Somewhere in the paperwork of every do-it-yourself website is a sentence owners skim past: the platform owns the platform. Your logo is yours. Your words are yours. But the machine displaying them is rented, monthly, from a company whose business depends on you never leaving. That arrangement works fine until the day your company outgrows it — and in this trade, that day is easy to spot. It arrives the first time you want the website to book a job onto the dispatch board and discover it simply cannot.
What follows is the migration itself, in the order a careful builder performs it. The fear that keeps owners renting for an extra three years is always the same — that leaving means starting over in Google. It does not, provided the steps below happen in this sequence and none is skipped.
The five steps, in order
- Inventory everything first. Every page, every URL, every image, every phone number and form. On Squarespace you can export most of the content; on Wix you cannot export anything at all, so the catalog is built from the outside, page by page. Nothing moves until the list is complete — this is the step people skip and regret.
- Rebuild rather than transplant. A rented site cannot be lifted intact, so the pages are rebuilt properly: hand-coded, sub-second, and wired for the things templates could never do — booking into your dispatch board, call tracking, and city-level depth. The old site stays live and untouched throughout.
- Map redirects one-to-one. Every old address gets a permanent redirect to its exact successor — not to the homepage, which is the single most common way migrations lose rankings. Rankings attach to addresses, and addresses can be forwarded.
- Switch at a scheduled hour. DNS flips on a chosen weekday morning, not a Friday night. The old site serves customers right up to the switch; the new one answers immediately after. There is no window in which a customer meets an error page.
- Verify the same day. Submit the new sitemap, spot-check the redirects, confirm analytics and call tracking are recording, and watch Search Console for a fortnight. Migrations fail quietly, so the checking is not optional.
The two platforms behave very differently
Squarespace, to its credit, lets you take your content out. You leave the design behind, but the words and photographs come along, and a careful builder carries the rankings across intact — the graduation described under Squarespace replacement. Wix is another matter entirely. There is no export. None. Your site exists inside Wix or it does not exist, which makes the only way out a rebuild from the outside — an extraction rather than a move. Professional credit where it is due: no company is better at getting a business online in an afternoon, and none is better at ensuring it never leaves.
“Rankings are not stored on the platform. They are attached to your addresses — and addresses can be forwarded.”
What actually happens to the rankings
Done in the order above, positions typically hold through the switch and improve within a quarter, because Google reads the outcome of a good migration as the same company in better health: faster pages, cleaner structure, honest redirects. The sites that lose rankings lose them to carelessness — redirects pointed at the homepage, pages quietly dropped, a sitemap never resubmitted — not to the act of leaving. That is worth stating plainly, because the fear of it keeps more contractors on rented platforms than the subscription fee ever has.
The honest test for whether it is time is not whether the template still looks handsome; most of them do. It is whether the ceiling costs more than the move. Run your figures through the cost-per-job calculator, then count what your current site books after hours without a human involved. If the answer is nothing, you have already priced the rental. A hand-coded replacement takes ten days, is quoted flat, and belongs to you the way your trucks do.
Filed by Casey Kinnison
Building websites for the trades since 1999. San Antonio, Texas.