Help! Moving from Squarespace to Custom-Built Website

Hey Daniel, if it's the lack of creative freedom that's frustrating you then I can wholeheartedly recommend using Webflow instead of Squarespace. I started using it in earnest for my personal folio and it was a real revelation for me. I have tinkered with HTML and CSS (tiiiiny bit of javascript) to a hobbyist level (I'm a product designer by trade) but what I was able to do in Webflow would simply have been impossible for someone like me any other way. They've designed it really well because even though at first it seems confusing once you get started it is all really intuitive to use. And the help videos in their 'University' are honestly some of the best I've used for this kind of app. I'm sure you could migrate stuff over without too many issues (there'll be help content on that for sure). Definitely worth exploring.

I would use a more flexible website builder first. If that doesn't work then try custom code.

We built https://versoly.com/ for SaaS companies it comes with a bunch of SEO features. You also get support from myself (co-founder, who has spent last few years focused on this one topic)

Hey Daniel!

I’ve migrated a few sites in the past and thought I’d offer some insight! There are some important things to think about when tackling this.

Right now, you are paying x amount to squarespace for hosting/cms. When you migrate away from squarespace, you will lose both of those things. Hosting is fairly cheap these days (depending on who you go with) for static content. Your devs might already be familiar with a couple hosting companies.

Editing/publishing content is great with squarespace, but you’ll be losing that as well once you migrate. Do you have a content team that needs a CMS? If you maintain a blog, then the answer is most likely yes. If you don’t, then how often do you need new content published to your site? You could go the jamstack route (I usually do this for clients/employers), where your front-end will be written in either react or vue, and your CMS will be separated from the front-end completely. There are also traditional CMS's like wordpress (which is also a fine...but I typically advise against it these days unless a client can justify why they need/want it).

You mentioned SEO, and it is important! I’m not sure how much of a hit your site will take from Google once you migrate (hopefully minimal). In my opinion, as long your content stays the same (copy/alt tags, etc..) then it shouldn’t be too bad at all.

As for outsourcing, your mileage may vary. If you go that route, just be sure to look at their previous work, and make sure whoever you hire has a good level of English. Communication is key because most outsourcing peeps are robots who will do exactly what you say. No extra thought/effort will be put into the work (unless you're hiring a more expensive dev). I’m speaking from experience, and I’m not trying to say that's a negative thing either. Just know what to expect.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have more questions!

Cheers,
Jon

Hey Daniel,

Sounds like your best bet would be to simply take the HTML of all page, strip the unnecessary stuff (unused scripts etc) & just deploy the static version of the site to Vercel.com

This won't poke your SEO at all, since technically you are still serving the same HTML but apart from actual content and certain tags, there isn't much to SEO.

You can use a static site builder for blog section which can parse something like markdown files or source blog content from a headless CMS and build those pages in Github actions and deploy them to Vercel automatically.

Then with time you can modify the design as you go long.

A better approach (if you have a bigger budget) would be to redo the existing design of the site in something like Tailwind css or whatever you prefer & apply the same JAM stack technique mentioned above so that its in its final form and you simply modify it to suit your changing needs.

Hit me up when you are ready to take this approach.

My company Aptuitiv (https://www.aptuitiv.com) has a fair amount of experience moving our client's websites from a template builder like Squarespace to a custom website. We specialize in custom website development. We can help you if you are looking to outsource the design and development.

We typically build our websites on BranchCMS (https://www.branchcms.com), which is our hosted website content management system. The biggest difference between it and something like Squarespace is that it is NOT a website builder. It is a hosted CMS meant for custom websites. (I fully realize that the BranchCMS website is underwhelming, we're in the process of redoing it ;) ).

We use BranchCMS for nearly all of our client's websites and we have other partner agencies (like https://www.lobstermarketing.com/) that use it for their clients. Lobster Marketing, as an example, has 300+ of their client's website with us, some of which are large, multi-million dollar companies.

If you want to discuss further please let me know.