Squarespace to WordPress migration · Speakers and Personal Brands

How we moved 1,500+ Adam Mendler articles and talks off Squarespace to WordPress

Adam Mendler had spent years publishing on Squarespace: more than 1,500 CEO interviews, talks, media features, and articles. The archive was his brand, but Squarespace's export was incomplete and the platform capped what he could do next. We wrote a scraper to pull every record cleanly, built a custom plugin that mapped Squarespace fields to WordPress custom post types, redesigned the page templates in Elementor with dynamic fields, and then cut the domain over. Every URL, every article, every quote made it across.

1,500+
Articles and talks migrated with full fidelity
0
URLs lost during cutover, every old path redirected
100%
Original SEO metadata, dates, and authors preserved

The challenge

Squarespace's built in export dropped custom fields, collapsed article types into flat blog posts, and skipped media galleries. Adam's archive was too large and too structured to rebuild by hand. He needed every interview, talk, and press feature to land in WordPress with the same URL, the same publish date, the same author attribution, and a design that matched his brand at the pixel level. Nothing could be lost, and Google could not notice the move.

What we did

  1. 1

    Wrote a script that crawled every Squarespace page and collection, pulling structured data, media, and canonical URLs into a normalized JSON archive.

  2. 2

    Built a custom WordPress plugin that read that archive and created native WordPress records, mapping each Squarespace collection to the right custom post type with matching taxonomies.

  3. 3

    Redesigned the page templates in Elementor so interviews, talks, and articles each got a purpose built layout instead of a generic blog template.

  4. 4

    Wired the redesigned templates to Elementor dynamic fields so every one of the 1,500+ records auto populated from its own data, no manual pasting.

  5. 5

    Rehearsed the full cutover on staging, generated a URL by URL redirect map, and rebuilt sitemaps, canonicals, and schema before touch down.

  6. 6

    Switched DNS during a low traffic window with the Squarespace site kept warm as a rollback for 30 days. Watched Search Console daily for coverage and ranking drift.

The result

All 1,500+ interviews, talks, and articles came across with their original URLs, publish dates, and metadata intact. The redesigned Elementor templates gave the archive a professional editorial feel that Squarespace could not produce. Adam moved off a rented platform without losing a single indexed page, and now owns every file and every field on his own hosting.

I had over 1,500 pieces on Squarespace that I could not afford to lose. WebCare wrote the migration around my archive instead of forcing my archive into a template. Every URL survived, the redesign is beautiful, and I finally own my own site.
Adam Mendler · Leadership Speaker and CEO Interviewer, adammendler.com

Common questions

Why not just use Squarespace's export?

Squarespace's built in export flattens custom collections into plain blog posts, drops custom fields, and skips galleries and product pages. For an archive of 1,500+ structured records that would mean rebuilding by hand. Scripting the extraction was the only way to preserve every field.

How were the 1,500+ records converted into WordPress?

We built a small plugin that read the normalized archive and created native WordPress posts against the right custom post type and taxonomies, with authors, publish dates, featured media, and canonical URLs all mapped one to one.

How did the SEO survive the move?

Every Squarespace URL was mapped to its WordPress destination before cutover. A single clean 301 covered each old path. Titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, sitemaps, and schema were audited on the new stack, and Search Console was watched daily for 30 days after DNS switch.

Why Elementor with dynamic fields instead of a static rebuild?

With 1,500+ records the design had to be template driven or edits would take forever. Elementor's dynamic fields let one interview template pull from every record automatically, so the design stays consistent and future entries render the same way with no extra layout work.

Want a recovery like this?

Evidence on request

Every fix is recorded. Every outcome is verifiable.

We have 500 plus recorded engineer sessions covering migrations, malware cleanups, speed wins, and emergency recoveries. Most clients are under NDA, so we cannot publish them publicly. On a 20 minute discovery call we will show you the recordings, dashboards, and before and after numbers most relevant to your situation.

  • Loom walkthroughs of real client recoveries, narrated by the engineer who did the work.
  • Anonymised case files with PageSpeed, GSC, and uptime evidence, NDA respected.
  • References from named clients available on the call when there is a fit.

On your discovery call you will see

500+

Recorded fixes

150+

Founder track record

100%

Confidential

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