Tutorial
Can you move your recipes to another website?
Before you export your recipe website, check what the files contain, whether photos are copied, and which recipe fields the destination can rebuild.
Before you export a recipe website, check whether you can recover one complete recipe—not just its words. Ownership describes your rights. An export determines which files you can obtain. The destination’s importer—the tool that reads those files—determines what becomes an editable recipe again.
Those are three different questions. Answering them before you add another dozen recipes makes portability a practical part of how you plan your recipe website, rather than something to investigate only when you need to leave.
Suppose you publish a cake recipe with a title, an introduction, separate batter and icing ingredient lists, ordered instructions, a yield and notes. There is a finished-cake photograph and a process photograph showing the icing’s consistency. The recipe also has a source credit, categories and an existing web address. Keep a record of all these parts: this is what you will compare with the export and, later, the destination.
Crumb publishes this guidance. The platform examples below are based on documentation, not hands-on migration tests, and the same scrutiny applies to Crumb’s own export limitations.
Read the files, not just the contents list
Suppose an export comes with a manifest—a list describing what it contains—with three entries: recipe text, remote image URLs and subscriber email addresses. That sounds substantial, but each entry answers a different question.
| Manifest entry | What to inspect | What the entry alone does not establish |
|---|---|---|
| Recipe text | Open the files and find the cake’s title, introduction, both ingredient sections, method, yield, notes and source credit. | That every part is present, or that the destination can turn the text into separate recipe fields. |
| Remote image URLs | Identify which address belongs to the finished cake and which belongs to the process photograph. | That you have independent copies of either photograph. |
| Subscriber email addresses | Check which subscription-status and permission records accompany them. | That the recipe collection is included, or that an address establishes a reader’s status or permission. |
Read the cake’s exported text closely enough to cook from it. If the batter and icing both contain butter, have their headings survived so a cook knows which quantity belongs where? Is the icing method still after the cake method? A file can contain all the words while losing a distinction that makes the recipe usable.
Keep the audience record separate from this inspection. Subscription status concerns someone’s current relationship with a list; permission concerns what they agreed their information could be used for. An email address alone establishes neither. Ask what records you can retain and how the destination handles them, rather than treating a list of addresses as ready to use.
Crumb illustrates why the name of an export matters. Its ownership and export help says creators retain ownership of content they submit or authorize Crumb to import. It offers a filtered subscriber CSV—a table-like text file—but a self-service export for recipes, media, categories and complete publication settings is not currently available. Crumb also does not supply a standalone website codebase. The subscriber CSV therefore does not recover the cake and its photographs. If a complete self-service exit is essential to your publishing plans, this is a material limitation, despite retained ownership.
A photograph’s address is not a copy
The cake’s process photograph might be listed as a web address pointing to an image on the original site. That tells another system where to find it. It does not put the photograph in your export folder.
WordPress.com’s content-export guide makes this distinction explicit. Its XML export, also called WXR, is a structured content file containing posts, pages, comments, categories and tags, plus media references. It does not contain the actual image files, theme, design customizations or plugins.
Media references are not necessarily a failed transfer. An importer can use them to find the original photographs and copy them to the destination. WordPress.com says the original site must remain public and accessible while that copying happens. Deleting it or making it private too soon can remove the importer’s access to the files it needs.
Keep independent image copies you control alongside your recipe records; WordPress.com’s guide also describes a separate media-library export. Then verify both cake photographs in the destination’s media library. Open their records and check that the files are stored by the destination or its media service, rather than merely referenced from the old site. If the storage location is unclear, ask the destination’s support team to confirm it.
Seeing the photograph on the new page is not enough. A page can display an image still hosted elsewhere. The preview may look complete today while remaining dependent on the website you intend to close.
Find the recipes that never enter the export
Checking the cake’s files will not help if the cake is absent from the export altogether. Suppose it is still an unpublished Squarespace draft. Squarespace’s export guide lists drafts among the content its XML export excludes, so you need a separate copy of that recipe and its associated material.
The guide also excludes more than one blog page. If your recipes occupy several blog pages, identify which blog is selected and account for the recipes outside it. Compare the collection you meant to preserve with the collection actually exported; do not assume a successful download means every recipe was included.
Squarespace also excludes style settings and custom CSS. Those omissions mean presentation needs rebuilding. A missing draft means recipe content needs recovering. Keep the two kinds of work separate: choosing new typography cannot restore an unpublished icing method.
Its image warning is similarly specific. When importing Squarespace content into self-hosted WordPress using WordPress Importer, images may remain references instead of being copied. Squarespace recommends importing into WordPress.com, which copies images to its servers, and then checking the WordPress Media Library. For those using WordPress Importer, it recommends manually downloading the images and uploading them to WordPress instead.
These are documented options to investigate, not a guarantee for every transfer—and not evidence that every Squarespace image import fails. Check the route you will actually use and verify the resulting copies before closing the original site.
Can the destination rebuild an editable recipe?
Once you have complete text and independent photographs, you have material from which to rebuild. You still need to know how much rebuilding the destination will do.
Ask whether its importer accepts your export format and supports the recipe system you used at the source. Generic content-export documentation does not establish compatibility with a particular recipe plugin. A tool might recreate the cake as a page without recognizing its ingredients, instructions or yield as separate editable fields.
Make the questions specific enough to reveal that difference:
- Will batter and icing remain separate ingredient sections, with their quantities intact?
- Will instructions become ordered recipe steps, or arrive as a single block of page text?
- Where will the yield, notes and source credit go?
- Can the finished photograph and process photograph keep their distinct places in the recipe?
- Will the cake remain one recognizable recipe entry, connected to the appropriate categories?
Preserved prose is valuable even when the importer cannot interpret it. You can use it to reconstruct the recipe manually. But copying each ingredient into a field, restoring section headings and placing photographs beside the right steps is work you should know about before committing the collection.
Category names need inspection too. Finding “Cakes” somewhere in an export does not establish that the imported cake belongs to it. Preserve the relationships between recipes and categories; deciding how best to organize your recipe archive is the next question. Keep the old web address with each recipe record as well, even if the destination has no dedicated place for it. Planning what happens to those addresses is separate from checking whether the recipes survive.
If an address must change, Google’s site-moving guidance recommends mapping the old page to its new destination and setting up redirects. A redirect sends an old recipe link to the new page. Ask who will maintain it, including after the old hosting ends.
Try one recipe before committing the collection
Run the representative cake through the proposed route on a test destination. Keep the source record beside you and inspect two things: the destination editor and the resulting preview. The editor reveals whether the ingredient sections, steps and yield are separately usable. The preview reveals whether a reader can follow the recipe, see the process photograph where it helps and find the source credit.
If the destination provider is carrying out the trial for you, ask:
Can you import this recipe into a draft so I can check it? Will the ingredient groups, steps, notes, and photographs come across? Is there a fee for the import or any cleanup?
For each part, record whether it arrived intact, needs manual rebuilding, is missing or remains uncertain. Verify actual photo copies separately. Include any work needed to recover a draft or material outside the export’s selected scope.
Budget for that recovery and rebuilding work separately from the new website’s running costs.
One successful sample establishes something about that route, not every recipe in your collection. If other recipes use materially different formats, check those too before assuming the same result.
You can then accept a known amount of rebuilding, ask for a concrete answer about an unresolved essential item, or compare recipe website builders with that missing capability in mind. Make that decision while it still concerns a manageable collection—not after every new recipe has added the same recovery work.