Complete guide to migrating your Squarespace website to Hugo. Leave Squarespace's walled garden behind and get blazing fast builds. Free migration tool included.
You can migrate from Squarespace to Hugo for free using LeaveWP. Enter your site URL, choose Hugo as the destination, and download your content — posts, pages, and media — in minutes. No API keys, passwords, or CLI tools required. Difficulty: Easy. Estimated time: 10-20 minutes.
Official docs: Squarespace Developer Docs · Hugo Documentation
All-in-one website builder with designer templates. Non-technical creators who want a polished site without touching code, but these limitations push teams toward modern alternatives.
Walled garden — no code access or custom server logic
This is the most common reason teams migrate away from Squarespace. Hugo eliminates this issue entirely.
Cannot self-host or export to another platform easily
With Hugo, blazing fast builds — renders 10,000 pages in seconds.
Limited to Squarespace's template system for design
Modern architectures like Hugo are designed to avoid this from the ground up.
Monthly costs add up ($192-588/year) for a content site
After migrating, you'll no longer need to worry about this — Hugo takes a fundamentally different approach.
Fastest static site generator, written in Go. Built with Go (Go templates), it's documentation sites and blogs where build speed and simplicity matter most.
Blazing fast builds — renders 10,000 pages in seconds
Single binary with zero dependencies
Built-in image processing, taxonomies, and i18n
Huge theme library for quick starts
Hugo is open-source and free to use. You own your code and data with no vendor lock-in. Deploy to any host that supports Go, or use managed platforms like Vercel and Netlify for zero-config deployments.
Side-by-side comparison based on real platform characteristics
| Metric | Squarespace | Hugo |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5 | ⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 |
| Performance | ⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5 |
| Flexibility | ⭐⭐ 2/5 | ⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 |
| Cost | ⭐⭐ 2/5 | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5 |
| Scalability | ⭐⭐ 2/5 | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5 |
| Ecosystem | ⭐⭐ 2/5 | ⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 |
| Language | Proprietary | Go (Go templates) |
| Pricing | $16-49/month | Free (open-source) |
| Open Source | No | Yes |
Ratings are based on publicly available data, documentation, and community consensus as of 2026. Individual experience may vary.
A detailed breakdown of how your Squarespace content maps to Hugo
What may need manual attention
Visual layouts and custom animations built in Squarespace's editor will need to be recreated in Hugo. The content and text transfers, but the visual design is platform-specific.
Migrate your content in three simple steps
Enter your Squarespace site URL — LeaveWP connects automatically.
Select Hugo as destination and choose content options.
Download your migrated content or preview it in your browser.
Migrating from Squarespace to Hugo makes the most sense if you're experiencing walled garden — no code access or custom server logic or outgrowing Squarespace's architecture. Hugo is best for documentation sites and blogs where build speed and simplicity matter most.
You should migrate if: your Squarespace site is slow, your hosting costs are climbing, you need more control over your code, or you want to adopt a modern JAMstack architecture.
You might want to stay if: your Squarespace site benefits from beautiful, professionally designed templates out of the box and you don't have Go developers on your team. Squarespace is genuinely easy to use, and that simplicity has value.
The migration itself is straightforward with LeaveWP — enter your Squarespace URL, select Hugo, and download your content. The more important question is whether Hugo's architecture fits your team's skills and your project's long-term needs.
Explore more migration paths from Squarespace or to Hugo
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