Cancelling Squarespace is a two minute job in the billing panel. 

Doing it without losing your content, your domain, or a year of prepaid hosting takes a little more care. The platform treats your website plan, your domain, your email, and your scheduling tools as separate subscriptions, so ending one leaves the others billing quietly in the background. And once a site is cancelled, the clock starts on permanent deletion.

This guide covers the full sequence: what to back up, which of the two cancellation methods to use, how to keep your domain alive, and what you can realistically expect to get refunded.

Cancelling At A Glance

Squarespace gives you two ways out, and they produce very different outcomes. Pick the wrong one and your site disappears the same afternoon.

If you are still using the site for anything at all, turn off auto-renew. You have already paid for the rest of the term, and outside the refund window you get nothing back for surrendering it early.

Step 1: Export Your Content First

Squarespace holds cancelled site data for about 30 days and then deletes it permanently. Export before you touch the billing panel, not after.

Set the site to Public, then open Settings, Import and Export, Export and download the XML file. It carries your pages, blog posts, text blocks, gallery pages, and images.

What the export will not carry:

• Template design, custom CSS, and style settings
• Product pages, album pages, event pages, and index pages in usable form
• Form submissions and stored contact data
• Audio, video, and third-party integrations
• Anything configured in a connected service rather than in Squarespace itself

For those, take full page screenshots and copy the settings you care about into a document. If the site is going to WordPress, the XML import will get your written content across, and a developer can rebuild the layout from your screenshots. Our roundup of WordPress development shops is a useful starting point if you want that handled for you.

Step 2: Sign In As The Account Owner

Only the owner and administrators with billing permission can see the Billing panel. If you were added as a contributor, the option will not appear at all, and no amount of clicking will surface it. Confirm who owns the account before you start.

If the account holds several sites, open the dashboard for the specific site you intend to cancel. Cancelling the wrong property in a multi-site account is one of the more common and more painful mistakes.

Step 3: Open Billing And Review Your Subscriptions

From the site dashboard, go to Settings, Billing, Subscriptions. This screen lists everything charged to the account, which usually includes more than the website plan:

• The Website or Commerce plan
• Any registered domains
• Google Workspace or Squarespace email
• Acuity Scheduling, formerly Squarespace Scheduling
• Email campaigns, member areas, digital products, and add-ons

Note the payment due date shown under your plan. That is your next renewal date, and it determines whether cancelling today costs you unused time.

Step 4: Cancel Or Disable Auto-Renew

To cancel immediately

Click the Website or Store subscription, scroll to the bottom, and select Cancel Subscription. Squarespace will show a retention survey asking why you are leaving and may offer a discount. Pick any reason, continue, and confirm. The site goes offline right away.

To let the plan expire instead

Open the same subscription and switch off the Renew automatically toggle. Nothing changes today. The site stays live, your visitors see no difference, and the plan simply lapses on the renewal date. This is the safer default for a business site mid-migration.

Either way, watch for a confirmation email. If it does not arrive within a few minutes, go back into Billing and check the subscription status rather than assuming it went through. Squarespace documents both routes in its help article on cancelling a website subscription.

Step 5: Deal With The Domain Separately

This is where people get caught. Cancelling the website plan does not cancel your domain, and it does not release it either. Domains bill on their own cycle.

You have three sensible options:

• Transfer it out. Unlock the domain, get the authorisation code, and start the transfer at your new registrar. Do this while the Squarespace account is still active, because managing a domain gets harder once the site is gone.
• Keep it at Squarespace. Leave the domain subscription running and point the DNS at your new host. The domain renews annually on its own.
• Let it go. Open the domains dashboard, click the domain, and switch off the Auto-renew toggle. It expires at the next billing date. Only do this if you genuinely never want the name again.

Freshly registered domains have a short grace period. Squarespace allows cancellation of an eligible gTLD domain within five days of registration for a full refund, measured to the minute from the time you registered. After that window, disabling auto-renew is the only route. The detail sits in the Squarespace guide to cancelling a Squarespace domain.

One rule worth writing on the wall: never cancel or transfer the domain before your new DNS is live somewhere else. That is how you turn a planned migration into an outage.

What You Can Expect To Be Refunded

The refund policy is narrower than most people assume.

• Annual plans: refundable if you cancel within 14 days of the initial payment. If the plan included a free domain, roughly $20 is withheld because domain registration is non-refundable.
• Annual plans after 14 days: no refund. You keep access until the term ends if you disabled auto-renew, which is the only value left to recover.
• Monthly plans: not refundable once billed, including a renewal charge that landed the day before you cancelled.
• Renewal payments: generally non-refundable regardless of plan.

Because of that, the timing question matters more than the method. If your renewal date is three weeks away, disable auto-renew today and keep the site until it lapses. If a charge just hit and you are inside 14 days on an annual plan, act now rather than after the weekend.

If You Subscribed Through An App Store

Plans purchased inside the Squarespace mobile app are billed by Apple or Google, not by Squarespace, and the web billing panel cannot cancel them. Squarespace support cannot cancel them for you either.

On iPhone, open the Settings app, tap your name at the top, tap Subscriptions, select Squarespace, and tap Cancel Subscription. On Android, open the Google Play Store, tap your profile icon, then Payments and subscriptions, Subscriptions, and cancel from there. Do not try to do it from inside the Squarespace app.

What Happens After You Cancel

Your site goes offline and visitors get an error or an expired site notice. You can still sign in to the account and see the Billing panel, and for roughly 30 days the site data is recoverable, which means you can reactivate by resubscribing or run a late export if you forgot.

After that window, the content is permanently deleted. Connected services degrade separately: digital products and member areas pause, scheduling continues billing unless you cancel it, and email campaign subscriptions carry on under their own plan.

Common Mistakes Worth Avoiding

• Cancelling the site before exporting, then discovering the export needs the site to be public
• Assuming the domain died with the website and finding a renewal charge a year later
• Cancelling immediately on an annual plan with nine months left and no refund available
• Letting the domain lapse before the new host is serving the site
• Forgetting Acuity, Google Workspace, or campaign subscriptions still attached to the card
• Trying to cancel an Apple-billed plan through the Squarespace dashboard

Conclusion

Cancelling Squarespace cleanly comes down to sequence. Export first, decide between an immediate cancellation and a lapse at the end of the term, handle the domain as its own subscription, and sweep the billing panel for the services that do not stop on their own. Get the order right and the switch costs you nothing but the time you had already paid for. Get it wrong and you are rebuilding a site from screenshots while someone else registers your domain.