How to Backup Your Squarespace Website
Understanding how to backup your Squarespace website may save you from a potential disaster. After all, your website is your business's biggest asset - so it's vital that it stays up to date and is immune to any threats.
Unlike Wordpress, Squarespace is a closed system, which means that your site is unlikely to break because there are no third part plugins, themes or software that could cause issues on your website.
The chance of your Squarespace website disappearing or breaking out of the blue are next to nil, but it's always important to have a plan B. Particularly when scenarios like a deleted blog post or a broken CSS snippet are far more likely.
In this post, I'll be walking you through the simplest way to make a backup of your Squarespace website (it takes just a couple of minutes!) as well as some other tips and tricks to help you feel confident that your site is safe and secure.
How to Duplicate Your Website
By far the quickest method of backing up your website is duplication. This is a new feature that Squarespace recently brought in, and it has made making a backup so much easier. Backing up your website essentially means that a copy of all your content exists somewhere else - and that is exactly what duplication does.
In Squarespace, duplicating your website is easy - you can follow these steps and have a secure copy of your website in just a few minutes:
Head into your account dashboard. This is where all your websites live, whether you have one or twenty.
You don't want to click on the website. Instead, click on the three dots and select duplicate website - this will start the process of duplication which is completely automated.
You'll now see a new copy of your website appear in the dashboard. Occasionally, Squarespace can miss the odd thing during this process, so make sure to double check the new copy for any flaws.
You should now be left with a complete backup of your website - content, images, blog posts and everything else that you may have added over time.
How Often Should I Backup My Website?
A normal website should be backed up every quarter to ensure that the duplication stays relevant. However, if your website is particularly content heavy or undergoes regular updates and additions, it may be worth scheduling backups monthly or even bi-weekly.
Lastly, if your website has just had an overhaul, make sure to duplicate the site immediately to avoid any potential disasters.
Related: How to Know If It's Time for a Website Overhaul
Other Backup Recommendations
While site duplication is by far the easiest way of backing up your website, it is important to take other considerations when producing content for your website. In the past, these steps were about the only way you could protect your Squarespace website from impending doom.
Now that duplication exists, it can be easy to start missing other important steps when it comes to the protection of your website and it's content. If your able to, I would still recommend taking these steps as a secondary precaution and an overall best practice.
Written Content
Do NOT write your website content directly into Squarespace. This is the most effective way to waste your hard work and time! As with any website platform, Squarespace will occasionally struggle to save your page, due to connection issues, computer speeds and various other factors.
Save yourself a headache and write your content inside something like Microsoft Word or a Google Doc. All the content for Wolf & Wild is written inside Notion, but any platform with an auto-save works well.
Image Content
Organisation is key here. It's easy to loose images or graphics you may have created for your website if your file system is chaotic or non-existent. Here's an example of how we organise the content for Wolf & Wild.
Subfolders are your friends! It's also good practice to name your images clearly - for example, the filename AboutPage5.PNG suggests that the file is the fith image for the about page. Easy to understand at a later date!
Code Injections and Custom CSS
If you're not sure what Code Injections and Custom CSS is, then you won't need to worry about this step.
It's essentially some extra code that you can put into your Squarespace website, which allows you to add unique customisations and functionality.
Depending on how much CSS you've added to your website, it can be quite catastrophic if you were to accidentally delete it. Wolf & Wild has over 2,000 lines of CSS powering our website, which means that backups of this are essential.
Backing up your custom CSS can be done by following these steps:
Head into the backend of your website
Go to Design > Custom CSS
Copy and paste all the CSS from the Custom CSS box into a Word/Google Document
This does require more frequent updates - in fact, making a new "backup" of this CSS every time you make a change is good practice. This is because it is so easy to accidentally delete everything, and CSS can be time consuming to re-write!
Related: A Beginner's Guide to Squarespace Custom CSS
XML File
An XML file is essentially a map of all the pages on your website.
This is a bit of a last resort when it comes to backups. XML files are great for SEO (more on that later), but not that useful unless you want to transfer to Wordpress. It will not help you transfer content from one Squarespace site to another, which is why this step isn't very important.
Only certain types of content will transfer via XML:
Text blocks
Image blocks
Layout pages
Project pages
Gallery pages
One blog and all posts
Blog comments
Pretty much every other type of block will not transfer. This means that moving to Wordpress is a messy business and not recommended (besides many other reasons!) Squarespace has an article all about this if moving to Wordpress really is on your task list.
To download your XML file, follow these steps:
Go to www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml (replace your domain with your website address).
This will immediately prompt the download of your XML file.
XML files are actually way more useful for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). You can use this to prompt Google's "spiders" to crawl your pages faster to start ranking on Google. We have a whole post dedicated to SEO on Squarespace if you want to know more!
