Will I Lose My SEO When I Migrate from WordPress to Squarespace?
So you have little time to manage your site and you’re thinking about moving your website from WordPress to Squarespace. But, you’re also wondering if you’ll suffer some SEO loss and valuable site traffic.
The good news is, from Google’s perspective, they really don’t care which website platform you use. The bad, well you probably will experience a short-term drop in your SEO ranking, but assuming you take a few key steps when migrating your website, this will only be temporary and have minimal impact.
Moving from WordPress to Squarespace and maintaining SEO
In this post, we’ll be going through the steps necessary to maintain your SEO ranking in Google.
Here’s what we’re going to look at:
URL 301 redirects
Keeping your metadata the same
Alt text on images
Creating a 404 page
Submitting your sitemap to Google
Wordpress URLs vs Squarespace URLs
The main reason why SEO rankings fall after a migration from Wordpress to Squarespace is that there’s a difference in certain URL structures between the two platforms.
Before you switch platforms, it’s best to make a list of every URL in Wordpress and its corresponding URL in Squarespace. If there is a difference in the two URLs, you’ll need to do a 301 redirect.
Here are a few examples:
Blog migration to Squarespace
Let’s consider a blog migration from WordPress to Squarespace. A blog post in WordPress typically follows the following structure:
www.domain.com/blog-post-title
In Squarespace, a blog post is located in a sub-folder and therefore the URL structure looks more like this:
www.domain.com/blog/blog-post-title
Assuming you name your blog folder, ‘blog’, every blog post will be located in the ‘blog’ subfolder. This creates a difference in URLs and the old WordPress URL will need to be redirected to the new Squarespace URL.
Shop items
It’s a similar story for shop items. If you sell shop items on your website, your WordPress URL will look something like this:
www.domain.com/product-item
On Squarespace, like the blog, your product items will be located in a sub-folder and your URL will look something like this:
www.domain.com/shop/product-item
Starting to see a pattern? Here’s another one for you.
Tags and categories
Let’s say you have a fashion blog and there’s a category called ‘evening shoes’.
In WordPress your category will look something like this:
www.domain.com/category/evening-shoes
In Squarespace, your URL will have this structure:
www.domain.com/blog/category/evening+shoes
The same follows for tags. Now it can be a bit of a pain redirecting all of your tags and categories but it’s worthwhile doing as Google can sometimes index these pages.
If you’re in a similar situation to a recent client of mine, where you have around 500+ tags some of which are relevant and some of which are not, I’d just focus on the categories for now. It’s also a great opportunity to narrow down your tags to a few keywords relevant to your target audience. Who doesn’t enjoy a spring clean once and a while? :)
Subpages in WordPress
Occasionally in WordPress, you may have a sub-page, which is essentially a page of a page. For example, you may have a page called ‘styling’ and a page underneath that called ‘personal styling’.
The URL format will be:
www.domain.com/styling/personal-styling
Here, the URL ‘/styling’ is a page and ‘/styling/personal-styling’ is a separate page.
The way to get around this in Squarespace is to create a ‘blog collection’ and name it ‘styling’ and then create a post called ‘personal styling’.
However, if you’d like the sub-page to remain a page in Squarespace, you can create a new page that has the format: www.domain.com/personal-styling - And then do a 301 redirect from the old WordPress URL to the new Squarespace URL.
How to do a URL 301 redirect in Squarespace
Head over to Settings ->Advanced -> URL mappings. The format for redirecting is :
/old-url -> /new-url 301
So for a blog post the format looks a like this:
/blog-post -> /blog/blog-post 301
Essentially you’re telling Squarespace, this is the old URL (/blog-post), please forward it (->) to the new URL (/blog/blog-post) and this is a permanent change (301).
Keeping your metadata the same
If you’ve been on Wordpress for a while, you’ll be familiar with a plugin called Yoast and you’re probably wondering how on earth you’re ever going to live without it.
On the Yoast plugin, you can create an SEO friendly title for your blog post and a meta description. Unfortunately, data in plugins doesn’t carry over to Squarespace and you’ll need to copy and paste over the SEO titles and descriptions for all of your pages and blog posts. This can be an undertaking depending on how big your site is, but it’s important to do so you don’t lose all of your metadata.
The good news is that you no longer need a plugin to manage. Changing the SEO titles and descriptions is built into Squarespace and you can easily do this by heading over to the settings of your blog post.
Alt text on images
The last time I did a blog migration from Wordpress to Squarespace, I noticed that the alt text copied over into Squarespace. Yay! In Squarespace the alt text becomes the image caption.
But, if your Wordpress blog has a featured image, this isn’t always the case. So I would double check the featured images and if it’s missing an SEO optimised caption, add one in :)
Creating a 404 page
Broken links can be kind of annoying when you’re on a website. We want to keep your website visitors on your site for as long as possible and set up a 404 page that helps redirect your visitors back to current pages is a perfect solution.
Pro-tip: Include a search bar, links to pages, and even some blog posts.
To do this, create a new page and label it 404-page. Then under ‘Design’ -> ‘404-page’ ->select your custom page.
Submitting your sitemap to Google
Once you’ve connected your domain and launched your new site, submit your new sitemap to Google Search Console.
In Google search console, click on ‘Site maps’ -> paste in ‘https://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml -> click submit
It can take Google a couple of days to crawl and index your new site.
Conclusion
So if you’re wondering if you should switch from WordPress to Squarespace, hopefully, this blog post has helped you navigate that process so that you can enjoy a simpler life and minimise the short term drop in SEO for your site.
