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-Adrian
The Problem With Exporting Your Website Away From Squarespace
I finally — FINALLY! — managed to pull the rest of my images and blog posts off my older Squarespace website and got them displaying correctly on this website, hosted by Dreamhost (Affiliate Link), where all the images are now correctly imported into and served directly from the media library.
Formatting for some image galleries is off, but that can easily be fixed. The important part is not having to chase down broken image links that point to a defunct website as the source and having to re-upload them one at a time, per blog post, to fix them.
I let it sit for nearly a year because I didn’t want to deal with it while editing single blog posts whenever I felt up to it.
What a ?!*#%$&!?! pain in the ass it is to migrate data I own away from Squarespace! And, as I understand, with Squarespace’s newest templates, exporting away is not even supported.
If you are looking to build a website and want to choose between an integrated website builder platform like Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Shopify, etc vs building with WordPress, Drupal, Concrete5, or some other open source CMS, consider how important your content is to you, and what your options are should you need more functionality or resources than what you started with.
If you hit that point, will you be able to easily take ALL of your content with you to another platform or website, if at all? What happens if you export everything into an XML file, only to find that all of the images you had posted didn’t import correctly and now you have to fix dozens of broken image links.
Or what if you want to export everything but find out, at that moment, that you cannot because the platform will only export certain things or won’t allow you to export out at all..?
Choose carefully.
About my current webhost
In case you’re curious, this website is hosted by DreamHost, my current favorite webhost, on their dedicated WordPress plan, DreamPress (Affiliate Link).
I chose them after migrating away from Squarespace and comparing different WordPress hosting plans on Hostgator, SiteGround, InMotion Hosting, and Pressable among several others.
For a variety of reasons, I refuse to touch GoDaddy.
American Bogan, my e-commerce shop, is also hosted under a second DreamPress plan after I decided to migrate it away from Shopify. The combined monthly costs for two Shopify stores on the basic plan ($39.99 x2) plus another $20 each (to allow Shopify’s live shipping rates to connect to Printful) is more than three times what my DreamPress Plus websites cost at $29.95 each!
I now have multiple automatic backups enabled for safety and security and can access far better SEO tools, something that Shopify does not offer unless you install separate apps that each charge you yet another monthly fee.
I also have a shared hosting account with DreamHost. On it, I am currently hosting three websites: one for Zoe’s chainmaille and scalemaille webshop, her best friend’s handcraft shop, and one for Artemis’ official website.
I can host as many websites on my shared-hosting plan (Affiliate Link) as I wish without worry.
DreamHost has been the right combination of price, storage, un-metered bandwidth, expertise, and support for me. I swear to God, I learn something new every time I have to contact Customer Support with a new question!
Bottom Line:
If you’re looking for a good webhost, please consider DreamHost (Affiliate Link).
I’ve been very happy with them for a few years, now!