Leaving Squarespace in 2026: What Your Renewal Actually Costs Now

Renewal season, 2026 edition

On July 6, 2026, Squarespace raised prices on its US site plans — Basic, Core, and Plus — leaving the top Advanced tier and legacy Commerce plans where they were (as documented by JPK Design Co, as of July 12, 2026). There was no dramatic announcement. There rarely is. Renewal notices are how most owners found out.

Within days, the Squarespace forum had threads of owners comparing renewal notices that came in noticeably above what they had budgeted. Not outrage, exactly — more the specific dismay of people who set an annual line item and assumed it would stay set.

We are deliberately not printing the new tier prices here. Squarespace has changed them once this year already, and pasted-in prices rot faster than anything else on the internet. Check squarespace.com/pricing for the figure that applies to you today. The shape is what matters: the meter moved, and you didn’t touch anything.

Part of the sting is structural. Annual billing means you evaluate this purchase exactly once a year, in a single email, usually while doing something else. Fifty-one weeks of not thinking about your website, then one number, take it or leave it. Worth taking the moment seriously — it is the only one you get.

To be clear, a price increase is not a scandal. Companies reprice; infrastructure costs money; nobody is owed 2021 rates forever. But renewal is the one moment a year when you are actually invited to do the math. So let’s do the math properly: what does this bill buy, and what does it still not buy?

What the bill buys — and what it still doesn’t

Credit first, because the numbers back it up. Squarespace ships polished templates, managed hosting, SSL, and genuinely respectable performance. On real-user Chrome data, roughly 70% of Squarespace sites passed mobile Core Web Vitals as of November 2025, with Wix around 74% (CrUX-based benchmarks; the 2025 Web Almanac puts the mobile web average at 48%). Both builders beat the average web page. If someone tells you leaving Squarespace is about page speed, ask for their data — we published ours in the small-business website speed study.

So no, the problem is not speed. The problem is what the bill still doesn’t buy, at any tier: a second language. Squarespace has no built-in multilingual feature. The standard workaround is Weglot, a third-party translation layer that meters your site by translated words and by language (weglot.com/pricing, as of July 12, 2026):

The arithmetic is quick. A 30,000-word site translated into two languages is 60,000 translated words — past the Business cap, into Pro at €79 a month. At that point, teaching your site two extra languages costs more per month than many owners pay Squarespace itself. These are words you already wrote, metered per language, every month, forever.

Notice the meter’s distinctive property: it grows when you succeed. Publish more pages, write more posts, and your translated-word count climbs toward the next tier. A meter on words is a tax on writing — the one activity a content platform is supposed to encourage.

This is not a Weglot-specific complaint — Weglot publishes its meters plainly, which we respect. It is a platform complaint: multilingual is table stakes for a lot of small businesses, and on Squarespace it is permanently someone else’s meter. We cataloged how the whole industry prices this in the CMS Language Pricing Index 2026.

The export receipt

“Fine,” you say, “I’ll leave.” Squarespace does have an export button — one XML file, shaped for WordPress imports. Here is what Squarespace’s own help page says stays behind (as of July 12, 2026):

• Store pages, index pages, portfolio pages, cover pages, and album, info, and calendar pages

• Every blog except one — a multi-blog site exports a single blog, with comments capped at 1,000 per post

• Product blocks, video blocks, and audio blocks

• Draft posts

• Custom CSS and all style settings

• Content in page-specific headers, footers, and sidebars

Read that list against a typical Squarespace site — a store, a portfolio, a couple of index landing pages, one blog. The export contains approximately your blog. Everything else is copy-paste archaeology, one page at a time.

None of this is hidden, to be fair — the help page is public and clearly written. But nobody reads export documentation at signup. You read it at exit, which is precisely when it can no longer inform your decision about entering.

Wix owners, before you feel smug: it’s tidier for you, in the wrong direction. There is no general site export at all. Wix will hand you CSVs of structured data — products, contacts, orders — and its own help center explains that the site itself cannot be exported or hosted elsewhere. The design, the layouts, the pages: those stay.

What leaving actually looks like

If the renewal notice has you doing math, do the migration math before the renewal date, not after. The work is unglamorous but finite:

• Inventory your pages by type. Squarespace’s exclusion list above is, conveniently, your manual-migration checklist.

• Export the blog you’re keeping and open the XML to confirm the posts are actually in it.

• Copy everything else out by hand — page text, images at full resolution, product data from the commerce dashboard.

• Map every URL and plan 301 redirects, or watch your search traffic take an unplanned sabbatical.

• Move DNS last, once the new site is live and you’ve clicked through it.

And give yourself runway. A single-blog brochure site moves in a weekend; a store with years of products and a portfolio behind it is a couple of evenings per section. The renewal date is a deadline you already know about — working backward from it beats paying for another year you intend to leave.

None of this is exotic. It is just labor — and it is labor a complete export would have done for you. That, more than any single price change, is our actual complaint. A platform’s export tells you what it thinks it owns.

Where we stand

We build StoryPress, so weigh what follows accordingly. Here is the position, plainly.

We meter real resources — bandwidth and storage — with sensible caps labeled in plain language. We refuse to meter artificial ones: languages, seats, locales. Words you already wrote do not cost more in French. Our native CMS is arriving imminently with first-class language support and no cap on the number of language variants — we wrote up why we don’t count languages if you want the reasoning.

StoryPress is $5 a month, billed $60 yearly. That buys hosting on Cloudflare’s edge, the visual editor, SEO with JSON-LD, sitemaps, and OG tags built in, cookie consent, GTM wiring, and zero maintenance — no plugins to patch, ever. There is also an MCP server, which means an AI agent can edit your site conversationally instead of you clicking through panels at 11 p.m.

And the export: full content export, always. If you leave StoryPress, you leave with everything. We think the exit door is part of the product. A platform confident in its renewal email doesn’t need to keep your portfolio pages as collateral.

The receipt, itemized

• Squarespace raised US site-plan prices effective July 6, 2026 (Basic, Core, Plus; Advanced and legacy Commerce plans excluded) — JPK Design Co.

• Renewal notices reflecting higher prices drew owner complaints on the Squarespace forum within days (July 2026).

• Squarespace has no built-in multilingual; the standard route is Weglot at €15–€699/month, metered by translated words (10,000 to 5,000,000) and languages (1 to 20) — weglot.com/pricing, as of 2026-07-12.

• Squarespace’s export excludes store, index, portfolio, cover, album, info, and calendar pages, all but one blog, product/video/audio blocks, draft posts, custom CSS, and style settings — Squarespace Help.

• Wix offers no general site export; only structured-data CSVs — Wix Help Center.

• Mobile Core Web Vitals pass rates: Wix ~74%, Squarespace ~70% (CrUX, November 2025 — source); mobile web average 48% (Web Almanac 2025).

• StoryPress: $5/month billed $60 yearly, full content export, languages never metered.

If your renewal notice is sitting unanswered in a tab, run the numbers while the tab is still open. Start at storypress.app/get-started, see how the whole industry meters languages in the CMS Language Pricing Index 2026, or check whether speed claims survive contact with data in our speed study. The website you won’t outgrow is also the one you never have to babysit.