How to leave a website builder that will not export your site

Some builders hand you your site. Some do not. If you are on one that does not, the migration is not a file transfer — it is a rebuild, and the difference is worth naming before you start so you plan for the right job.

First, know what you can actually take

Wix: no clean HTML export. The content stays in Wix's format. What you can retrieve is what you can see: the words, the images, the structure of the pages.

Squarespace: its export is blog posts as XML. No design, no CSS, no images. Useful for moving your writing; not a site.

Webflow: a real export — HTML, CSS, JS, assets — minus the CMS, ecommerce, forms and search, which are services rather than files.

So for the first two, plan a rebuild. That sounds worse than it is: most small sites are five to ten pages, and the part that took the longest the first time — deciding what the site says — is already done.

The order that wastes the least time

1. Write down every URL you have. Your sitemap, your analytics, and a crawl of the site. This list is the only thing that protects the rankings you already have.

2. Save the words before the design. Copy the text of every page into plain files. This is the asset. The design can be remade in an afternoon; the copy took weeks and usually cannot be recovered from a screenshot.

3. Download the images at full size. Right-clicking the page gives you the resized version the builder served. Look for the originals in your own files first.

4. Rebuild the pages at the same paths. If your about page was /about, make the new one /about. Every URL you keep is a redirect you do not have to write and a ranking you do not put at risk.

5. Write redirects only for what changed. One 301 per moved URL, pointing at the closest equivalent — not all of them at the home page, which search engines treat as a soft 404.

6. Move the domain last. Have the new site finished and previewed before you point the DNS. The gap between "switched" and "working" is where the traffic goes missing.

What to check the week after

• Every old URL either loads or redirects once — a redirect chain costs you.
• Your sitemap lists the addresses that answer, not ones that redirect.
• The canonical on each page names the URL that actually serves it.
• Search Console has the new sitemap and no spike in 404s.

Avoiding the same trap twice

Before you commit to the next tool, ask for its export and read what is missing. A builder that gives you HTML and CSS you can host anywhere means the next migration is a file copy rather than a rebuild.

DragGo exports the same clean HTML it publishes, on every plan, and hosting is free — so the move off it, if it ever comes, is a download. You can start from a template or see how it compares to Wix and to Squarespace.