The decision usually arrives with a renewal email. The current platform wants another year, something about it has annoyed you for eighteen months, and you have four weeks to decide whether moving is worth it.
Moving is usually less work than people fear and less automatic than vendors imply. Almost all of the difficulty is in one part, and it is not the part anyone worries about.
Take the inventory before you touch anything
An hour with a notepad now saves a fortnight of surprises. Write down:
- The domain, and who controls it. Not who uses it. Who can log in and change where it points. If you cannot answer, read who owns your website before you do anything else.
- Every page, with its address. Export a list from your sitemap or your analytics. You need the addresses, not just the titles.
- Where the forms go. Which inbox, and whether anything downstream depends on them.
- Anything embedded. Booking widgets, review badges, chat, maps, a shop from another provider.
- Email on the domain. Often overlooked, and the one thing that stops a business dead if it breaks.
What moves, and what has to be rebuilt
Moves easily: your words, your images, your page structure, your logo. This is the bulk of the site by volume and the smallest part by effort.
Has to be rebuilt: the design, because themes never transfer between platforms. Forms, because they are platform features rather than content. Anything you embedded from a third party. Redirects, which we will come to.
Needs a decision rather than a move: every page you had but never needed. A move is the one moment when deleting a page costs nothing, and most sites are carrying a third more pages than they use.
The URL map is the whole job
This is the part that goes wrong, and it is not visual. Every address that exists today and earns any traffic must either keep working or send visitors and search engines to its replacement, permanently.
Not doing this is how a site loses rankings it took years to earn, and the loss shows up two weeks later when nobody is looking. Work through it page by page: old address, new address, and a permanent redirect between them. Where a page genuinely has no successor, send it somewhere sensible rather than to a dead end. Moving a website without losing Google rankings covers this in detail, and it is the article to read twice.
The sequence that avoids downtime
The old site stays up throughout. That is the whole trick.
- Build the new site on a temporary address. Every platform gives you one. Nothing about your live site changes.
- Move content and rebuild what has to be rebuilt. Take the opportunity to fix the copy you have not liked since 2023.
- Test everything that is not a page. Submit every form. Make a booking. Buy something with a real card and refund it.
- Prepare the redirects, so they are ready before the switch rather than after it.
- Point the domain, and only then. Keep the old account alive for a month, because the cheapest insurance is the ability to switch back.
When not to move
Three situations where staying put is the better decision, and it is worth saying them plainly:
- You are in your busiest eight weeks. Nothing about a move is urgent enough to do during the season. It will wait for February.
- The only complaint is the price. If the platform does what you need and the annual figure is the whole objection, work out what a week of your time is worth before you spend one to save a subscription.
- Nobody has agreed what is wrong. "The website is rubbish" is not a specification, and a move made without one produces the same site somewhere else. Write down the three things that must be different first.
The good reasons are structural: you cannot do a thing the business now needs, you cannot get your content out, the cost scales with something you cannot control, or you do not own the domain.
What breaks, and how you find out
- Email on the domain, if the move touches DNS records it should not. Check you can send and receive within the hour.
- Links you did not know existed. A supplier directory, a local paper, a PDF. Watch for missing pages in the first fortnight.
- Anything embedded that was tied to the old domain and quietly stops.
A week after the switch, run the site through a free website checker and read what it finds with fresh eyes. If you are still deciding between platforms, the comparisons at Webkio vs Wix and Webkio vs WordPress set out the trade-offs without pretending the move is free.
Frequently asked questions
Will I lose my Google rankings if I change website builder?
Not if every address that exists today either keeps working or sends visitors and search engines permanently to its replacement. Skipping that redirect map is the usual cause of a drop, and the drop shows up about two weeks later when nobody is looking.
What transfers when I switch website platforms?
Your words, images, page structure and logo transfer easily, and they are the bulk of the site. The design, the forms, anything embedded from a third party, and the redirects all have to be rebuilt, because they are platform features rather than content.
How long does it take to move a website?
Less than people fear, because the old site stays up throughout. Build on the temporary address every platform gives you, test everything that is not a page, prepare the redirects, and only then point the domain. Keep the old account alive for a month afterwards.