If you are considering switching from Squarespace to a custom-built website, you likely want more control and a better bilingual solution. The short answer is that your content can transfer, but the design and structure will be rebuilt. As a web design agency in Los Angeles that builds bilingual sites for Korean American businesses, we start by auditing your existing Squarespace site to see what can be migrated and what should be redesigned.

This process is about more than just moving pages. It is about building a site that fully serves your Korean and English-speaking customers on separate, rankable URLs. Your domain, text, and images can come with you. The template, its limitations, and any automatic translation must stay behind. For a detailed look at our approach, you can review our web design services.

1. What actually transfers from my Squarespace site?

Your content is portable. This includes all the text you have written, your photo and video files, and your domain name. We can export these from Squarespace. Your business information, service descriptions, and menu items do not need to be rewritten from scratch.

What does not transfer is the Squarespace template itself. The visual design, the layout, and the underlying code are proprietary to Squarespace and cannot be moved to another hosting platform. More importantly, any built-in language toggle or automatically translated pages should not be migrated. For a true bilingual site that ranks in both languages, the Korean content must be written by a human and placed on its own dedicated URL, connected via hreflang tags. This is a core part of our Landmark and higher-tier builds.

COST DRIVER: The main cost drivers in a migration are not moving old files. They are the hours to rebuild the design from scratch, to manually create and populate the Korean language pages, and to ensure the new site meets WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards. You can see the fixed prices for these builds on our pricing page.

2. Do I need to redesign everything, or can we keep the look?

You can keep the general look if you are happy with it, but it will be rebuilt by hand. We do not purchase or use pre-made themes. This means a developer will recreate your chosen layout and styles in clean, custom code. This process often reveals opportunities for improvement that were impossible within Squarespace's template constraints.

However, if you are switching away from Squarespace because the design no longer fits your business, this is the time to change it. A common reason for a switch is the need for a distinct online store, a member portal, or a booking system that Squarespace could not cleanly support. In those cases, starting with a new design focused on that functionality is more efficient than recreating an old limitation. For complex needs like integrated portals and accounts, our Flagship builds on frameworks like Next.js are the appropriate path.

3. What happens to my online store and bookings?

This depends on the complexity of your transactions. For simple product sales, product data and images can be migrated to a new ecommerce platform. However, the storefront itself, the checkout flow, and any tax or shipping configurations will be set up anew in a system like Shopify or WooCommerce, which we integrate into a custom site. Our Storefront package is built for this.

For appointments, classes, or reservations, the data (like service names and durations) can be moved. But the live calendar integration and booking engine will be newly connected. The goal is to ensure payments and appointments work reliably from day one on the new site, rather than trying to salvage a potentially fragile Squarespace setup.

KEEP: If your Squarespace site is working perfectly for your needs and processing orders without issue, there is no urgent reason to leave. The switch is warranted when you face a specific limitation: the bilingual setup is hurting your search visibility, you need a feature Squarespace cannot provide, or you want to own your site's code and hosting account outright.

4. How does SEO and traffic transfer during the switch?

Properly managed, your search rankings can transfer and often improve. The key is to maintain the same core content on the same permanent URLs (if the URL structure is good) or to set up precise redirects from every old Squarespace page to its new counterpart. We map this out in the planning stage.

Crucially, this is where a true bilingual build helps SEO. When Korean and English live on separate URLs (e.g., yoursite.com/service and yoursite.com/kr/service), search engines can index and rank each page for its specific language. This is far more effective than a single page with a language toggle, which Squarespace often creates. To maintain visibility locally, pairing a new site with a local SEO retainer ensures your name, address, and phone number are consistent across the web.

Choosing a web design agency in Los Angeles

The right agency for this migration understands that it is a rebuild, not a simple transfer. They should ask about your goals for both language audiences, audit your existing site's structure, and provide a clear plan for redirects and hosting. They should also be willing to say if a move is unnecessary.

At Hyper Vision Co., we start with a free website audit. We look at your Squarespace site and give you a straightforward report on what a migration would involve, what would be rebuilt, and which of our fixed-price packages would match the scope. There is no obligation. The goal is to give you the information to decide if switching serves your business.