Capture the Squarespace baseline
- Crawl the live site and export XML sitemap URLs.
- Add organic landing pages, conversions, backlinks, campaign links, files, and URLs absent from navigation.
- Record status, indexability, canonical, title, description, H1, schema, language signals, internal links, and media references.
- Identify priority pages and pages to consolidate, archive, or remove.
- Approve the WordPress permalink model before templates and redirect rules are locked.
Create a one-to-one URL decision map
For every valuable Squarespace URL, record the final canonical WordPress destination, expected status, redirect rule, reason, owner, and tested result. Preserve a useful path where possible; when it changes, redirect directly to the closest equivalent.
Avoid chains, loops, broad patterns that capture unrelated paths, and homepage fallbacks. Test hostname variants, HTTP and HTTPS, trailing slashes, case, encoded characters, parameters, files, feeds, and campaign URLs.
Transfer page-level search signals
| Element | Migration action | Validation |
|---|---|---|
| Titles, descriptions, and H1s | Map useful source values or approve revisions | Find missing, duplicated, truncated, or unintended values |
| Canonicals | Point indexable pages to final self-canonical URLs | Check rendered HTML and target status |
| Internal links | Rewrite to final WordPress URLs | Crawl for old paths, redirects, and broken targets |
| Structured and social data | Reimplement valid destination markup | Test rendered output and required properties |
| Images and files | Move accessible assets and update references | Check status, alt text, indexing intent, and embedded URLs |
Validate protected staging
- Keep staging behind access controls and explicit noindex protection.
- Allow authorized migration QA to crawl rendered pages.
- Compare statuses, canonicals, robots directives, titles, descriptions, H1s, schema, links, assets, pagination, language signals, and sitemap membership.
- Test mobile rendering, performance, navigation, forms, analytics events, and the APP conversion path.
- Confirm production will remove staging-only blocks without copying staging URLs into canonicals or sitemaps.
Launch-day checklist
- Complete the content freeze or final delta transfer and reconcile results.
- Confirm production hostname, HTTPS, statuses, robots rules, canonicals, and indexability.
- Apply and test approved redirects for priority landing pages, backlinks, and alternate paths.
- Crawl production for broken links, old-host references, blocked assets, chains, and missing metadata.
- Verify analytics, forms, conversion events, sitemap publication, and search-tool submission.
- Keep named owners for errors, rollback decisions, content corrections, and redirect changes.
Monitor after the platform switch
Track server errors, 404s, redirect hits, index coverage, sitemap processing, priority URL inspection, organic landing pages, queries, backlinks, conversions, and performance. Compare patterns by page group instead of reacting to one URL at a time.
Keep important redirects for the long term and record every correction in the URL map. For transfer mechanics, read the export/import guide; for current product scope, use the commercial migration page.