Squarespace to Shopify Migration for Indian D2C Brands

Squarespace is a website builder that added stores. Shopify is an ecommerce platform that added a website builder. The distinction matters when your catalogue grows, when you need Indian payment gateways and courier integrations, or when you want to scale beyond Squarespace's limits. This guide explains what data moves cleanly, what must be rebuilt, how to protect your search rankings through the switch, and when to plan the migration.

Details are from the Shopify Help Centre and Squarespace support documentation, checked on 8 October 2026, including Shopify's own Squarespace migration guide and its URL redirect documentation, plus Razorpay's Shopify integration docs. Both platforms update regularly, so verify the export options in your admin before you start.

Why do Indian D2C brands move from Squarespace to Shopify?

Squarespace works well for small stores with steady traffic and a simple product mix. The reasons Indian founders usually give for moving fall into a few groups:

• Indian payment and checkout. Shopify Payments is not available in India, but Indian gateways plug into Shopify directly. Razorpay's own documentation describes a Shopify app that accepts UPI, cards, wallets and netbanking, and Cashfree and PayU also serve Shopify stores. Check whether your current Squarespace payment setup gives your customers UPI and the other methods they expect.
• Courier and fulfilment. Indian shipping aggregators publish Shopify apps. Shiprocket's App Store listing, for example, says it helps Indian businesses automate shipping operations and fulfil orders. If your courier setup on Squarespace is manual, this alone can justify the move.
• Cash on delivery controls. The Shopify App Store has many apps for verifying COD orders and cutting return to origin losses, which matter a great deal for Indian stores. Our guide on reducing COD returns to origin covers what actually works.
• Growth beyond one channel. Shopify supports bulk product edits, CSV imports, a public API and many marketplace and ERP connectors, which matters once you sell in more than one place.

If your Squarespace store is small, your payments work, and customers are happy, there may be no urgent reason to move. Migration is most valuable when Squarespace is holding back sales or operations, not because another platform is trendy.

What data moves from Squarespace to Shopify?

Most store data can move. Shopify's Squarespace guide lists products, customers, historical orders (orders already fulfilled) and reviews, and it recommends using CSV files where they are available. Order history is the exception: the guide points you to third-party migration apps from the Shopify App Store for that. Blog posts and pages are not covered by the CSV route, so plan to copy them across or use a migration app.

On the Squarespace side, Shopify's guide gives these paths. Products: open the Products and Services panel, then Products, and export all products or a selection. Customers: go to Contacts and use the export option. Orders: go to Selling, then Orders, click Download CSV and choose fulfilled orders. Open each file in a spreadsheet and check it before you import anything.

What does not move from Squarespace to Shopify?

Plan ahead for these gaps:

• Your design. Squarespace templates do not convert to Shopify themes. You pick a Shopify theme and rebuild the look, or hire a developer. This is also a good time to fix what was not working on the old site.
• Customer passwords. No platform exports passwords. Customers with accounts must set a new password on Shopify after you launch.
• Store settings like tax rules and policies. These must be reconfigured on Shopify. Our GST setup guide for Shopify covers tax configuration for Indian stores.
• Squarespace apps and their data. Reviews, loyalty points, subscriptions and form submissions live inside each app. Shopify's guide lists reviews as data you can migrate, usually through a reviews app that accepts a CSV import. Export everything before you disable the old store.
• Your URLs. Squarespace uses a different URL structure to Shopify, so every page address changes. Redirects are essential to preserve rankings.

How do you protect SEO when migrating from Squarespace to Shopify?

With a complete URL redirect map. Google has indexed your Squarespace URLs, and other websites link to them. If those links break after launch, you lose rankings and traffic. Redirects tell Google and visitors where each page has moved.

