Squarespace Cuts 19% of Staff; Stores Need an Exit Plan

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Squarespace Cuts 19% of Staff; Stores Need an Exit Plan
Squarespace Cuts 19% of Staff; Stores Need an Exit Plan
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Squarespace is cutting about 19% of its workforce, roughly 300 jobs, according to a company spokesperson quoted by TechCrunch on November 2.

If your store runs on Squarespace Commerce, this is a vendor-risk event and not a crisis. Nothing in the coverage says checkout or store features are changing. What it does say is that the people who build the product took the biggest hit. For an Ecommerce Paradise reader selling high-ticket products, the question is whether the platform under your store will keep shipping the features you depend on, and what it would cost you to leave if the answer turns out to be no.

Below are the reported facts, how this follows the Wix layoffs from May, my read on what it does to a store’s risk, and five moves worth making this week. I am not predicting anything about Squarespace’s finances. I am telling you what a sensible owner does with a vendor that just shrank its product team.

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Squarespace Cuts About 300 Jobs, Most in Product and Engineering

Squarespace confirmed the layoffs on Monday, November 2, after The Verge reported them first, according to TechCrunch. The company said the cut is about 19% of its global workforce. Spokesperson Jeff Seedman described it as a restructuring meant to “simplify how we operate, sharpen our priorities and enable the company to move faster.”

Most affected roles sit in product and engineering, per The Next Web, which cited a companywide memo from CEO Anthony Casalena as reported by Business Insider. Casalena wrote that “our operating model must adapt for the modern era.” He described the goal as “smaller teams, more player coaches, and a simplified organizational structure,” according to the same report.

The 300 figure traces to a headcount base of roughly 1,800 employees reported by The Verge. My arithmetic: 300 of 1,800 is about 17%, not 19%, so either the base or the rounding differs from what Squarespace used. The coverage I read does not include a base number from the company itself.

On severance, TNW reports the memo promises at least 16 weeks of base pay plus extra weeks based on tenure, with benefits continuing through May 2027. Packages outside the US follow each country’s rules and are communicated separately.

Squarespace has not tied the cuts to AI. TechCrunch notes that the statement it printed never mentions AI, and TNW reports that Squarespace told Investing.com it would not characterize the restructuring as linked to plans to increase investment in AI infrastructure. The company launched an AI tool called Blueprint in 2024 and has announced Forma, an AI-native platform with an open waitlist, per TechCrunch.

What the reports do not say matters as much. TechCrunch’s article does not name which teams were hit and carries no customer-facing statement. It says nothing about store features, checkout or the commerce roadmap. Squarespace has been private since 2024, when Permira’s buyout of roughly $7 billion closed, per TechCrunch and TNW.

Wix Cut 1,000 Jobs in May as Site Builders Shrink Teams

This is the second large website-builder layoff in six months. On May 28, Wix announced about 1,000 job cuts, roughly 20% of staff and the largest in its history, per The Next Web. Headcount fell from 5,277 at the end of March to about 4,200.

Wix co-founder and CEO Avishai Abrahami pointed to two forces. One was a currency mismatch: the Israeli shekel rose about 14% against the dollar in 2025 and another 7% in the first five months of 2026, while Wix earns mostly in dollars and pays most staff in shekels. The other was AI, which Abrahami framed as a reason to rebuild around “AI-native roles,” according to TNW’s account.

The numbers behind it were rough. Wix’s Q1 2026 revenue rose 14% to $541 million, but it reported a net loss of $57.5 million, and operating expenses climbed from 21% to 35% of revenue year over year, per TNW. Its shares are down more than 50% in 2026.

The counterpoint is real. Wix named a currency problem and a rebuild around AI. Squarespace has named neither, and no source I found says its store product is being shut down, sold or frozen. A smaller product team can ship less, but it can also ship a tighter roadmap. One layoff is a data point. Two large builders cutting about a fifth of staff in six months is a pattern worth watching, which is as far as the evidence goes.

The market pressure behind both cuts is easy to name. TNW’s report on Squarespace says AI site generators now make basic site creation cheap and fast, and chatbots answer questions that once sent search traffic to small sites. Squarespace competes with Wix, GoDaddy and Shopify, per the same report. A builder whose core pitch was “make a good-looking site easily” has to find a new pitch when a prompt can do that for free.

Platform vendors are not the only ones trimming. I covered Automattic’s layoffs at WordPress.com and VIP on October 22. A day later came eBay’s 9% staff cut. Sellers on any rented platform are living through a stretch where the landlord’s headcount is shrinking.

What a Smaller Squarespace Product Team Means for High-Ticket Stores

My read: nothing breaks tomorrow, and that is exactly why this is the right moment to plan. When a platform vendor cuts roughly a fifth of its staff and most of the cuts land in product and engineering, the first thing that slows is the unglamorous roadmap. Checkout options, integrations, tax and shipping rule upgrades, and bug fixes are not what an AI site-builder rebuild is built around.

High-ticket stores lean on exactly those unglamorous features. You sell items that cost thousands of dollars, so you need flexible checkout, financing options, freight shipping rules that handle oversized items, fraud controls and a clean order export. A store selling $29 candles can live with a slow roadmap. A store selling $4,000 equipment cannot wait a year for a shipping-rules fix.

Start with the cost side, because it is the only part I can price from a source. Squarespace’s pricing page, which I checked on November 3, lists a 2% online store transaction fee on the Basic plan and none on Core, Plus or Advanced. Hypothetical math, for illustration only: a store doing $30,000 a month in sales on Basic pays $600 a month in that fee, or $7,200 a year, before card processing. Compare that with every Shopify charge by plan before you assume a move costs more than staying.

