Leaving Wix or Squarespace: What Moves and What Gets Rebuilt

Wix and Squarespace are good at getting a business online quickly. Sooner or later, though, plenty of owners want something the builder makes hard: a faster site, more control over search settings, a booking setup that fits how they work, or someone else to handle the whole thing. Others just want to switch from one builder to the other.

Either way, the first question is the same. What comes with me?

Your domain, your email, your words, your photos and most of your data can all come along. The design and the page layouts stay behind. Here is what that means in practice for a Sonoma County business, and a checklist for doing it without losing customers along the way.

The site itself stays behind

Neither platform lets you pack up a site and run it somewhere else. Wix states that a Wix site has to run on Wix’s servers. Squarespace can export some content to a file meant for WordPress, and its list of exclusions is long: store pages, index pages, product blocks, video and audio blocks, style settings, custom CSS, and every blog after the first one.

Moving between the two builders works the same way. Squarespace’s importer accepts content from WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, and products from Shopify, Etsy and Big Cartel. Wix is missing from that list, so a Wix to Squarespace migration means rebuilding the pages by hand, the same as a move anywhere else.

That sounds worse than it is. Most small business sites run to a handful of pages, and rebuilding them is the easy part. The trouble tends to come from everything around the site.

What moves cleanly

Your domain. If you bought it through Wix or Squarespace, you can transfer it to another registrar. If you bought it elsewhere and only pointed it at the builder, you change where it points. Either way, tidy up the ownership details well ahead of the move. Under ICANN’s rules, changing the registrant name, organization or email on a domain can block a transfer for 60 days.

If you originally bought your domain from Google Domains, it now lives at Squarespace. Squarespace bought the Google Domains business in 2023 and moved those registrations to Squarespace Domains, so you may have a Squarespace account you have never logged into.

Your words and photos. Copy every page’s text into a document and download your original images at full size before you cancel anything. It is tedious work and it protects everything else on this list.

Store, contact and booking data, as spreadsheets. Both platforms export products to a CSV file, and Squarespace exports orders the same way. Wix also exports contacts and booking lists. Read the fine print on each export: Squarespace’s product file leaves out featured images, variant images and customer reviews, and Wix leaves digital products out of its product export.

What needs care

Email

If your business email came bundled with the builder, it is most likely Google Workspace billed through Wix or Squarespace, and it can keep running after you leave. Both platforms let you move the subscription over to Google directly. Squarespace keeps billing for the mailbox even after you cancel the website, until you move or cancel the email itself.

The step that breaks mail is DNS. When the domain moves, the records that route your mail (the MX records, plus the ones that vouch for your outgoing mail) have to exist at the new host before the switch. Copy every DNS record down before you touch anything, and test sending and receiving the same day you move.

Old addresses and redirects

Every page on your current site has an address, and Google has those addresses in its index. The new site will almost certainly use different ones. Without redirects, every old link, bookmark and search result leads to an error page.

The fix is a permanent (301) redirect from each old address to its new equivalent. Google recommends exactly that for a site move, advises keeping the redirects in place for at least a year, and warns to expect some temporary ranking fluctuation. For a medium-sized site, it can take a few weeks or more for Google to start showing the new addresses.

Build the list before launch. A spreadsheet with the old address in one column and the new one beside it does the job. Include blog posts, product pages, and any PDF you ever linked from a flyer or an email.

Search settings

Page titles, meta descriptions, image descriptions (alt text) and headings all need carrying over or rewriting. After launch, submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and update the website link on your Google Business Profile. A move is also a good time to write proper titles for pages that never had them.

Booking

Booking is the hardest piece to move, because it is live. Customers have appointments on the calendar, and their history, deposits and reminders sit inside the old system. Choose the new booking tool first, test it end to end, run both for a short overlap, and only then point new bookings at it. Move upcoming appointments by hand if you need to. A customer showing up for an appointment that disappeared in the move is the outcome to plan around.

Store

Products move as a spreadsheet, though the new platform will expect its own column layout. Order history comes along as a record. Customer accounts are the awkward part: passwords are stored in a form that can’t be carried to another platform, so anyone with a login on your old store will need to set a new one. Gift card balances, subscriptions and product reviews each need a plan of their own.

Forms, members and comments

Contact forms, member-only pages and blog comments are built into the builder, and each one gets rebuilt on the new site. Download past form submissions first if you want to keep them.

Wix to Squarespace, or the other way

Moving between the two builders is a rebuild in both directions, so everything above applies. Before you start, ask whether the new builder fixes the thing that made you want to leave. If the trouble was speed, search control, or paying for a platform and still doing all the work yourself, a sideways move tends to bring the trouble along. If the trouble was a specific feature the other builder has, switching can make good sense.

Our Sonoma County pricing post has a section on when the DIY builders are a reasonable choice, which is worth a read before you decide where to go next.

The checklist

1. Write down every login: builder, domain registrar, email, Google Business Profile, Search Console, payment processor.
2. Confirm the domain is registered in your name, and fix any owner details well before the move.
3. Copy every DNS record, including the mail records.
4. Export products, orders, contacts, bookings and form submissions.
5. Copy all page text and download your original images.
6. List every old URL and map it to a new one.
7. Build and test the new site on a temporary address.
8. Move bundled email billing over to Google and confirm mail still flows.
9. Set up the 301 redirects.
10. Switch the domain, then test pages, forms, booking and email the same day.
11. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and update the website link on your Google Business Profile.
12. Cancel the old builder plan last, after a few weeks of everything working.

If you would rather hand it off

We can rebuild a Wix or Squarespace site as part of our standard web design work. For a typical small business site, the build is included in the $200 Website Plan with no setup fee. Stores and booking systems vary a lot, so anything beyond a standard build is quoted before work starts.

Your domain stays registered in your name, and our promise puts in writing that you can take the domain and a full copy of your site’s code with you if you ever leave. That makes the next move, whenever it comes, a lot easier than this one.

If you want a baseline before you move, the free audit records your current site’s speed and search setup, so you have something to measure the new site against.