Squarespace URLs depend on how your site was set up: the name of your store page, your page slugs and your blog slug all shape them. Shopify uses fixed patterns instead, so almost every address changes. The old URLs below are placeholders only. Take your real ones from a crawl of your own site:

To protect your rankings:

1. Crawl your Squarespace site with a tool such as Screaming Frog and save every live URL. Include the URLs from your Squarespace sitemap and your top landing pages.
2. Match slugs where possible. If the product handle on Shopify matches the Squarespace slug, the redirect is simple and the page retains its identity.
3. Map each old URL to a specific new page, not to the homepage. A redirect to the homepage wastes most of the page's search value.
4. Load the redirect CSV into Shopify. In the admin, go to Content, then Menus, then View URL redirects, and use Import. Shopify provides a sample CSV to use as a template. Shopify's Squarespace guide says to set up redirects before you transfer your domain.
5. Bring over page titles and meta descriptions for pages that bring traffic.
6. Resubmit your sitemap in Google Search Console after you go live, and watch the coverage report over the next weeks for errors.

How long does a Squarespace to Shopify migration take?

It depends more on your store than on the platforms. A small catalogue with a few variants on a ready theme is fast. A larger brand with many products, variants, years of order history, custom design, multiple apps and content that needs link-by-link checking takes weeks of careful work.

A typical flow looks like this:

1. Audit. List every product, page, app, integration, email list and URL you need to move.
2. Set up Shopify. Create a new store, pick a theme, set up payment gateways, shipping and Indian taxes (GST).
3. Move the data. Products first, then customers, then orders and content.
4. Build and connect. Customize the theme, install apps, connect payment and courier integrations, rebuild any Squarespace-specific features.
5. Test thoroughly. Test every payment method including COD, test mobile, test redirects, test order notifications.
6. Launch. Point your domain to Shopify at a quiet time, then monitor orders and redirects closely.

Should you migrate before or after Diwali?

For most brands, after. Diwali falls on 8 November 2026. The weeks leading up to Diwali are the busiest of the year for many Indian stores. Launching a new platform in the middle of peak season adds real risk: new checkout, new courier connections, new payment gateways and new redirects all being tested by real customers at peak volume. If anything breaks, the cost is high.

If your Squarespace store is already failing and peak season is at risk, a fast, tightly scoped migration might still make sense, but finish well before the busiest weeks. Otherwise, plan and build on Shopify through October and November, then switch the domain after Diwali ends. Our Diwali readiness checklist covers what peak season demands of a store.

What should you check before switching the domain?

• Every product has correct prices, variants, images, stock and weight.
• Products are available on the Online Store sales channel. Shopify's guide notes that imported products marked as hidden stay unpublished until you make them available to your sales channels.
• Test orders work with every payment method, including COD and prepaid options.
• Shipping rates and courier integrations return the correct charges for your pin code zones.
• GST settings and invoice formats are correct.
• Email notifications for orders, accounts and support carry your brand and link correctly.
• All URL redirects are in place and tested, including old product and blog URLs.
• Analytics tags, Meta pixel and Google tags fire correctly on Shopify.
• Keep your Squarespace plan active for a while after launch so you can check anything you missed.

We have also written guides on WooCommerce to Shopify migration and custom website to Shopify migration to help you compare platforms.

Can you migrate from Squarespace to Shopify yourself?

A small store can. If you have a few dozen products, little order history, simple design, no custom Squarespace apps and limited search traffic, CSV exports, a migration app for order history and a good theme will carry you most of the way. Spend your time on the redirect map and testing checkout.

Bring in help when real business is at stake: a large catalogue with many variants, search traffic that brings meaningful sales, custom design that took months to build, Indian integrations that must work on day one, or a launch date that cannot slip. The cost of a broken migration, in lost rankings and lost orders, is usually higher than the cost of doing it right.

Planning a Squarespace to Shopify move?

Free migration plan. Get in touch or email hello@exactwhy.com with the subject "Squarespace to Shopify" and your Squarespace store URL. Tell us roughly how many products you sell, which apps you use and when you would like to launch. We reply within 4 hours with what will move cleanly, what needs rebuilding, how to protect your rankings, and whether to launch before or after Diwali.

If you go ahead. We handle the full move: data migration, Shopify setup, theme design, Indian payment and courier integrations, redirects and launch testing.