Site builders are fine until they aren't
Wix and Squarespace are good products. For a business that needs a few pages, a contact form and a decent photo gallery, they get you online in a weekend for a monthly fee you barely notice. Plenty of businesses should stay on them, and we tell people that when it's true.
The trouble starts when the business grows and the website is asked to do things the builder wasn't made for. That's usually when someone calls us, and the first worry is almost always the same: we rank on Google for the things that matter, so will moving break that?
It can. Migrations are one of the most common ways a small business loses search traffic it took years to build. But the loss is nearly always caused by a handful of avoidable mistakes, not by the move itself. Done carefully, most sites come out the other side ranking where they were, and often better once the new site is faster and better structured.
Signs you have actually outgrown it
Before planning a move, it's worth being honest about whether you need one. A new site costs money and attention, and a builder that's working shouldn't be replaced because it feels unfashionable.
You've probably outgrown it when the workarounds have started to pile up. Bookings run through a third-party widget that doesn't match the site and doesn't talk to your calendar. Products live in the builder's store but stock lives in a spreadsheet, and someone reconciles them by hand every week. You want a quote calculator, a member area or a proper integration with your CRM, and the answer from the app marketplace is "sort of". Pages are slow on mobile because of the scripts each add-on brings with it, and there's nothing you can do about it because you don't control the code.
Another common sign is that the site has become hard to change safely. Nobody is quite sure which apps are still in use, the design has drifted page by page, and editing anything risks breaking something else.
You probably haven't outgrown it if the real complaint is that the site looks dated. A redesign inside the same builder is a much cheaper fix for that. The same applies if traffic is low because there's little content or no local SEO work behind it. Moving platforms won't solve either of those, and we'd rather tell you that up front.
What comes with you and what doesn't
Neither platform is built to make leaving easy. Expect to rebuild more than you export.
Your written content can come across, but usually by copying and cleaning it up rather than by a tidy export. Blog posts can be exported in some cases, and the result normally needs work: formatting, internal links and image references tend to come through messy. Images can be downloaded, though often not at their original size, so it's worth tracking down the originals if you still have them.
Store data is more variable. Products, customers and orders can generally be exported as files, but what's included and how well it maps to a new platform differs. Customer passwords never come across, so customers will need to set a new one. Reviews, apps and any custom code built into the builder have to be rebuilt or replaced.
Design doesn't come with you at all. That's normally fine, because a rebuild is a chance to fix the things that were bothering you, but it's worth knowing so nobody expects a pixel-perfect copy.
The part that protects your rankings
Google ranks pages, not websites. Every page that currently brings you traffic has an address, and when you move, each of those addresses either keeps working, redirects to its new home, or breaks. Broken ones lose their rankings. So the most important document in any migration is a spreadsheet that lists every old URL and where it will go.
Builders tend to produce their own URL patterns. Blog posts and product pages often sit under paths that the new site won't use, and you can't change the old platform's patterns to match the new one. That's normal. The fix is a permanent 301 redirect from each old address to its closest equivalent on the new site. Not to the homepage, which Google treats much like a broken link, but to the page that actually covers the same thing.
To build the list, we pull every URL from the current sitemap, everything Search Console says gets impressions, and any pages with links pointing at them from other sites. Then each one gets a destination. Pages you're dropping still get redirected to the most relevant page that remains.
While you're mapping URLs, carry the on-page details across too. Page titles, meta descriptions, headings and the body text on your best-performing pages are part of why they rank. A migration is a fine time to improve weak pages, but rewriting your strongest ones at the same moment as changing platform makes it very hard to tell what caused any change in traffic. We usually move the top pages across largely as they are and improve them a few weeks later.
Structured data, image alt text and internal links also need checking. Builders often add some of this automatically, so it disappears quietly unless someone puts it back.
We go into more detail on sequencing in the website migration playbook.
Domains, email, analytics and your Google listing
The domain is where moves most often go wrong on the day. If your domain was bought through the builder, it may need to be transferred to a registrar you control, which can take several days and has to be planned around. If your email runs through that domain, the DNS records that make it work must be copied across exactly, or email stops arriving. We've seen businesses lose a few days of enquiries this way, and it's entirely avoidable with a checklist.
Analytics should carry on without a gap. If you use Google Analytics, the same property and measurement ID go into the new site so your history continues, and any conversion tracking on forms or checkout has to be set up again and tested before launch. Any advertising pixels need the same treatment.
Your Google Business Profile doesn't move, but its website link, booking link and any other links into your site should be checked against the new URLs. The same goes for links in social profiles, directories and email signatures. Redirects will catch most of them, but updating the important ones directly is better.
Launch, then watch closely
The cutover itself should be uneventful. The new site is built and tested on a staging address, redirects are loaded and checked, and the DNS change happens at a quiet time with someone available to watch it. Our site launch checklist covers what we verify before switching.
After launch, Search Console is where you find out how it went. Submit the new sitemap straight away. Then watch the coverage and page indexing reports for a rise in "not found" errors, which usually means a URL was missed in the map and needs a redirect. Watch impressions and average position on your main queries. Some movement in the first couple of weeks is common while Google re-crawls and works through the redirects. What matters is the trend over a month or so, and whether your key pages have settled back in.
Keep the redirects in place indefinitely. They cost nothing to leave running, and old links from other sites will keep sending people through them for years.
If traffic drops and stays down, the cause is almost always findable: a block of URLs that wasn't redirected, a page that lost its content, a stray "noindex" left over from staging, or tracking that broke so the drop isn't even real. That's why we keep watching for the first several weeks rather than handing over on launch day.
Getting help with it
You can do a migration yourself if the site is small and you're methodical. Where it gets risky is a site with a lot of pages, a store, or rankings that bring in real revenue. That's the kind of move where a careful URL map and someone watching Search Console afterwards are worth paying for, and it's part of our technical SEO work on every rebuild.
If you're weighing up whether to leave Wix or Squarespace, we're happy to look at your current site and your Search Console data and tell you honestly whether moving is worth it, and what it would involve. Get in touch.
