Moving Your Website Off Wix or Squarespace

Wix and Squarespace make it easy to start a website. Leaving is a different story. Here is what comes with you when you move, what has to be rebuilt, and how to keep the Google rankings you've earned.

What you own versus what you rent

On Wix or Squarespace, you rent a website. You pay a subscription, and the platform runs the software, the hosting, and the design tools. Your words and photos are yours, but the site itself only works on their system.

Wix says this plainly in its own help center: its architecture does not support outside hosting, and a Wix site has to run on Wix's servers. You can't download a Wix site and put it somewhere else.

Squarespace offers an export, but a partial one. More on that below.

The parts of a website you can own outright, wherever you go, are:

• Your domain name, the address people type to reach you. If you bought it through Wix or Squarespace, it can be transferred to another registrar or pointed at a new host.
• Your content: the text, photos, logos, and documents.
• Your page addresses and the search rankings attached to them, as long as the move is planned to protect them.

The design, the layout, and the platform's built-in features stay behind. That is the trade most people don't think about when they sign up.

What moves and what doesn't

Here is what each platform lets you take with you, based on their own help documentation.

From Wix:

• There is no whole-site export. Pages get rebuilt on the new site, and the text and images are copied over.
• If you run a Wix store, products can be exported as a CSV file (a plain spreadsheet format most software can read). Wix notes that digital products can't be exported this way.

From Squarespace:

• Squarespace exports a file in WordPress's import format. It includes regular pages, gallery pages, one blog with its posts and comments, and text and image blocks.
• It does not include store pages, product blocks, video blocks, audio blocks, page headers and footers, style settings, custom code, or drafts.
• Only one blog exports. If you have more than one, you pick which one comes along.
• Images may not come through when the file is imported into a self-hosted WordPress site, so they often have to be downloaded and uploaded again.

In both cases, plan on rebuilding the design. That turns out to be good news more often than not. A rebuild is the moment to fix what never worked on the old site: slow pages, a confusing menu, or a layout that falls apart on a phone.

The part that matters most for search is the list of page addresses. Every page on your current site has a URL, and Google has ranked those URLs. The new site either keeps each address or forwards it with a 301 redirect, a permanent forwarding rule that sends visitors and Google from the old address to the new one. Wix and Squarespace often use URL patterns of their own for blogs and products, so the new site rarely matches them one for one. Redirects close that gap.

WordPress or static as the destination

There are two places I move sites to, and the right one depends on what your site has to do.

WordPress is the better fit if:

• You sell products online. I build stores on WooCommerce, which runs on WordPress.
• You or your staff want a visual editor to change pages yourselves.
• You need memberships, bookings, or several people publishing content.

If you want total control of your website and the option to create unlimited content, I've got a website for you. A static site:

• Loads fast, has nothing to update, and has no login page to attack.
• Lets you add as many pages and posts as you want.
• Explains what you do and brings in calls and emails.

If you enjoy working with an AI assistant, a static site is the easiest website you can own. You have total control of your site from the prompt. I can give your AI assistant instructions that limit its work to content, including new pages, posts, and more, but not the design. Or, if you choose, I can give you free rein. I can help you decide what's best for your needs.

A static site is a set of finished HTML files, with no database and no plugins. It is the fastest, simplest kind of website there is. My own site is one, and the static website case study explains why I moved it and what changed. My static website development page covers how that service works.

Either way, the new site is yours. It runs on hosting you choose, and you can move it again if you ever want to. I host sites on my own private server for $350 a year, with free migration, but you're never locked into my hosting either.

Whichever you choose, I build to industry best practices for accessibility, with a target of a 100% accessibility score in Google PageSpeed Insights on every page, verified before launch. I check speed in PageSpeed Insights before and after, too.

Keeping your rankings through the switch

Most of the risk in a platform move is search rankings, and most of it is avoidable. This is the order I work in:

• Inventory every URL. I pull every page, blog post, and product address from the old site and its sitemap before anything changes.
• Map each one. Every old address either keeps its URL on the new site or gets a 301 redirect to the closest matching page. Nothing is left to land on a "page not found" error.
• Carry over the words that rank. Page titles, headings, and the content Google already knows stay in place unless there is a reason to improve them.
• Build and review on a staging copy, a private test version of the site, before anything goes live.
• Switch the domain and test the redirects. Then I confirm the new site in Google Search Console, Google's free tool for watching how your site appears in search, and submit the new sitemap.
• Watch the first few weeks. Search Console shows any address that slipped through, and I fix it.

When I rebuilt the Second Chance Dance website, the move included 18 redirects so the studio's rankings carried over on launch day, with analytics and Search Console running from the first hour. The Print Center rebuild moved 107 pages, 75 posts, and more than 3,300 media files to a new site with zero broken links. Those weren't Wix or Squarespace moves, but the method is the same: know every address before you change anything.

Time and cost

I bill by the hour, and you get an hours estimate before any work starts. Most small business sites take 10 to 40 hours, or about $900 to $3,400. Where yours lands depends on how many pages you have, how much content has to be copied by hand, whether there is a store, and how many redirects the move needs.

A site moving off Wix can take longer than you'd expect for its size, because nothing exports and every page is rebuilt. A Squarespace site with a single blog can move faster, since the posts come across in the export.

I sell time in prepaid blocks: 5 hours for $500, 10 hours for $900, or 20 hours for $1,700. The rates page has the details, and the small business website cost guide explains what drives the hours. No commitments, no contracts, no gotchas.