Migrating to 7.1 / Squarespace, you can do better than this... really

Having received the notifications about the 7.1 upgrade, I finally decided to see what the process of upgrading was all about. After reading about it and pouring through the help center, I'm absolutely appalled. 

Final answer: SquareSpace offers no options for upgrading other than completely recreating our sites.

Not believing such a thing could possibly be true, I kept searching the help forums.

The first alternative I found involved using SquareSpace's competitor, WordPress, as a temporary holding spot to move my photography blog into version 7.1.

"I'm sorry, sir, but to upgrade to the new version of gMail, you'll need to first create an AOL.com account, then forward all your archived messages to AOL, then upgrade gMail, and finally email everything now in AOL back to gMail. The process will only take you countless hours/days of your life, quite possibly change how every email looks, and destroy your will to live. But hey, it's all free!"

The next option I uncovered was to use a third-party, paid plugin.

So apparently we're expected to believe that the programmers over at SquareWebsites ("Not affiliated with or endorsed by Squarespace") have figured out how to migrate from 7.0 to 7.1, but the SquareSpace team can't build a beautiful new platform that is directly accessible from their previous platform.

The last option I read about is that we simply pay a third-party consultant to do all the work. Sorry, but I don't even want to consider what that might cost.

How can it possibly be true that SquareSpace upgraded its own product and then provided no reasonable method for existing customers to move to their new version? Are you mad at all of your existing customers? Is our subscription money insufficient? I swear I've never said anything bad about SquareSpace and have only recommended it to others, and for seven years running have always paid my subscription on time!

Apologies for being so blunt, but have you people lost your minds? 

Certainly, this must be a bad dream and your upgrade process/tool-thingy will be along soon and is just delayed for some reason, right? C'mon, please tell me that's what is happening. Please?

I agree. Hopefully they are working on it as we speak. The new Squarespace 7.1 is great and I want to move all my sites to it.

Folks. I just don't see an SS built v7.0 to v7.1 upgrade option in the future.

v7.1 has been out for several years and there has been no hint of such a feature.

v7.0 and v7.1 are fairly different in how the templates and v7.0 template features are handled. Obviously Brine is the forerunner to v7.1. v7.1 sites all have the same template and what SS calls templates is just really different color options for the most part. Expressing all v7.0 templates in v7.1, I think, is a nearly impossible task, given the structure of v7.1.

Given that v7.0 isn't likely go away anytime soon, what is the financial incentive for SS to make an upgrade feature? The number of folks moving to v7.1 on their own is probably not worth the expense SS would have to put in to provide such a feature. If at some point in the future the number of SS users dropped off SS would again have a hard time justifying the expense of creating an upgrade feature for so few users.

On 11/14/2022 at 4:21 PM, creedon said:

Folks. I just don't see an SS built v7.0 to v7.1 upgrade option in the future.

We're just going to have to disagree on this. Your reply seems to make clear that you are someone who is deep into building sites. I am not. So while my complaint may seem silly and trivial to you, it is not to me. My Squarespace subscription is no different than anyone else's. My expectation is that I am afforded the same quality product, along with any of its improvements. But that did not happen. Squarespace is moving along and improving their platform and no longer making any of those new functions available within the only product version that was available to me when I became a customer.

I can't think of a subscription service that doesn't include the platform's ongoing upgrades and improvements. That is largely the advantage of a software subscription rather than a software purchase. And you can certainly argue that all the new features and functions are fully available to me - to which I completely agree. But having to go to ground zero and rebuild my site all over again to obtain those platform improvements is crazy. I didn't just subscribe to Squarespace 7.0; I subscribed to Squarespace.

When was the last time you had to reformat your hard drive and reinstall all your software and data just so that you could install a new version of Windows (or whatever you are using)?

This is a rant I hope someone at squarespace will see.

Folks, please do better. I've used squarespace since the early days and generally enjoyed it. When 7.1 came out, I kept putting off switching over, but finally decided to give it a go. I start prepping and find out the recommended method.

Start a trial subscription and build a new site? Really? A company with millions and millions of dollars, highest level coders, really can't come up with a better solution for their longtime customers?

Call me crazy, but not coming up with some sort of transition tool for your current customers is completely insane. You've taught us to rely on you, let us build complex sites with large amounts of data and products, then provided absolutely nothing to help us upgrade beyond "build a new site, do some redirects, good luck..." 

