Astro vs Squarespace
Squarespace is a good answer for a site built once and edited occasionally. The question is whether the template is still helping you or has become the reason three things on your list cannot be done.
Pick the one the job wants.
Read both columns. The one that describes more of your week tells you where the pressure is coming from.
Stay on Squarespace when
- Squarespace is also running your store, your scheduling or another part of the business, and those systems are working.
- The pages change a few times a year and the template still fits them.
- One person maintains the site and the editor is why they can.
- The store is doing real business and moving it would be the actual project.
- Nothing on the roadmap needs a layout the blocks will not make.
Move to Astro when
- The marketing site has outgrown the template while commerce or scheduling can be separated out behind it.
- The same facts are retyped across nine pages because nothing relates them.
- Code injection has become an undocumented dependency list nobody reads.
- A page needs a layout the template will not produce, so CSS is being fought.
- The site has outgrown one editor and needs a model rather than more blocks.
Capability by capability.
| What is being compared | Squarespace | Astro |
|---|---|---|
| Design control | Squarespace A template, with the settings it exposes | Astro Components, styled in code Squarespace templates are opinionated on purpose, which is why they look coherent. The trade is that the opinions are not negotiable past a point, and custom CSS is where teams discover where that point is. |
| Content model | Squarespace Collections: blog, events, products, gallery | Astro Collections somebody designed for this site |
| What the export contains | Squarespace Partial. WordPress XML carries some pages, one blog and basic content; the layout system, the styling and several Squarespace content types stay behind | Astro The repository is the site: components, routes, styles and configuration in code your team controls This is the row that decides the shape of the project. The export is real, and it is partial in ways worth knowing before anybody quotes. |
| Blocks versus structure | Squarespace Pages assembled from blocks on a page | Astro Content separated from the layout that renders it |
| Third-party code | Squarespace Code blocks and code injection | Astro Integrations in the codebase, reviewed |
| Who maintains it | Squarespace Squarespace, including hosting and updates | Astro Your team owns the build, the deploy and the dependencies |
Architecture
Four things that change when the site becomes a codebase.
Differences in how the site is worked on, not reasons on their own. If the case for staying on Squarespace above still describes you, none of them is worth a migration.
Estimate your migration cost Compare Astro to every platform
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Blocks
Content stops being an arrangement of blocks
A Squarespace page is blocks on a page, so the words and the layout are the same object. That is why the export flattens it and why every page built with the editor as a layout tool is rebuilt by hand.
Afterwards the content is separate from what renders it, which is what lets the same fact appear on nine pages and be changed once.
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Code injection
The integrations come out of the shadows
Analytics, chat, pixels and the odd fix accumulate in header and footer injection over years, added by people who have moved on.
In a codebase each is a deliberate integration that somebody reviewed, and the audit on the way across routinely finds half of it loading nothing.
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Templates
The layout stops being a negotiation
Squarespace templates are opinionated on purpose, which is why they look coherent, and the opinions stop being negotiable at a point every growing site eventually finds. Custom CSS is where teams discover where that point is.
Past it, writing the layout is cheaper than fighting one.
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Content model
Your content model is yours
The built-in collections are blog, events, products and gallery, and what you publish either fits one of those or gets forced into it.
A designed model holds what the site actually has, with relationships the build can check rather than a naming convention somebody has to remember.
Integrations
Changing the frontend doesn't mean changing your stack.
The site is one part of a marketing stack, and a migration that leaves the rest of it broken has not finished. Each of these is a deliberate integration with a guide behind it, rather than a script pasted into a header somewhere.
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HubSpot
Forms that land in the CRM as records, confirmed by the server rather than by the browser.
CRM
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Sanity
A content model the marketing team edits and the build renders, with no second copy of anything.
CMS
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Google Analytics
Traffic and conversions measured against the routes the site actually has.
Analytics
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Stripe
Checkout handled by Stripe, with the webhook as the record that decides what happened.
Payments
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Mailchimp
Signups that reach the audience exactly once, whatever the visitor clicks.
Email
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Zapier
Site events handed to the automations the team has already built.
Automation
Squarespace and Astro, answered.
Can I export my Squarespace site?
Partly. Squarespace exports to WordPress XML, which carries pages and one blog and leaves behind products, galleries, audio and video blocks. It is a real export and a partial one, and knowing which half is missing before anybody quotes is the difference between a smooth project and a surprise.
What about my store?
Commerce does not come out in the export, and moving a working store is usually the wrong project. If the store matters, the honest answer is to keep selling where you sell and move only the marketing site, which is the same boundary I recommend on Shopify.
Will my URLs stay the same?
Page slugs and the blog structure stay. Squarespace also serves several address shapes for the same page, including older ones nothing links to any more, and those are inventoried from analytics and Search Console rather than from a crawl, because a crawl only finds what the site links to now.
How long does it take?
Two to five weeks. The range is wide because it depends almost entirely on how many pages used the editor as a layout tool: those are rebuilt individually, and a site of mostly standard pages moves in half the time of one where every page is bespoke.
Reach out and see if we are a good fit.
Currently booking two to four weeks out.