Moving off Wix or Squarespace

Your site does not come with you. Wix has no site export at all. Squarespace has one, and it leaves most of your site behind. Here is the exact list of what survives, what does not, and the honest cases where staying where you are is the better answer.

Do I need a Wix or Squarespace web designer, or a rebuild?

Two different purchases, and people search for the first when they want the second. A Wix website designer or Squarespace web designer works inside the platform: you keep the subscription, the editor and the constraints, and you buy somebody's taste and time. That is the right buy if you like the platform and dislike your template.

A rebuild moves you off it. Worth being blunt about which you need, because the platform decision is the one that is expensive to reverse later — and a designer who only works in Wix will not tell you that leaving is an option. Ask any candidate the export question below before you pay either of them.

The same applies to Webflow and Framer, which sit between the two: more control than Wix, still a platform you rent, and still a place where the export question has a specific answer worth getting in writing.

How do I migrate from Wix to WordPress, or anywhere else?

The destination barely changes the method, which surprises people looking specifically for "migrate Wix to WordPress". There is no export file to move — Wix has no full site export — so every route off it is the same four steps: list every existing address, recreate the content on the new platform, point each old address at its new one, then switch DNS last.

What does change with the destination is what you inherit. WordPress gives you a platform you control and a maintenance job that never ends: Patchstack recorded "7,966 new security vulnerabilities" in the WordPress ecosystem in 2024, 96% of them in plugins. A static or managed build gives you less control and almost no maintenance. Neither is the right answer in general; they are different amounts of work arriving on different people's desks.

Can you export a Wix site?

No. Wix does not offer a full site export. Wix's own help page states that a Wix site "needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers" because the platform "uses Wix's proprietary technology" (Wix Help Center, Exporting or Embedding Your Wix Site Elsewhere, checked September 2026). There is no download button. What you can get out:

• Your domain. It is yours and it transfers out to any registrar.
• Your contacts. Up to 50,000 of them, as a CSV. CMS collections also export to CSV, one at a time.
• Your text and images, manually. Copy the words off your own live pages, save the images. Nothing stops you. It is just slow.

That last line is the whole problem. The content is not locked away, it is public on your own website. Only the retyping stops people leaving.

What does the Squarespace export actually include?

One XML file in WordPress's import format. It carries your layout pages, one blog page with its posts, text blocks and image blocks. Everything else stays behind. It also needs an active, published site, so you cannot export from a trial.

From Squarespace's Exporting your site page, checked September 2026:

Index pages are the main layout of many Squarespace homepages. Custom CSS is where most of the design lives once a designer has touched it. If your site has a store and a portfolio, the export is close to an empty box.

What do you keep, what do you lose, and what has to be rebuilt?

Keep: your domain, your words, your photos, your reviews, your Google Business Profile. Lose: the design and anything the builder rendered for you. Rebuild: every page, and the address of every page. The design was never the expensive part.

Why do the old page addresses matter more than the old design?

Because every builder invents its own URL pattern, and Google ranks addresses, not pages. A Wix blog post sits at /post/post-title, and Wix confirms that prefix cannot be made to match your blog page (Wix Help Center). A Squarespace post URL "always begin[s] with the blog page URL slug" and can carry the date as well, giving you /blog/2024/01/post-title (Squarespace Help Center). No new site will reproduce those by accident.

Squarespace is blunt about changing one and doing nothing else: traffic "won't automatically redirect to the new URL" and "a 404 error will appear." Google's guidance for a move with URL changes is permanent redirects, kept "for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year" ( Google Search Central, checked September 2026).

Run this before you talk to anyone. Ten minutes, and it is yours to keep.

1. Open yoursite.com/sitemap.xml in a browser.
   Wix and Squarespace both generate one automatically.

2. Copy every URL into a spreadsheet. Column A = old URL.

3. Column B = new URL. Fill it in during the rebuild.
   Every row needs a value. No blanks.

4. Column C = monthly visits, from Google Search Console
   (Performance > Pages). Sort by it. The top 20 rows must
   not 404.

5. On launch day, open ten old URLs from Column A. Each must
   land on its Column B page, not a homepage and not a 404.

When should you stay on Wix or Squarespace?

Stay if the site works and you are not technical. Stay if you edit it yourself most weeks and like doing that. Stay if you need five pages and nothing more. A working site you can change at 9pm on a Sunday beats a better site you have to email someone about. That is often the right answer.

Stay, definitely, if you sell products online, take bookings through the site, need a member login or customer portal, run multiple locations or a franchise, or need a custom web app. We do not build any of those, and we would rather say so here than on a call.

Do you need a Squarespace web designer, or do you need to leave Squarespace?

Hire a Squarespace web designer if the platform does what you need and the problem is that your site looks dated. That is a design job, not a migration. Doing it inside Squarespace keeps your URLs, your store and your booking tools intact. Leaving costs you all three.

The split is fairly clean:

• Hire a Squarespace web designer when you are happy with the monthly fee, you use the store or scheduling features, and you want a better-looking version of what you have.
• Leave when what you want is not possible on the platform, when the site is slow and you cannot fix it, or when you have stopped updating it because editing is a chore. A dead site is the real cost. Either way, ask the questions in how to hire a web designer.

What does staying actually cost?

List prices as of September 2026, from each company's own pricing page. Squarespace runs $19 to $99 per month. Wix runs $17.77 to $159.77 per month, though its premium tiers were showing a 50% promotional discount when we checked, so plan around the renewal number.

Be honest about that table. If you enjoy editing your own site, Squarespace Basic at $19 is cheaper than anything we sell, and we will tell you so. Our $69 buys hosting, maintenance, nightly backups, uptime monitoring, a monthly report and someone who makes the changes. If nobody is making changes, you do not need us.

Where does Fablence fit?

The migration is included in the $299 setup fee. We do not charge extra to move content, because we automate it. Full numbers are on pricing.

1. We read your existing site and take the services, hours, copy and photos off it. You send us nothing. No export file, no logins, no folder of images.
2. We rebuild the homepage at a private link. It is free. If you say no, we delete it and you owe nothing.
3. You approve the design. Only then does the $299 apply. Live within 72 hours.
4. Every old address gets a permanent redirect to its new one, from the sitemap list above, included in the $69/month rather than sold as an add-on.

And because this page is about being trapped: you own the domain, the content, the leads and the Google Business Profile, where we are only ever Manager and never Owner. A free static export of your site is available any time, same day, no fee. Month to month, 30 days' notice, no exit fee. More in who owns your website and moving your website.

One person builds the sites and answers the emails, so we are picky about fit. If the honest answer is "stay on Squarespace and hire a designer", we will say that.