How to export your GoDaddy website
The short answer: the site does not export
GoDaddy Website Builder cannot export your pages or your design. Leaving means rebuilding, and the only question is how much of your content you rescue on the way out.
Your product list is the exception. It exports to a spreadsheet.
If you run a shop: export your products first
In your GoDaddy account, open Websites + Marketing, then Commerce, then Products, and choose Export. You can export all products, one category or a few at a time. GoDaddy emails you a link to the file.
Open the file and check it before you rely on it. Make sure every product, price and option is there. Save your product photos too, and do it while the store is still live.
What else stays behind
- The source code. You never had access to it, so there is nothing to take. What the browser shows is generated by GoDaddy's own software.
- The design. Pages are assembled from pre-built sections you can switch on and off but not rearrange freely. That structure is theirs.
- Custom code you added. GoDaddy sometimes places injected HTML inside an iframe, which is why analytics and tracking scripts behave oddly there. It does not survive the move either.
You cannot install WordPress on a Website Builder plan. If someone has told you to "just switch to WordPress on GoDaddy," that means a different hosting product and a different bill, not a setting.
And a warning about the shortcut you will find online: site crawler tools such as HTTrack or wget can pull down the published pages. What you get back is machine generated markup wired to GoDaddy's own stylesheets and scripts. It is occasionally useful for recovering text you would otherwise retype. It is not a working site, and treating it as one is how people end up with something broken they cannot fix.
What you can actually take
- Your text, by copying it.
- Your images, saved one at a time at the largest size offered.
- Your domain, if you registered it there. It is yours, subject to the usual sixty day transfer lock.
- Your list of page addresses, which you should write down before anything changes, so every one of them can be redirected.
The order to do it in
- Export the product list first, and check the file.
- Save every image and every page of text.
- Record every page address for redirects.
- Build the new site and confirm it works.
- Move the domain, redirects already in place.
- Then cancel, and not before.
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.