Moving off Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy without breaking anything

There are two versions of this article on the internet. One says these platforms trap you and you must escape immediately. The other says they are perfect and you should never leave.

Both are marketing. The honest position is that they are good products with a real limitation, and moving is straightforward if you do two things in the right order.

What is genuinely true

Your domain is yours. If you registered it through Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy, you can transfer it out. There may be a lock period of sixty days after registration or a previous transfer, which is an industry rule rather than a platform trick.

Your content is yours. Text and images. You may have to gather them by hand rather than press an export button.

The site itself is not portable. This is the real limitation. There is no export that produces a working website you can host elsewhere. The pages exist inside the platform and stay there. Blog posts can often be exported, which helps if you have many.

For a five-page business site, "not portable" means an afternoon of copying rather than a crisis. It matters more if you have two hundred pages.

Do these two things first

1. Sort out email. If your business email runs through the platform, or through a mailbox bundled with the domain, it can stop working the moment things change. Nothing else in a migration causes as much genuine disruption. Know where your email lives, and either leave it alone or move it deliberately as its own step.

2. Check the domain's transfer status. Log into the registrar, see whether it is locked, and get the authorisation code ready. If the domain was registered within the last sixty days, or transferred recently, you will have to wait. Better to discover that now than on launch day. See how to transfer a domain name.

Take a copy of everything

Your URLs. Before anything changes, list every page address. Google Search Console under Pages is the authoritative list. This is the single most important thing you will collect, because it becomes the redirect map.

Your text. Copy and paste from the live pages.

Your images. Download from the platform's media library at full size where you can, rather than from the rendered page, which serves compressed versions.

Your blog, via the platform's export if it has one.

Your forms. Note every form, where its submissions currently go, and any that are connected to something else. Forms are the most commonly forgotten item and the most expensive to break, since a broken form fails silently.

Rebuild, keeping the addresses

Build the new site with the same URLs wherever possible. If Squarespace served /services/kitchens, serve /services/kitchens.

Where an address must change, write down the mapping and set up a 301 redirect for each one, matching subject to subject. That is the whole discipline, and it is covered properly in migrating without losing rankings.

Go live in the right order

1. New site built and tested on a temporary address
2. Redirects prepared and ready
3. Domain pointed at the new hosting, or transferred
4. Check old URLs immediately, each landing correctly in one hop
5. Sitemap submitted in Search Console
6. Only then cancel the old subscription

That last point matters. Keep paying for the old platform for a month after the move. It is a small amount of money for the ability to go back and check something you forgot, and people always forget something.

When you should not bother

Leaving costs time and creates risk, so it needs a reason. Good ones:

• You need something the platform genuinely cannot do
• The cost has risen to where it no longer makes sense
• The site is slow on phones in a way you cannot fix
• You want your presence built on something you control

Bad ones:

• Somebody told you the platform is bad for SEO. Broadly it is not. Weak content and an unclaimed Google listing are what hold most small sites back
• A supplier who wants to build you something new said so

If your site works, loads quickly, and you can edit it, staying is a perfectly respectable answer. The platform is rarely the thing limiting a local business. Reviews, the Google Business Profile and consistency of details usually are, which is why our audit looks at all seven parts rather than starting from the website.