Moving Off Wix, Squarespace, or GoDaddy

The question usually arrives the same way. Your renewal notice comes through and the price has gone up again, or you want one change made to a page and the editor will not let you make it, and you start wondering what it would take to just leave.

Then you think about the four years of content sitting in there and decide to worry about it later.

So here is what actually happens when you move, platform by platform, including the parts that are genuinely annoying. Some of this is worse than people expect. Some of it is a lot better.

What you can always take with you

Start with the reassuring part, because it is the part people get most anxious about.

Your domain name is yours. You registered it, you pay for it, and no platform owns it regardless of who you bought it through. You can point it anywhere you like. If GoDaddy is your registrar and you leave their website builder, you can keep the domain with them or move it, and neither choice is forced on you.

Your content is yours too. The words on your pages, your photos, your logo, your customer reviews, your product descriptions. Nobody has a claim on any of it. Worst case you are copying and pasting rather than importing a file, which is tedious but not a barrier.

Your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and your social accounts sit entirely outside whichever platform hosts your site. They come along without you doing anything.

What you cannot always take is the thing the platform built for you: the layout, the theme, the drag and drop arrangement of it all. That varies quite a lot.

Wix

Wix is the hardest one to leave, and it is worth being blunt about why.

There is no export. You cannot download your Wix site and put it somewhere else, because the site only exists inside Wix’s system and is not a set of files you can pick up and carry. Your content can be copied out manually, and your domain can be transferred away, but the site itself has to be rebuilt.

That sounds worse than it usually is in practice. Most small business sites are five to ten pages of text and images, and rebuilding those is a normal job rather than a heroic one. The sites where it genuinely stings are the ones with hundreds of blog posts or a large product catalogue, because that is where manual copying stops being viable and starts being a project.

If you are on Wix and thinking about a move eventually, the useful thing to do today is stop adding volume you will have to move by hand later.

Squarespace

Squarespace is better. It gives you an export, but the export is partial and the gaps are not always obvious until you are looking at the result.

You get your pages and your blog posts in a WordPress-compatible file. You do not get your design. Layout, fonts, colour choices, and the arrangement of blocks on the page do not survive the trip, because they are Squarespace-specific and there is nothing standard to translate them into.

The export also skips things. Product pages, event pages, album pages, and some block types come across incompletely or not at all. If your site sells anything, assume the shop needs rebuilding rather than importing.

So the text arrives, the look does not. For a lot of businesses that turns out to be fine, because wanting a fresh look is often part of why they are moving.

GoDaddy Website Builder

Same shape as Wix. The builder does not give you a way to export the site, so content comes out by hand and the site gets rebuilt.

One thing that trips people up: GoDaddy Website Builder and GoDaddy the domain registrar are separate products that happen to share a login. Leaving the builder does not mean losing your domain, and you are not obliged to move your registration to change who builds and hosts your site. Plenty of people keep the domain exactly where it is.

WordPress

WordPress is the odd one out, because technically nothing is locking you in at all. It is open source, you can export everything, and you can move it to any host that runs it.

The lock-in is different and quieter. It shows up as a site running fourteen plugins where nobody remembers what four of them do, a theme that was customised by someone who is no longer around, and a nagging awareness that the updates have not been run in a while and running them now feels risky.

That is a maintenance burden rather than a hostage situation, and the honest answer is that it is worth checking whether the burden can just be lifted. A WordPress site that is actually kept updated, backed up, and secured is a perfectly good website. If yours is in decent shape and you like it, the case for rebuilding is weaker than the case for looking after it properly.

Where it stops making sense is when the plugin sprawl is doing more work than the site is. If your five page site needs a page builder, a security plugin, a caching plugin, and a backup plugin before it will stay online, you are maintaining infrastructure to run a brochure.

What a move actually involves

The domain transfer is the only part with a fixed waiting period attached. If you move a registrar, expect roughly five to seven days, and be aware that ICANN applies a 60 day lock after a domain is first registered or after the registrant details change. That catches people who update their contact details a week before deciding to move.

You do not have to transfer the registrar at all. Pointing your existing domain at new hosting is a DNS change and takes hours rather than days.

Your email needs thinking about before anything moves, not after. If your business email runs through your current platform, that is the part where a bad Tuesday becomes a bad week. It needs to be set up and tested on the new side first.

The old site should stay up until the new one is live. There is no reason for a gap, and anyone telling you there has to be one is doing it wrong.

When not to bother

If your current site works, the price is fair, and you can make the changes you need to make, stay where you are. Moving a working site for the sake of it is a cost with no return, and we will tell you so.

The reasons that hold up are concrete. You cannot make a change you need. The renewal keeps climbing and you cannot see what for. Your site is slow enough that customers mention it. You have been locked out of something you thought you owned.

The reason that does not hold up on its own is that someone told you the platform you are on is bad. Plenty of perfectly good businesses run on Squarespace and always will.

If you do want to move

We do this regularly and the first conversation is free. We will look at what you have, tell you what actually transfers and what needs rebuilding, and give you a straight answer about whether it is worth doing.

If you go ahead, you see a working demo of the new site before anything switches over, and your hosting bill does not start until it is live. Bringing a domain in costs the same as registering a new one, with no transfer fee. Details are on our hosting page and our pricing page.

If we think you should stay put, we will say that instead.

Your Friends at Adams Digital