The depot
Moving a website is a packing job, not a button
The design never fits through the door; it is rebuilt on the far side. The domain goes last.
You have already decided to leave your website builder. MovingDay is the part nobody writes down: what actually comes out of the box, what has to be carried by hand, and the order the steps go in so you do not end up with a live domain pointing at an empty room.
Each one graded for how much arrives
Wix → Squarespace
No importer exists between these two. This is a rebuild with a product CSV and a redirect map — and knowing that up front is the whole job.
Squarespace → WordPress
The one route on this site with a real, supported export file. It carries one blog and your text. It leaves a surprising amount behind.
Wix → Shopify
Products and customers have a supported path. Pages, posts and every URL you own do not — and Shopify forces its own URL shapes on arrival.
In the yard
After the Move: What to Watch in the First Thirty Days
Rankings wobble after a platform change and that is normal. What is not normal is a wobble with no floor. Here is what to check on day one, week one and month one, and how to tell an ordinary dip from a broken migration.
Rebuild or Migrate? Working Out Which One You Are Doing
Two very different jobs get the same name, and picking the wrong one is the most expensive mistake in a website move. A method for estimating the hours honestly, and the cases where rebuilding is the better answer anyway.
WordPress to Squarespace: Using the Importer Properly
Squarespace has a genuine WordPress importer, and it carries more than most people expect — posts, pages, authors, categories, tags and comments. It also has four documented limits that quietly damage a large site if you do not know about them first.
Run Both Sites in Parallel, and Cancel Nothing Early
The overlap window is the cheapest insurance in a website migration. How to keep the new build out of search results, what the old site is still quietly doing after launch, and the order in which subscriptions should be closed.
The DNS Cutover: Moving a Domain Without Going Dark
The half hour that makes a migration visible to the public. Lowering TTLs, the difference between pointing and transferring, the sixty-day lock, and the MX records that take your email down if you forget them.
The Website Builders You Cannot Export From
Some platforms hand you a file on the way out. Some hand you a partial one. Two of the most popular hand you nothing at all. A plain list of which is which, with the vendors' own wording where it exists.
What this site is for
Every comparison article ends the same way: pick the right one and you are away. Nobody writes the next paragraph — the one where you already have three years of pages, a store, a mailing list and a domain that also delivers your email, and none of it is going to get up and walk.
That paragraph is this entire site. We do not argue about which builder is better. We assume you have made that call, and we show you the move.
The rules of the depot
Three things hold across every guide here, and they are the reason the procedures look pessimistic next to the vendor documentation.
- An export is a file, or it does not exist. If a platform has no export file, there is no migration from it, only a rebuild. Several very popular builders are in that category and we say so by name.
- Every claim traces to the platform’s own help documentation. Where we could not confirm a step at the source, the step says so rather than guessing. A wrong instruction in a migration guide costs somebody their content.
- Redirects live on the receiving end. This is the single most common misunderstanding in the whole subject, and it is worth an entire page on its own.
Where to start
If you have not moved a site before, read the moving-day checklist first — it is the inventory sheet everything else depends on. If you know what you are doing and just want the sequence, the plan for switching website builders is the one-page version with the order of operations and a table of what each platform lets out.
If you already know the two platforms involved, go straight to the route card. Each one tells you at the top whether you are doing a real migration or a rebuild with a nicer name, and grades how much of your site survives the trip.
What you will not find here
No rankings of website builders, no scores for which one is prettiest, no argument for leaving a platform you are happy on. The honest answer to “should I switch?” is usually no, and the guides here start from the assumption that you have already worked out why yours is a yes.