Squarespace has been quite prominent in the market for a long time. If you ask, which is the best CMS platform for handling small to large businesses? The answer is simple. Squarespace. Squarespace comes with many features for budding entrepreneurs. The out-of-the-box website design approach and no-coding web builder.

Squarespace comes with a drag and drop interface, is e-commerce friendly, and has many templates. But, when it comes to expanding your business and upgrading your eCommerce services, Shopify is the best choice.

Shopify empowers around 1,700,000 active businesses spread across 175 countries, generating $200 B. Source.

We’ll explore the benefits of Shopify over Squarespace and how to migrate to Shopify easily.

Why do businesses migrate from Squarespace to Shopify?

Shopify was built specifically for the eCommerce sector. On the other hand, Squarespace caters to all sorts of websites. So, Shopify being niche-specific has many compelling features like:

Stock Management

Shopify has a wonderful ability to manage stocks. Automatic messages in case of low inventories, adding items as per demand in the market, and real-time reports of the revenue; you get everything on Shopify. It is a one-stop solution to inventory management.

You can even access third-party retailers from the store itself. They do all the collection and selling of the products. eCommerce store owners need to select their products, add them to the store, and clients can select their desired products. Shopify interface will automatically transfer links to third-party for delivery.

Payment Gateways

Squarespace comes with a fewer choice of payment options. On the other hand, Shopify has hundreds of payment gateways. Any payment option you think! Shopify has it. Let it be country-specific or niche-specific, and it has everything—for example, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, Paytm, PayPal, even cryptocurrency. With more payment options, you can easily set gateways according to customer and business preferences. And it just charges 2% of the transaction fees.

Ease of Digital Marketing

Shopify has integrated all the many marketing techniques into its platform. You can build your brand and increase your online presence with Shopify. There are more than ten social media platforms to showcase, advertise, and sell your products.

Shopify gives you Email marketing options as well. With this, you can manage around 50,000 emails. Initially, it is free of cost. Later, you can pay $8 per month. You can easily manage your Email campaigns from your admin page itself.

Shopify simplifies your SEO. Shopify has a range of built-in SEO apps and third-party apps for making your task easier. It helps your website rank higher and thus brings you more clients.  

Active Customer Support

Shopify has 24*7 customer support. Do you know that it has both offline and online services? Shopify chatbots are intelligent enough to tackle all your basic queries. In case of complicated problems, Shopify provides active customer support. So, if you get stuck during platform operation or you’re able to understand how to use certain features, Shopify will assist you.

It streamlines your marketing campaigns, accounting, shipping, customer support, and inventory management; Shopify is a one-stop solution for all. You can hire Shopify experts for migrating from Squarespace to Shopify seamlessly.

How to Migrate from Squarespace to Shopify?

Migrating data is not a big deal as Squarespace provides export options and Shopify imports. You can have a look at this complete guide before transferring your data.

Managing your previous data

Data is a crucial part of any business. While designing your Squarespace website, you must have invested a lot of time and effort into that. First of all, it is necessary to secure our previous data. You can do it by:

# Exporting products from Squarespace

To export your product data, transfer all your product information, images, related products, customer data, and purchase section from Squarespace. Otherwise, some of the purchase history or hidden products may remain undetected. Follow these steps:

1. Go to your Squarespace account.
2. Move to advanced settings.
3. Select Export from the Import/Export menu.
4. Check out if you have exported all the required product data.
5. Click on the Download button. You will produce a CSV file.

#Exporting content from Squarespace

Content is the soul of any website. There are many essential sections on the website, such as the Landing page, About us, e-store categories, blogs, payment details, and other information.

1. Go to advanced settings and click on Export.
2. Click on the WordPress menu. And Choose the data which you want to download.
3. After some time, all the content will get exported.
4. Download .xml file. And convert it into a CSV file.

Developing your store on Shopify

After securing your previous data, you can set up your store with Shopify. Shopify has a 14-day free trial period to let you see how your business operates. You can choose different plans if you want to continue.

Once you have done the basics of creating your store, you can import your information on Shopify.

It is necessary to import both product and content CSV files.

Working on Theme and Switching Domains

For providing your clients with the same or better experience from Squarespace, you need to select the first-class Theme. We recommend installing Shopify Debut Theme or Turbo Theme. You can customize it according to your requirements:

1. Specified places for menu
2. Images, logo placement
3. Color choice, CTA buttons, and
4. Last but not least, placing products with their description.

Switching Domains is also a crucial step as it takes Shopify around 24 hours to switch the domains. So, keep your Squarespace until Shopify has launched your new store. Otherwise, your clients will go unattended.

Optimizing your Store

The most important thing for SEO is URLs. It makes a big difference in your SEO rankings. So, take backup for your sitemap and convert it into CSV. Upload the data into Excel Sheets to keep it safe.

There are many backlinks, internal and external links. It is easy to manage internal and external links. You can refer to your previous data and provide hyperlinks accordingly.

But what about backlinks? Links from resource pages, high-quality websites will go unutilized. And it will be the worst user experience. So, for managing backlinks, the best thing to do is: includes status code:

1. Provide Redirects 301, 302 if alternate links you have added. These are permanent redirect links. This way, your previous clients will be able to find your new web page.
2. Provide 404 error code if page information got obsolete. It is necessary to report Google and other search engines if some pages are no longer there on the web.
3. Sending your clients to the home page in place of unrelated links is not a good choice as Google may penalize you, considering it to be black-hat SEO.

Other important Tips are:

1. Give secure connection to your users with HTTPS.
2. Make sure to update your website address on all search engines.
3. Check Google Analytics and edit the information of your new domain.
4. Merge all previous APIs of Squarespace and integrate social media links on Shopify.

Conclusion

In brief, we can say it is worth switching to Shopify in case you’re looking for customized eCommerce services, expanding your customer reach, and in-store digital marketing facility. It is advisable to transfer your products and content from Squarespace to Shopify. Indeed, it is necessary to manage URLs carefully for search engines and users. So, how are you planning to migrate to Shopify?