Squarespace to Shopify Migration Cost: What You Actually Pay in 2026

People talk about a migration like it is one task. It is really four jobs wearing a trench coat.

A cheap migration usually means someone did job one and skipped the rest. That is fine if you have ten products and no traffic. It is a quiet disaster if you have a real store, because the parts that get skipped are the parts that protect your money.

Here is a realistic map of what a squarespace to shopify migration cost looks like in 2026, depending on how much you need done. All figures are in NZD and are typical ranges, not quotes.

Most small and mid-size stores that care about results land in the middle two rows. The DIY row is real, but it only fits stores where lost rankings would not hurt, because that is exactly what tends to happen. For a wider view across platforms, our website migration cost guide covers the same logic for WordPress, Wix, and others.

If two stores get wildly different quotes, it is almost never random. These are the levers.

• Catalogue size. Twenty products is an afternoon. Two thousand products with variants, options, and tidy descriptions is a project. Bulk data needs cleaning, mapping, and checking, and that time is the cost.
• How custom your Squarespace design is. A standard template ports quickly. A heavily customised layout with custom code blocks has to be rebuilt by hand on Shopify.
• Content quality. If your product descriptions and pages need rewriting to actually sell, that is copywriting time on top of the move.
• Integrations. Email tools, inventory systems, reviews, subscriptions, and accounting links all need reconnecting and testing.
• SEO scope. A store with strong rankings needs careful redirect mapping and metadata work. The more traffic you have to protect, the more this matters.

The cheapest migration is the one where you knew your numbers before anyone touched your store. The expensive one is the surprise.

The migration is a one-time spend. Shopify itself is a monthly one, and it pays to know the floor before you switch. Shopify publishes current plan pricing on its own site, and the tiers shift, so check the official Shopify pricing page for the latest before you budget.

The rough shape in 2026: a basic plan covers a starting store, the mid plan suits growing stores that want lower transaction fees, and the advanced plan fits higher volume. On top of the plan you have transaction fees if you do not use Shopify Payments, plus any paid apps and themes. None of this is hidden, but it does mean Shopify is rarely as cheap as the headline plan price once a real store is running.

We break the full picture down in how much a Shopify website costs, which covers plans, apps, and build cost together.

This is where budgets quietly blow out. None of these are scams. They are just easy to forget until the invoice or the app bill arrives.

You can do this yourself. The question is whether you should, and that comes down to what is at stake if it goes sideways.

A tiny store with a handful of products, no real Google traffic, and time on your hands is a fair DIY candidate. Shopify's import tools and a few migration apps will get the data across. You will spend a weekend, save a few thousand dollars, and probably be fine.

Once you have a real catalogue, rankings you depend on, or a design that needs to actually convert, the maths flips. The risk is not the migration fee. It is the months of lost sales if redirects are botched and your traffic falls off a cliff. At that point professional help is the cheaper option, because it protects the thing that makes you money. If you are weighing this up, our piece on Shopify versus WooCommerce versus custom helps you sanity-check that Shopify is even the right destination first.

This is the part that turns a cheap migration into an expensive one. When you move platforms, your URLs change. Squarespace and Shopify use different URL structures, so a product page that lived at one address now lives at another.

If you do not redirect the old addresses to the new ones, Google keeps sending people to pages that no longer exist, and those rankings fade. Search engines treat broken links and missing redirects as signals that a site got worse. Google's own guidance on site moves with URL changes is blunt about this: set up 301 redirects, keep your content, and tell Search Console about the move.

Protecting SEO during a migration means mapping every old URL to its new home, keeping page titles and descriptions, preserving your content, and watching Search Console for crawl errors after launch. It is not glamorous work, and it is exactly the work a bargain migration skips. We wrote a full walkthrough on Shopify migration without losing SEO if you want the step-by-step.

One decision quietly sets a big chunk of your cost: do you copy your current design across, or rebuild it?

If your Squarespace store already converts well and you mostly need the platform power of Shopify, a clean port that keeps the structure can be enough. You keep what works and just change the engine underneath.

If sales or enquiries have been soft, the migration is the natural moment to fix the design instead of carrying old problems onto a new platform. Paying to move a weak design and then paying again to redesign it later is the most expensive path there is. Decide this before any work starts, not halfway through. A good audit tells you which camp you are in, which is exactly why we lead with one.

You do not need a quote to estimate your own number. Work through these and you will be close.

1. Count your products. Small catalogue points to the lower ranges. Hundreds or thousands push you up.
2. Judge your design. Standard template ports cheaply. Heavily customised needs a rebuild.
3. Add the Shopify plan. Pick a tier and add twelve months of it to your first-year cost.
4. List your apps. Note every Squarespace feature you rely on and check whether it costs extra on Shopify.
5. Weigh your SEO. If you have real Google traffic, budget for proper redirect and metadata work. It is the cheapest insurance you will buy.

Run those five steps and you will have a band you can plan around, well before anyone sends you a proposal.

We treat a migration as a chance to make the store better, not just to move it. The data has to land cleanly, the rankings have to be protected, and the new store should actually sell harder than the old one. Anything less is just relocating a problem.

Before any of that, we run a free website audit so you know what is worth keeping and what a clean move would really cost for your store. You can also browse the full package list to see where you fit. Our concept demos are labelled as concept work, not client results, because we would rather show our craft than invent a case study.

A squarespace to shopify migration cost is predictable once you stop treating it as a mystery. A small clean move sits around NZD $1,500 to $4,000, a proper rebuild with design and SEO protection runs NZD $5,000 to $13,000 or more, and the real risk is not the fee but the rankings you lose if redirects get skipped.

Count your products, judge your design, add the running costs, and protect your SEO. Do that and the move pays for itself instead of setting you back. If you want a second opinion before you commit, get a free audit and we will give you a straight answer.