The process that I used to bring my posts from my SquareSpace blog to the newly created one on WordPress was pretty basic. I first went into the blog on Squarespace via the longer url of quawkle.squarespace.com and logged in with my administrators account. Since I had already hooked up the DNS settings for quawkle.com to the new blog site on WordPress this was the only means I had of accessing my SquareSpace account. In the settings, there is an area for exporting my blog content so I chose the WordPress setting which then created an XML file I was able to download to my computer.
I switched over to the WordPress account for Quawkle and using the Tools, Import link, I was directed to download the WordPress importer plugin. I then chose the XML file I downloaded from SquareSpace and imported all of my posts and data into WordPress. So far, so good. I took a look and for the most part, things looked better than I expected.
I soon discovered a couple of issues that would require significant time on my part to correct. The first issue was that all of the images in my posts were still sourced on my SquareSpace account. Since that account would be closing in a little over a week’s time, I now need to take action immediately and start recovering those images to my local hard drive and then manually replace each post’s image so they would be sourced in the new blog. There were some images that I was hosting on my dropbox account, but the majority were still with SquareSpace. That process took the better part of a couple of days. I have since moved my images again to make use of Amazon’s S3 as my storage hopefully to prevent this issue in the future should I ever decide to make another change.
The second issue was that my permalinks were a bit messed up. I guess that I could have gone though each post and fixed those (which I probably should do) but I was faced with the dilema of whether to change them to the format I used with SquareSpace or the new format I chose to use with WordPress. Rather I decided to use a nifty plugin tool called Permalink Finder which intelligently interprets incoming permalink requests and finds the appropriate post. It actually works quite well.
Aside from these two issues, the migration went quite well. If I had prepared a little better before making the migration, I may have been able to save myself some of the headaches of the changeover. However, I did learn quite a bit in the process and learning is always a good thing!
In part 3 of this series, I will share some information that I found online that may help the person who is migrating from SquareSpace to WordPress.