How does a company of your size not go about this in a more professional way? "Do a trial version"! oh lord. This makes weebly look more professional than squarespace. In some meeting somewhere, no one at all said, "Hey, maybe we should come up with a way to make this switch easy for our current customers"? Oh man. Really feeling rewarded for sticking with squarespace for so long.

18 hours ago, charliearnold said:

Start a trial subscription and build a new site? Really? A company with millions and millions of dollars, highest level coders, really can't come up with a better solution for their longtime customers?

Amen, brother! You just went down the same rabbit hole that I did. My rant is here.

This arrangement is one of the most pathetic situations I've ever seen from a software developer in my 30+ years in the business. There is absolutely no excuse for this situation.

Steven

haha, nearly the same rant. It's very weird. At the very least they could offer a "build account" or something like that that lets us preview, work out bugs, etc. One that lets us take as long as we want to do the transition without having to see the annoying "your 2 week trial is almost over!", then having to contact customer service to "extend the trial" which isn't even a trial account because I already subscribe to the damn service. 

So dumb.

And clearly, others have come to the same conclusion...

sjt

What is really sad, is that I was away for a while and just came back and fired up my old site and started MANUALY migrating from Zenfolio because that is how it has to be done.  It would have been nice for a pop up to tell me before I spent the last 5 days building out my new site.  I like what I created on 7.0, but was reading how to do some things and couldn't figure it out until I realized it wasn't available on 7.0.  WOW.  I wasted hours and hours of work and now have to start over.

Not the experience I expected... Nice way to say welcome back.

And as the world recently witnessed, they have plenty of money to spend on a Super Bowl commercial to lure in new subscribers, but they clearly can't be bothered to provide sufficient support for their pre-7.1 subscribers. 

Really lame, Squarespace. Really lame...

On 12/16/2022 at 1:19 PM, dougga said:

I like what I created on 7.0, but was reading how to do some things and couldn't figure it out until I realized it wasn't available on 7.0.  WOW.  I wasted hours and hours of work and now have to start over.

That is absolutely horrible. When their own documentation doesn't make it clear that it is version-specific, that is pretty clear evidence that the Squarespace mentality is all about their newer 7.1 customers and their long-standing, pre-7.1 customers are of no concern.

Very sorry that you had your time wasted in that way.

In my opinion, moving from 7.0 to 7.1 is a lateral move, not an upgrade. They are both good platforms.  It is very much like moving from Avenue to the Brine Family in 7.0. Both are very different from each other but one small advantage of the latter is there is a template change option which doesn't exist when moving from 7.0 to 7.1,   That is not there because the core configuration for Avenue and Brine is the same platform, which  7.0 and 7.1 do not share.  Maybe Squarespace could devise some kind of billing/trial program for existing customers to make that move (Circle members have a very helpful advantage in that regard), but programming wise I don't see a template change option to make the move ever happen.  I also think that 7.1 is geared more toward new customers with many of them building their first websites. 

I'm still pretty upset as a long time squarespace user that they just left so much of us in the dust. 

So much to this. It's enraging, actually. I had to delete 8-9 years of wedding blog posts, which in turn means I'm at square one with SEO and my wedding inquiries are almost non-existent now. So, loss of income for me. Terrible, terrible experience after being with SS for 10 years, I'm looking at moving to showit - what happens when 7.2 comes out and they can't be bothered to create a migration path between their own platforms, yet again?

Squarespace, you kind of suck.

There is now an official Squarespace migration tool that upgrades a version 7.0 site to version 7.1. You'll find it on the Design menu of a compatible site.

I've provided some details in this guide.

Did this help? Please give feedback by clicking an icon below  ⬇️

Great, so 2 years or so into 7.1 they finally release a way to migrate? How thoughtful. I already deleted my 7.0 site content and lost my SEO rankings. Too little, too late.

Ok sooo.. I am reading all this and want to downgrade back to 7.0, I do not want to have to play for a plug in or fiddle with custom code to get my website to do what I had it doing before! 

Ugh. I am a lay person, and I can't believe how limited I feel on the new platform. I have been a Squarespace user since it's inception and have never felt so dissatisfied. 

9 hours ago, monicaleestudios said:

Ok sooo.. I am reading all this and want to downgrade back to 7.0, I do not want to have to play for a plug in or fiddle with custom code to get my website to do what I had it doing before! 

Ugh. I am a lay person, and I can't believe how limited I feel on the new platform. I have been a Squarespace user since it's inception and have never felt so dissatisfied. 

Unfortunately I believe it is not possible to “roll back”. Once you have updated to 7.1 then you cannot change your site back to 7.0