Two domain jobs landed in the same week last month, one Squarespace domain name going out and one coming in, and only one of them was painless.
The bakery going out had registered through Squarespace back in 2022 and wanted everything consolidated at Cloudflare. Squarespace does release domains, no drama there, but the order matters. I moved the DNS records over to the new provider first and let them run for a full day while the domain was still registered at Squarespace, then unlocked it, pulled the auth code out of the domain panel and started the transfer. The site never blinked. Do it the other way round and you get a window where the records are whatever the gaining registrar sets by default, and for a lot of them that default is nothing at all.
The one coming in was a therapist moving off GoDaddy onto a new Squarespace site, and that is where SSL bit me. Squarespace issues its own certificate once the domain is connected and pointing at them properly, usually inside an hour. This one sat pending for most of a day because of a stale CAA record left on the domain by some old host. Support does not tell you that. Support tells you to give it 24 hours.
DevDome flagged the SSL not reissuing before anyone on the client side noticed, and that is the only reason I was looking at it on a Saturday. It only ever tells you something is broken though, the fix was still 40 minutes of support chat and a DNS record I didnt know existed.
Check the padlock the morning after any domain move, every time. That is the whole lesson in this.
Source: r/WebsiteStarters · by /u/Flashy8-8