Data portability is always a critical feature with every major blogging platform. If you need to move your site, you need to have control over your content-- and that includes the ability to import and export your blog.
Squarespace has provided both importing options (from most popular formats) and exporting options (to Movable Type format) since day one, but there's always been an elephant in the room that nobody discusses when it comes to portability: when you move your site, these export files don't contain your media from your old posts. In other words, in most cases you'll have to keep your old site live so that images on your new site will work. Additionally, new systems almost always have different URL structures --meaning that links to your old posts will inevitably break when you move.
These are serious problems that we set out to solve. Which is why it's with great pleasure that I can finally announce our new importing tool. The new system will:
- Support more importing types - We realize that there are a variety of blogging platforms out there, so we engineered an Importer designed to work with all the major online blogging tools including: Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and Movable Type.
- Move ALL of your data over - After entering your login credentials, our Importer Tool will migrate all of your old blog posts, comments, tags, authors and more to your new Squarespace site. You will lose nothing.
- Crawl existing post media and rehost to Amazon S3 - Upon importing, Squarespace will crawl all the media from your old posts and ensure these files are uploaded to our Amazon S3 account. That means you can safely cancel your old service without worrying about how to download your images and re-upload them (an impossible manual task). Further, this won't count against your Squarespace bandwidth bill at all, as this technology is on our next generation media platform that's built to scale (using S3!).
- Ensure URLs map over to Squarespace properly - For users with custom domains moving over, we actually use the URL structure of your existing site and create mappings for every single one of your old posts -- automatically. This ensures that when you move your domain over to us, in most cases, all links to your old posts will work, and nothing will break. Your PageRank will update seamlessly, and the move will have no impact on the SEO status you've taken so long to build.
As with all new features -- there will likely be kinks, but let us know right away and we'll get to the bottom of things. Enjoy!