Here is how I would sort owners into three groups. Group one stays put: you sell a few dozen products, checkout works, you run no custom code, and nobody on your team has hit a roadblock in the last quarter. Watch, do not panic. Group two builds an exit plan this month: you take phone-assisted orders, rely on financing or freight rules, or have integrations that already feel thin. Group three moves: Squarespace announces a commerce feature removal, a fee increase, an integration deprecation or support replies start taking days. Those thresholds are my rule of thumb, not a formula.

If you decide to move, Shopify is where I would send most high-ticket operators first. Its help center says products, customers and historical orders can be migrated, along with gift cards, blogs and pages, using CSV import, migration apps from the Shopify App Store, a Shopify Partner or a custom API build, per Shopify’s Squarespace migration guide. The order it recommends is products first, then customers, then historical orders so they connect properly.

For context on Shopify’s momentum, I covered its Q3 results, with GMV up 29% and growth slowing from 32%. My second platform to test would be BigCommerce, because I would want a second quote before committing.

Moving is not the only hedge. The pieces of your business that live outside the platform are the ones that make leaving cheap. Your customer list belongs in a tool like Klaviyo. Your books belong in QuickBooks.

Your documents and branded email belong in Google Workspace. When those three sit outside the cart, a platform move changes your storefront and nothing else. I laid out the full email setup in my guide to the email flows every high-ticket store needs.

Platform risk also shows up at exit time. Buyers audit the stack your store runs on, and a store tied to a shrinking vendor with no documented migration path is harder to value. The checklist in what buyers check during due diligence is a good test of whether your own records are clean. Selling is a separate decision, but the habits overlap with the ones in my Shopify store transfer checklist.

Switching costs deserve their own line, because they are the part owners underestimate. The data moves in an afternoon. The search rankings take longer. Every product URL that changes needs a redirect, and every redirect you skip is a page that can lose traffic you spent years earning. On a store with a few hundred indexed pages and steady organic orders, I would budget a few weeks of monitoring after launch, not a few days. That is a hypothetical estimate based on how redirect work usually goes, not a measured figure from any Squarespace store.

The other cost is attention. Every hour you spend on a rushed migration is an hour you are not on supplier relationships, ad creative or follow-up with leads. Doing the prep work now, while nothing is on fire, is cheaper than doing it under pressure after a fee notice lands. Calm preparation is the whole argument for acting this week instead of next quarter.

The honest complexity is that a migration touches product data, URLs, tax settings, payment setup, email flows and ad campaigns at the same moment, all while orders keep coming in. That is why I built a done-for-you option. If you want someone else to run the move and the rebuild, my turnkey store build service exists for that job.

Planning a platform move while the store keeps selling? My team can scale the store you already have and handle the move without you pausing sales. See the scaling service →

5 Steps to Squarespace-Proof Your Store This Week

Do these five in order. None of them requires you to leave the platform.

  1. Pull every export Squarespace offers for products, orders and customers today, and save the files in a shared drive under your Google Workspace account. Then import the customer list into Klaviyo so you can email your buyers whatever platform hosts your cart.
  2. Find out where your domain is registered and who holds the login. If it sits inside your site builder account, plan to move it to a registrar you control, such as Namecheap. My walkthrough on canceling Squarespace, including domain, email and add-ons covers each of those three pieces.
  3. Price your current setup. Look up your plan’s transaction fee, multiply it by your last 12 months of sales and write the number down. Then compare it to Shopify’s fee table so you know what a move would change.
  4. Run a ten-product test import into a Shopify trial store, following Shopify’s order of products, customers, then orders. Turn off staff order notifications before you import orders, because Shopify’s guide warns that each imported order emails staff who receive them. Check the shipping policy page too, since Shopify’s guide flags that URLs like /policies/shipping-policy can become /pages/shipping-policy and need redirects.
  5. Write down three tripwires that would trigger a full migration, such as a fee increase, a removed commerce feature or a support delay beyond 48 hours. If you want a second set of eyes on the plan, book a discovery call and bring your export files.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Squarespace shutting down its online stores?
No source I found says so. TechCrunch’s report has no statement about commerce, and the company has described the layoffs as a restructuring to simplify operations and sharpen priorities.

Should I leave Squarespace right now?
Layoffs alone are not a reason to rebuild a working store. Build the exit plan, set your tripwires and move when one trips. If you are still choosing a site builder, my list of WordPress alternatives shows the options side by side.

How hard is it to move a Squarespace store to Shopify?
Products, customers and fulfilled historical orders can all be imported, per Shopify’s help center, and the tools range from CSV files to migration apps to a Partner. The hard parts are redirects, tax setup and email flows, not the data itself.

Did Squarespace blame AI for the layoffs?
No. TechCrunch says the statement never mentions AI, and Squarespace told Investing.com the restructuring is not linked to plans to increase AI infrastructure investment, per TNW. Wix, by contrast, cited AI-native roles and a currency mismatch.

What should I sell if I rebuild my store from scratch?
Start with products in categories where buyers expect to spend thousands and speak to someone before buying. My free high-ticket niches list is the fastest place to start. The longer high-ticket niches guide covers 150+ categories.

Will my domain or email be affected by the layoffs?
Nothing in the reports suggests so. The risk is practical: if your domain and email live in the same account as your site, any platform change forces you to untangle all three at once.

Not sure whether to stay, hedge or rebuild? I coach high-ticket store owners 1-on-1 through exactly this kind of platform decision. Get the coaching details →

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