Squarespace to Sanity Migration SEO Checklist for B2B Websites

Start with the reason for the move

A Squarespace site can carry a young company for a while. The editor is familiar, Squarespace owns the hosting layer, and a small team can publish basic pages without much process.

The cracks show when the website has to do more serious work.

A B2B site may need product pages, use-case pages, comparison content, a resource library, reusable calls to action, clean analytics events, CRM handoff, and technical SEO controls. At that point, the team needs more than page editing. It needs a web system.

Sanity solves a different problem than Squarespace. Squarespace gives you a hosted site builder. Sanity gives you structured content that can power a custom frontend. The migration pays off when you use that structure on purpose.

Before you move anything, write down the business reason for the migration:

• marketing needs reusable content instead of copied sections
• sales needs clearer product and use-case pages
• SEO needs cleaner metadata, redirects, and internal links
• design needs a component system instead of one-off layouts
• development needs a maintainable frontend and deployment flow

That reason becomes the filter for every migration decision. If a page, field, or component does not support the new operating model, do not drag the old mess into the new CMS.

Inventory the Squarespace site before you touch the build

Do not start in Sanity. Start with a spreadsheet.

Export what Squarespace lets you export, then crawl the live site so you can see the URLs search engines and users can reach. The export gives you content. The crawl gives you reality.

Capture:

• current URLs
• page titles and meta descriptions
• H1s and major headings
• indexable pages
• canonical tags
• image URLs and alt text
• internal links
• forms and conversion points
• embedded scripts
• redirects already in place
• pages with organic search value

This is where teams under-scope the job. They think the migration means moving page copy. The real work is preserving the parts of the site that already work while removing the parts that made the old site hard to operate.

If a page gets traffic, leads, backlinks, sales usage, or paid campaign traffic, mark it as high-risk. Those pages need more careful handling than a stale announcement post from three years ago.

Decide what deserves a new URL

A migration is a chance to clean up the site. It is also a chance to break search visibility by renaming everything for sport.

Keep existing URLs when they still make sense. Change URLs when the current structure hurts clarity, creates duplicate paths, or blocks the new site architecture.

Use three buckets:

Avoid chain redirects. Avoid redirecting every removed page to the homepage. If a page has no useful replacement, decide whether it should return a 404 or 410 instead of pretending the homepage answers the same intent.

Google can handle site changes when you give crawlers clear signals. You make the job harder when you change URLs, titles, content, internal links, and page intent at the same time without a map.

Build the Sanity content model around how the site will run

Sanity should not become a drawer full of rich text blobs.

The point of moving to a structured CMS is to model the business. That means defining content types and fields that match how the site works, not how the old Squarespace pages happened to look.

For a B2B marketing site, the content model may include:

• landing pages
• blog posts
• authors
• categories
• product pages
• use cases
• industries
• comparison pages
• resource cards
• testimonials or proof modules when approved
• calls to action
• FAQs
• redirect entries
• SEO fields

Give editors control where they need it. Give the system rules where consistency matters.

For example, a comparison page should not be one giant text field. It may need competitor fields, positioning sections, feature tables, decision criteria, FAQs, related resources, and conversion modules. The frontend can turn those fields into a polished page. Editors can update the content without rebuilding the layout every time.

That is the value of Sanity: not prettier data entry, but cleaner content operations.

Rebuild pages as components, not replicas

A weak migration tries to recreate the Squarespace site in a different stack.

A strong migration uses the old site as source material and rebuilds the experience around better components. The frontend should make common sections easy to reuse: hero sections, problem blocks, proof modules, pricing paths, resource cards, forms, comparison tables, and CTA bands.

This protects the site after launch. Marketing can publish and revise pages without turning every campaign into a custom design request. Design and development keep control over spacing, hierarchy, accessibility, and performance.

The rule is simple: editors should manage content. The website system should manage presentation.

When those roles blur, the new site ages like the old one.

Preserve metadata and search intent

Every important page needs an SEO handoff from old to new.

For each migrated URL, review:

• title tag
• meta description
• H1
• canonical URL
• open graph title and description
• image alt text
• internal links pointing to the page
• schema markup when the page supports it

Do not copy bad metadata just because it exists. Keep what matches the page intent. Rewrite what is vague, duplicated, or misaligned with the new page.

Search intent matters more than exact wording. If the old page ranked for a specific query, the new page should still satisfy that query. A prettier page that changes the subject can lose the traffic the old page earned.

This is also where analytics helps. If Search Console shows a page getting impressions for comparison, pricing, migration, or setup queries, keep that intent visible in the new copy and headings.

Plan redirects before launch day

Redirect planning belongs in the middle of the project, not the night before launch.

Create a redirect map with four columns:

Test redirects in staging if your hosting setup allows it. Test them again after launch.

A redirect map also helps the team spot content gaps. If several old pages redirect into one new page, make sure that new page covers the combined intent. If it does not, create a better destination before launch.

Set up analytics and conversion tracking in the new frontend

A migration can clean up tracking. It can also erase the data your team needs.

Before launch, define the events that matter:

• form submissions
• meeting bookings
• primary CTA clicks
• resource downloads
• pricing or demo path clicks
• outbound product or app links
• key scroll or engagement points when they support a real decision

Do not paste old scripts into the new site without review. Identify what each script does, who owns it, and whether the new site still needs it.

For a custom frontend, build tracking into the component system. A CTA component should send consistent event data wherever it appears. A form component should capture the same source context across pages. This creates cleaner reporting than a pile of page-level script edits.

Launch with a technical SEO checklist

Use a launch checklist that catches the obvious problems before users and crawlers find them.

Check:

• XML sitemap includes the final production URLs
• robots.txt does not block the site
• canonical tags point to production URLs
• redirects resolve in one hop
• no important page returns 404, 500, or a staging URL
• metadata exists on every indexable page
• internal links use final URLs
• images load with useful alt text where needed
• forms submit to the right destination
• analytics fires on key events
• Search Console can inspect important URLs
• the CMS preview and publishing flow works for editors

Run the checklist before launch, right after launch, and again after the first crawl data appears. The second pass matters because production finds issues staging misses.

Keep the first post-launch week boring

The best migration launch feels uneventful.

After launch, monitor:

• index coverage
• crawl errors
• redirect behavior
• organic impressions and clicks
• top landing pages
• form submissions
• analytics events
• CMS publishing issues
• user-reported broken links

Do not panic over normal search volatility. Do respond fast to broken redirects, blocked pages, missing metadata, broken forms, or analytics gaps.

Hold non-essential design changes for a short window after launch. The team needs a stable baseline so it can tell whether a problem came from the migration or from a new change layered on top.

When Virdis recommends the move

Virdis does not recommend moving from Squarespace to Sanity because Sanity sounds more technical.

The move makes sense when the website has become a real business system and the old platform keeps forcing workarounds. If your team needs structured content, custom page types, cleaner SEO controls, reusable components, and better integration paths, Sanity with a custom frontend can give the site a stronger base.

If the site is still a small brochure with simple editing needs, stay on the simpler tool until the business has outgrown it.

The right migration does not preserve the old website. It preserves the value of the old website while building the system the next version of the business needs.