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Moving your site

What you can take with you, what you cannot, and what to do about the gap.

Most website builders are glad to have you. Very few are built to let you leave. The gap between those two things is where people get stuck, usually at the worst possible moment, and usually after paying every month for years.

These pages say plainly what each platform lets you take, and in one case what it asks of you instead. They are useful whether or not you ever speak to us.

Leaving Wix Wix does not export sites at all. Here is what you can still get out. Leaving Squarespace There is an export. It goes to one place and it leaves a lot behind. Leaving GoDaddy No export at all, and products can be imported but never exported. Leaving Durable No export, and cancelling is also when you lose access to your own words. Leaving WordPress The opposite problem. It gives you everything and asks for your attention forever.

Somewhere else? Tell us the address and we will look at the actual site and tell you what can and cannot come with you. We do that part before any money is discussed.

The part nobody says out loud

Your words are yours. Your photographs are yours. Your design usually is not. The template, the platform's stock photography, its fonts and its layout system belong to the platform, and none of them travel with you no matter which export button you press.

This catches people badly, because the design is the part that feels most like the site. You can take everything you are entitled to take, open the file on the other side, and find it does not look like your website. That is not a fault in the export. It is what the export was always going to do.

Three things worth doing before you touch anything

1. Write down every page address you have

Every old address needs a permanent redirect to wherever that page ends up. Search engines carry your ranking across a properly redirected move and lose it across a careless one. Do this first, because it is far harder to reconstruct a list of addresses from a site that is already gone.

2. Get your images at full size, not at the size the page shows

Builders serve resized copies, so what you see in the browser is often not what you uploaded. Find the originals on your own computer if you still have them. If you do not, download the largest version the platform will give you, and do it before you cancel anything.

3. Check who actually holds your domain

If you registered your domain through the builder it is still yours and you can move it. Expect a wait. A domain registered or transferred within the last sixty days is usually locked from transferring again, which is an industry rule rather than a decision your platform made about you.

Do not cancel anything yet

The single most expensive mistake is cancelling the old plan before the new site is live. Sites usually go dark immediately. Keep paying for one more month. It is the cheapest insurance in this entire process.

We do this for people. We rebuild the site properly, map every redirect before anything switches over, and your old site stays up until you tell us you are happy with the new one. From CA$1,800, quoted after we look at your pages rather than guessed. Tell us about your site.

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