How to keep your SEO ranking when moving from Wordpress, Wix or Showit to Squarespace?

March 11, 2021 Emily Peilan

Let me guess... your biggest fear about moving from Wordpress, Wix or Showit to Squarespace is that you're gonna lose all your hard earned SEO brownie points and your traffic is going to take a nose-dive, which might cause your business to sink! Gargh! Better to just stay right?!

Well... what if I told you that you don't have to lose all your hard earned organic SEO traffic? What if you could actually INCREASE your SEO rankings and organic website traffic BY moving over to Squarespace? Because if something is easier to maintain and optimise, you're more likely to do it right? And Squarespace makes it SO easy to optimise your site for SEO!

I've helped quite a few clients migrate their entire business from Wordpress over to Squarespace without losing their SEO ranking or traffic! In fact, their SEO rankings have INCREASED because I was able to help them implement the below strategies when migrating!

So, in this blog article, I want to help you do the same! I'll share with you my top 5 tips for a seamless content transfer and SEO optimisation when migrating from another website platform to Squarespace.

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CONTENT

URL redirects - most important
Connecting Multiple Domains
Broken Links or 404 Error Pages
SEO Page Title & Description
Squarespace SEO "Yoast" Plugin

1. URL redirects - most important!

Probably the BIGGEST reason why people's SEO and traffic plummet after moving to a new website platform is because they totally neglected their URL redirects!!

Think of it like this... when you move to a new house with a new address, you gotta tell people!! Otherwise everyone thinks you're still living at your old address!! Your banks will keep sending statements to your old address and your friends still send card to your old address... unless you tell them! Or tell your post office to redirect any post addressed to your old address to now be sent to your NEW address!!

Much like the above example, when you move from Wordpress to Squarespace, it's very likely that you'll change or update some of your old URL slugs. And unless you tell the browser to redirect people to your NEW URL slug, then the page will simply appear to be 'broken' and Google will flag you for 'misleading people' to a page with no information, thereby lowering your SEO ranking.

eg. Let's say your blog gets you a tonne of traffic and its URL slug was /blog (eg. emilywanders.com/blog). But you were feeling super creative and wanted to now call it Journal, so you changed your URL slug to /journal (eg. emilywanders.com/journal).

This means that you could potentially lose ALL your blog traffic going forward because you changed the address of your blog without redirecting people to your new blog address! Naturally Google will flag you and your SEO will drop... UNLESS you do your URL Redirects correctly, in which case nothing bad will happen! In fact, if your NEW URLs have better keywords in them, then your SEO ranking might actually increase!

So... HOW do you do URL redirects?

Well, it's surprisingly LESS daunting than you think! You can follow Squarespace's guide on doing your own URL redirects here.

2. Connecting Multiple Domains

Following on from tip #1, if you have multiple domains, then these two tips go hand in hand!

If you have more than one domain directing to your website and you're not sure how to transfer multiple domains over to Squarespace... or what the best procedure is - don't worry, here's what you need to know in a nutshell:

You can keep your domains registered with your third party host (ie. Bluehost, Godaddy, Namecheap, etc.) and simply CONNECT each of your domains to Squarespace (without having to actually transfer the domain, which is a whole other story!). What this essentially means, is less admin for you and you're telling the browser to point all your multiple domains to your new Squarespace site instead of your old site (eg. on Wordpress).
If you prefer to have all your billing and invoices in one place (ie. with Squarespace), then you can TRANSFER all your domains from your current third party host (ie. Bluehost, Godaddy, etc.) TO Squarespace. This makes it easier in the future to manage your DNS settings right from Squarespace itself. It's more upfront hassle to TRANSFER (than option 1, which is to simply CONNECT), but it's LESS hassle in the long run - and I actually WOULD recommend this option if you plan on sticking with Squarespace for the next foreseeable future - like me ;)
Lastly, you just have to choose your Primary domain (or your main domain url). eg. if I have both emilypeilan.com AND arohavisuals.com but for now, I'd like to direct people to the latter then I simply set arohavisuals.com as my PRIMARY domain. However, if people were to go to emilypeilan.com - they would automatically be redirected to arohavisuals.com.

And if I was to decide to rebrand my business to emilypeilan.com then all pre-existing links directing to arohavisuals.com (eg. the contact page) would STILL work but it would automatically point people to emilypeilan.com instead (but still the same contact page, just different domain name)! So this is super handy if you've just pivoted or rebranded!

