If you are running your business on Squarespace and thinking about moving to WordPress, you are not alone.
Most business owners I speak to feel the same thing. The site looks fine. It works. But it feels boxed in. SEO is limited. Integrations are awkward. Customisation is frustrating. And now, there’s a new problem: Squarespace sites are very difficult to optimise for AI search.
Rebuilding your website from Squarespace to WordPress is not a small job. Done properly, it is a business decision, not just a design tweak – and the rebuild is an opportunity to get your site properly structured for both organic and AI search from day one.
- Why move from Squarespace in the first place.
- Rebuild or migrate – what is the difference.
- Sort your content before you touch design.
- SEO – what you must protect.
- Building for AI search from day one.
- Design – keep it clean and purposeful.
- Theme choice – bespoke vs off-the-shelf.
- Page builders – friend or future headache.
- Plugins – what you really need.
- Hosting and performance.
- Costs – realistic expectations.
- Choosing the right developer.
Why move from Squarespace in the first place.
Squarespace is fine for small brochure sites. It is quick to launch and easy to edit. But most growing businesses hit the same walls: limited technical SEO control, restricted custom functionality, difficult integrations with other systems, template restrictions, performance limitations, and no meaningful way to implement the structured data and schema that AI tools rely on.
WordPress gives you ownership and flexibility. You are not renting space inside someone else’s system. You control the hosting, the code, and the direction of travel.
Rebuild or migrate – what is the difference.
You can attempt a straight migration of content, or rebuild properly from scratch. In most cases, I recommend rebuilding. A migration often drags old structure, weak content and poor page hierarchy into the new build. If you are investing in WordPress, use it as a reset. Fix what is wrong. Improve what is unclear. Remove what is pointless.
Sort your content before you touch design.
This is where most businesses get it wrong. You do not start with design. You start with structure and copy. If you cannot clearly explain what you do, who you do it for, why you are better and what action you want people to take, then no design will save you. Plan your pages first. Treat it like the contents page of a book. Homepage, About, Services, Case Studies, Blog, Contact. Then break those down properly.
SEO – what you must protect.
Your Squarespace site will have some organic search performance, even if it is modest. Before you touch anything, audit what is worth keeping: which pages rank for commercial intent keywords, which pages generate actual traffic, and what your current backlink profile looks like. Map those URLs before the rebuild. Set up 301 redirects. Don’t throw away rankings through carelessness.
Building for AI search from day one.
This is the opportunity most businesses miss when they rebuild. Moving from Squarespace to WordPress gives you a clean slate – and you should use it to build properly for AI search from the start.
That means clean, semantic HTML with proper heading structure, schema markup to tell AI tools what type of content they are looking at, content structured around specific questions your clients are asking, and fast load times so AI crawlers aren’t spending budget on JS bloat.
AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity don’t see your site the way visitors do. They read the content layer. If that layer is clean and well-structured, you get cited. If it isn’t, you don’t.
Design – keep it clean and purposeful.
Good design for a B2B service site means clear hierarchy, appropriate typography, and layouts that guide visitors to the right actions. It does not mean animations, parallax scrolling or visual complexity for its own sake. The cleaner the design, the better it performs – for visitors and for AI crawlers.
Theme choice – bespoke vs off-the-shelf.
Off-the-shelf themes are the Squarespace equivalent in WordPress land. They look fine, they load slowly, and they generate code you did not ask for. A bespoke WordPress theme, built to match your design and nothing else, is leaner, faster and far more maintainable.
Page builders – friend or future headache.
Page builders like Elementor and Divi are popular. They are also the main reason WordPress sites end up slow, bloated and hard for AI to parse. We do not use them. We use custom ACF blocks instead – clean, structured, purpose-built.
Plugins – what you really need.
A good WordPress build needs very few plugins. Yoast or Rank Math for SEO. A security plugin. Caching. An image optimiser. That’s broadly it. Every additional plugin is a dependency, a potential security issue and extra load time.
Hosting and performance.
Don’t move to WordPress and then host it on shared hosting. Managed WordPress hosting – WP Engine, Kinsta, Cloudways – is worth the cost. Fast servers, automatic updates, proper backups.
Costs – realistic expectations.
A proper Squarespace-to-WordPress rebuild from an experienced agency will cost between £3,000 and £10,000 depending on complexity. Be wary of anything significantly cheaper: it will either be a template build in disguise or it will need redoing in 18 months.
Choosing the right developer.
Ask to see examples of bespoke builds – not template sites with a new logo. Ask about their approach to AI search. Ask whether they use page builders. The answers will tell you everything.
Talk to us about rebuilding your Squarespace site in WordPress.
David Foreman
Dave is the MD at Toast has have over 25 years experience in designing and building websites that help deliver growth to businesses. He specialises in optimising websites to get found across organic and AI search channels.
