I was working for a client that had a website on Squarespace. They were having issues getting more traffic to the site, and had specific needs that either required a bunch of extra work or couldn’t be met on Squarespace.
Customer requirements
- Better SEO
- Recipes that could be specified by a schema and pickup up by a search engine
- Events (broadcast, live shows, IRL appearances) to be managed and displayed in a calendar
- Episodes and sketches that can be syndicated as a video podcast (i.e. create a podcast RSS feed)
- Completely customer serviceable
Not wanting to get too in the weeds, I focused on platforms that were well maintained and would likely be around and supported for a long time. WordPress fit the bill and there were plugins that satisfied all the requirements.
Recipes and events were created and managed by respective plugins. Posts would be the majority of content, both for generally attracting visitors (special interest posts about food) and to represent sketches and episodes that would automatically appear in the podcast feed.
There was no clear way to get the existing data from the Squarespace site into a new WordPress install. I could get a backup/export from Squarespace, but that format couldn’t be directly imported into WordPress; WordPress did support importing from several other platforms, but I would have to create a solution here for myself. I picked apart the schema used by Squarespace backups and WordPress imports, then created a small C# app to transform the data. The code is on GitHub:
