Squarespace (or Wix) to Framer: Migrating a Marketing Site

Moving a marketing site from Squarespace or Wix to Framer means rebuilding the design in Framer's canvas rather than importing it, moving repeating content — blog posts, team members, case studies — into Framer CMS collections, mapping every existing URL to a new page or a redirect, and verifying metadata parity against a documented baseline before switching the domain. That is the whole job, in order. This guide covers how we actually run it, what reliably goes wrong, and the cases where the honest recommendation is to stay put.

The Thing to Understand Upfront: This Is a Rebuild

Migrations between a template builder and a design builder are rebuilds. There is no meaningful automated import path from Squarespace or Wix into Framer, and any pitch that implies otherwise is selling you a disappointment. Each platform renders pages through its own system: Squarespace and Wix through templates and blocks they control, Framer through a design canvas with its own component and layout model. Nothing carries across that boundary intact.

Content exports narrow the gap without closing it. Squarespace provides a limited XML export that handles blog posts reasonably and leaves plenty behind; Wix offers less. Either way you can recover text and get a head start on populating a CMS — but the layout, the type scale, the interactions, and the section design are recreated by hand.

That sounds like bad news and usually isn't, because it is normally the point. Teams rarely leave Squarespace because the export is poor. They leave because they've outgrown the template — the brand has moved past what the theme can express, the layout fights every new section, and design decisions keep getting made by what the builder allows. If you were going to keep the design exactly as it is, the migration would be hard to justify. Since you're not, the absence of an import is mostly an accounting detail. Plan for a rebuild, scope it as one, and treat the existing site as a specification for content and URLs rather than a source file for design.

First: Should You Migrate at All?

Stay on Squarespace when its bundle is the business. If your revenue runs through Squarespace commerce, appointment scheduling, member areas, or email campaigns, you are not evaluating a website — you are evaluating an integrated operations stack that happens to include one. Replacing it means sourcing and wiring each of those pieces separately, and the design upgrade often does not justify that. Squarespace is a genuinely good product for that shape of business, and the same fairness applies to Wix, which serves a very large number of small businesses well.

Consider Framer when design fidelity and motion are doing commercial work: a brand-forward marketing site, a product or agency site where the interface itself is the argument, a team with a designer who should be shipping directly instead of filing tickets. Framer's advantage is that the design tool and the publishing tool are the same tool, which collapses the handoff that usually slows marketing sites down. Our Framer development work exists for exactly that profile.

Consider a code-first build instead when the site is large, programmatic, or application-like: hundreds of pages generated from structured data, complex localization, gated flows, deep integrations, or a content operation that needs a real editorial backend. That is the territory of custom web development paired with a proper headless CMS, and pushing that shape of site into any visual builder is a decision you will revisit within a year. If your decision is specifically between the two visual builders, our Framer vs Webflow comparison is the more useful starting point.

The Five Phases

The order is not decorative. Inventory precedes design because you cannot rebuild what you have not counted; the design system precedes page building because components made after the fact never get retrofitted; URL mapping precedes cutover because redirects written under launch-day pressure are the ones that get skipped. It is the same documented-baseline, side-by-side-comparison, instrumented-launch sequence described in our methodology, applied to a smaller and faster project.

What Actually Goes Wrong in These Migrations

• URL patterns silently changed. The rebuild produces sensible new paths, nobody compares them to the old ones, and every ranking URL 404s on launch day. Platform URL conventions differ by default; the mapping in phase 4 is what makes the difference deliberate instead of accidental.
• Blog posts pasted as flat pages. Forty posts recreated as forty hand-built pages because it felt faster than modeling a collection. It is faster — once. Then every design change to the post template becomes forty edits, and the site quietly stops being maintained.
• Metadata never re-entered. Titles and descriptions written into Squarespace's SEO fields over several years exist nowhere in the new build, so every page ships with an auto-generated title. Metadata belongs in the baseline and gets checked for parity before cutover.
• DNS cutover before redirects exist. The site looks finished, the domain gets pointed, and the redirect map is scheduled for "next week." The crawlers do not wait for next week. Redirects go live with the switch, never after it.

What You Gain on the Other Side

A site where the design system is real and the content is structured. Components with variants mean a brand change propagates instead of being reapplied page by page; CMS collections mean the next case study is a form submission rather than a build task; and the design work stops being negotiated against what a template permits. For teams whose site is a sales asset rather than a brochure, the change in iteration speed is usually the durable win — you can ship a new landing page in an afternoon and actually keep testing.

Webvello is an independent development partner and is not affiliated with Framer, Squarespace, or Wix. We recommend all three in the situations where they fit, and say so when they don't.

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