog, including all of the things most people might forget to check.
Setting up your blog in WordPress
Hosting
When you choose to have a self-hosted WordPress site, you have to choose a company to host your website. This is the first thing that you need to set up.
There are quite a few options, but I followed everyone’s recommendations and went with Bluehost.
Bluehost is significantly cheaper than Squarespace. With Bluehost you can start at only $3.95 (£3) a month, that’s around £36 a year. When I saw this and compared it to the £300 I would have been paying for Squarespace, I felt pretty stupid.
Bluehost was a super affordable option and you have the option to pay for the whole year upfront, so it’s one less thing to worry about after that initial payment.
Take it from someone who started a blog without Bluehost, this is the best and cheapest hosting provider. I highly recommend it, click the banner below to set up your own website with Bluehost!
Bluehost also has really good customer service. The live chat is active 24/7 which I found especially useful after I ran into a whole load of issues.
You’re then able to install WordPress through the Bluehost portal, and after that, you’re ready to start building and importing your content!
Designing
One of the most important parts of this relaunch was the design of my website. I wanted it to be more of a representation of me and be more creative.
Because I had a Squarespace template, I couldn’t just move the design over to WordPress, so I had to start again from scratch, but luckily you have so many options when it comes to choosing a WordPress template.
If you want to keep costs down to a minimum, you can choose one of the free WordPress templates. But I wanted something a bit more unique.
WordPress templates
If you search WordPress templates in on Google you’ll find plenty of companies that sell templates for you.
Here are some of the best I found:
I chose a template from heartenmade. It was a bit different and creative, exactly what I was looking for. The price was also very reasonable, I paid $49 (£38) for mine.
When looking for blog designs, I’d recommend investing a bit of money into a good quality template.
I’m not saying you need to spend hundreds, but be aware that with these templates you get what you pay for.
You’ll find lots of templates that are super cheap, but normally are too good to be true and you may run into issues when trying to set it up.
I think the $50 mark is a good place to start if you’re a new blogger.
Once you pay for your theme, you should get instructions from the designer on how to install it in WordPress. If you have any issues, I’d always recommend contacting the creator, or send me an email – I’d be happy to help if I can!
I’m planning to do a whole post about designing a blog too where I cover how to come up with your branding and aesthetic and the tools I used to create mine – so keep a look out for that soon!
Importing and editing your content
Blog audit
Before you move all of your content over from Squarespace, I’d recommend doing a full blog audit.
Create an excel spreadsheet of all of the titles (and URLs, this will come in handy later).
Now you can see all of your blog posts and pages in one document, decide if there’s anything that you don’t need anymore.
This is an opportunity for a fresh start, so if there’s any posts or pages that you don’t think add value or aren’t up-to-date, get rid of them now before you start exporting.
I had a lot of posts from years ago that were just useless, they were getting no page views and there was no hope of them ever being useful to anyone, so I deleted them.
I was left with 50 good-quality blog posts and 4 main pages after getting rid of old content.
Exporting and importing content to move from Squarespace to WordPress
This is a simple process that’s covered in detail in an article from Themeisle.
I’d highly recommend following along their guide, this is what I used when I was moving my content.
Moving over images
(or in my case starting from scratch and resizing images)
This process is covered in Themeisle’s article. But before starting this process you should check what sizes the images on your new theme should be.
For example in my theme, I had to have a header image for all of my posts that was 1125px wide, and all pictures within the posts should be 800px wide.
All of the photos on my old blog were the wrong size so I had to go through and resize them myself and reupload each one individually.
I wish I had realised this before transferring the images over, it took a long time and I had to download various plugins and ultimately it was a huge waste of time as I didn’t need those images.
Double-checking the links and setting up redirects
Remember to double-check the link structures of your posts and pages. They may be automatically set up to include dates, categories etc. that may be different to your old URL structure.
You can update this in the Permalinks section of your WordPress dashboard, and you can keep it the same as your old structure.
This is when it’s good to have that list of all of your page URLs, so you can easily work out if you need to set up any redirects in WordPress to stop your readers coming across a 404 error page.
Transferring my domain
I wanted this to be one of the last steps I did to avoid my site being down for a long period of time.
I transferred my domain from GoDaddy to Bluehost. It was a long process that resulted in a lot of issues (this is when I was very thankful for the Bluehost chat support).
You can find plenty of guides on how to transfer your domain, I’d recommend this one.
Hitting publish
And that’s it! You’re ready to publish.
Your FREE publishing checklist
But wait! Before publishing, have a look through my FREE publishing checklist.
Put your details in below and get the guide emailed straight to you.
Moving to WordPress – Final thoughts
So it’s been a couple of months since my move to WordPress and I’m so happy with my choice.
I enjoy the process of writing and creating blogs within WordPress, I feel like I have so much more control over the design.
If you’re moving to WordPress, don’t expect to be confident straight away. I had to learn how to navigate the interface, work out how to use plug-ins etc. After a few weeks I felt confident in using it, so it really doesn’t take long.
Most importantly, I’ve noticed a SIGNIFICANT spike in traffic since the switch.
My traffic has more than doubled.
During the switch I did go through all of my posts and optimize them for the web which may have played a big part in it.
I really don’t think I’ll ever be moving away from WordPress now, it’s fantastic.
Thanks for reading! I hope that this was useful to anyone thinking of moving to WordPress.
If you have any questions, or would like advice about moving your blog, feel free to send me an email at volumesofbeauty@gmail.com – I’m always happy to help!
What do you use for your blog?
molly