Here are some more fantastic resources if you want to nerd out on this further:

3. Broken Links or 404 Error Pages

Broken links and 404 error pages can show up for a number of reasons! It could be that someone else typed your link wrong? Or misspelled some part of it? or some other random reason...

Let's just say, someone mistyped a URL on your site. They were going for: www.freelancenomad.com/services but instead they left out the -s and typed /service. Naturally, an error page shows up (through no fault of your own!).

But when this happens, people can get disheartened and bounce off your site quite quickly, causing your bounce rate to increase and SEO ranking to decrease. It also loses you potential customer and client leads.

So there are TWO ways I would recommend going about this:

Redirect them to your HOME page whenever they land on an error page! Or any other page of your choice! But either way, it will look much better than: 404 ERROR - and they will be less likely to bounce! From your Squarespace Dashboard, navigate to → Design → 404 page → in the drop down just select the page you want to redirect people to!
Create a Custom 404 error page that's fun, redirects them to your most popular pages and keeps them engaged on your site!

4. SEO Page Title & Description

Honestly... Squarespace makes it SO easy to optimise your site for SEO! Like they even have a section for you to fill out SEO Page Title and SEO Page Description! I don't ever remember Wordpress having this! Although it was a long while ago since I play around with Wordpress!

Aaaaanyway, point is - don't skimp out on filling out your SEO page title and descriptions because they can really boost your SEO! Especially if you just migrated from another website platform like Wordpress.

Essentially what it does is allow YOU the opportunity to write SEO keyword rich descriptions (kinda like an excerpt of your page), which will show up on Google Searches just beneath the title. How often do you make your choice to click through or skip a site, purely based on the title and this little SEO description? All the time right?

If you decided NOT to write the SEO page description, then Google will take the first 100 words of that page and use it as the preview text.

So imagine your blog post is: 7 Social Media Marketing Tips for 2021, but your first 100 words were something about how your started your journey back in collage with zero mention about Social Media Marketing and zero SEO keywords... mmm that page probably isn't gonna rank so well and very few people will want to click through because the preview (SEO description) seems so ... irrelevant to them!

Of course, you don't have to do this for each and every page! But... I would HIGHLY recommend doing this for all your important pages that you want to rank highly for and increase your traffic! Truly does make a difference, test it out and see for yourself ;)

5. Squarespace SEO "Yoast" Plugin

One of the biggest 'pros' of blogging Wordpress has been the Yoast plugin because it's able to tell you how strong your SEO game is, while you're typing out your text.

Well... I have to say, Yoast now has a pretty strong Squarespace contestant! The clever peeps from Squarestud.io have taken the best features in Yoast and worked with SEO experts to produce a comprehensive SEO plugin for the Squarespace platform! → link https://squarestud.io/shop/p/seo-pro

Best part is? You can try it out for FREE! And if you like it, the upgrade is only $30 USD for the Pro version!! Which, in my opinion, is such a steal! You can view it here.

So WHAT does the Squarespace SEO Pro Plugin actually do?

Analyses web pages across 22 different indicators to ensure they are fully optimised for Google and other search engines.
Uses 3 different categories of indicators to improve your pages.
📚 Readability: Analyses how readable a web page is for users. Web pages that have easy to read content result in higher user retention, and more users recommending the site to others. This results in a boost to your page’s SEO. Our tool scores your content using 8 reliability indicators, such as: the Flesch Easy Reading Score, Paragraph Length, Transition Words (how well your text flows) and Active/Passive text voice.
🔎 General SEO: Analyses the code behind your page to ensure it is optimised for search engines. Our 5 indicators ensure that you’ve correctly set page meta titles & descriptions, and included enough content for highly ranked web pages.
✍️ Keyphase Analysis**:** Optimises a page to rank in search engines on specific keywords. For example, if you run a website selling comedy t-shirts, you’d want to rank highly in Google for keyphrases like “funny t-shirts”. 9 keyphrase analysis indicators will assess your page, and advise where to include keyphrases within your content to rank higher.

*sourced from their site

I actually purchased the upgrade myself and recommended it to a few clients - so YES, I can also recommend it to you, especially if you do a lot of blogging and are looking for a Yoast alternative on Squarespace!

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