The Website Builders You Cannot Export From

“Your content is yours” appears on almost every website builder’s marketing page, and in a legal sense it is perfectly true. You own the words. What you may not have is a way to get them out in a form anything else can read, and those are entirely different propositions.

This page is the practical version of the question. For each platform: is there a file, what is in it, and can anything on the other end open it. Where the vendor documents an answer, that is what is quoted. Where it does not, the absence is noted as an absence rather than dressed up as one.

What counts as an export

Three tiers, and it is worth being strict about the boundaries.

A real export is a structured file containing your pages and posts, in a format at least one other platform can import. WordPress’s WXR is the reference case.

A partial export is a file that carries some of your content and documents what it leaves behind. Squarespace’s .xml is the clearest example.

A data export is a CSV of records — products, customers, contacts, orders. Genuinely valuable, and not the same thing at all. A products CSV does not contain your home page.

A platform with only the third tier does not have an export in the sense that matters for a migration. Whatever it does have, your written pages are still being retyped.

Wix: your records, and nothing else

Wix is the most-used builder on this list and the one with the widest gap between what people assume and what exists.

There is no site export. There is also no blog export, and Wix says so in its own words: it is not currently possible to export blog posts to other platforms. The suggestion offered alongside that statement is to share posts on social media, which tells you how the request is being categorised internally.

The blog does publish an RSS feed, and this is the workaround every third-party guide reaches for. It is worth knowing its documented ceiling: Wix states that the feed can only display up to twenty of the most recent posts. For a blog with thirty posts that is a partial rescue. For an archive of four hundred it is a sample.

What does come out, and what you should take before you cancel anything:

• Products, as CSV, from the Products tab. Wix documents a limit of 5,000 rows per file and states that exporting digital products is not currently supported.
• Orders, as CSV, with a choice between one row per item and one row per order. The timestamps are in UTC.
• Contacts, as CSV.

That is the complete list. Every page and every post is retyped by a human.

GoDaddy Websites + Marketing: nothing

GoDaddy’s builder publishes no export tool at all. Not a limited one, not a CSV-only one — none.

We went looking for a help article describing an export and did not find one, and every independent guide to leaving the platform describes the same thing: open two windows and copy. Several of them note the detail that stings most, which is that store products imported into the builder by CSV cannot be exported back out of it.

Images you uploaded can be downloaded individually. Everything else is a rebuild. If you are currently on this platform and even slightly considering a move, take full-page screenshots of every page today, while you still have access, because that will be your only reference.

Weebly: a zip with the important parts missing

Weebly has an archive feature, which sounds better than it is. It produces a ZIP of your site’s static files, requested from the editor’s settings and delivered by email.

Weebly’s own support documentation notes the limitation that matters: blog pages and store pages are not included, because they rely on the platform’s database rather than on static files. So the archive contains the part of your site that was easiest to rebuild and omits the part that was hardest. The archive is also one-way — it cannot be loaded back into Weebly — and interactive elements such as contact forms do not function outside the editor.

There is a broader situation here that changes the urgency. Square has been winding Weebly down: new signups have been closed, the product has been in maintenance for some time, and 2026 reporting describes a regional shutdown affecting a long list of countries with specific dates attached. We were unable to confirm those dates and countries against Weebly’s own announcement page, so treat any specific deadline you read — here or anywhere else — as unverified, and act on the direction rather than on the date. If you are on Weebly, export what you can this month rather than next quarter.

A partial export and a data export: Squarespace and Shopify

Squarespace writes a single .xml file in WordPress format, and documents its contents precisely. It carries layout pages, one blog page including its posts and up to a thousand comments each, text blocks and image blocks. It does not carry album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio or store pages, any blog beyond the first, dropdowns, audio blocks, product blocks, video blocks, drafts, style settings or custom CSS. Squarespace also states that it is not possible to export images or uploaded videos in bulk.

That is a genuinely useful file and a clearly documented one, and the documentation is the reason it scores well here. You can plan around a limit that is written down.

Shopify exports products, customers and orders as CSV from the admin. Blog articles have no native export — the admin has no button for it, and the tooling that exists is third-party or via the API. For a store that is mostly catalogue, this is close to sufficient. For a store that built an audience through content, it is a rebuild of the part that brought the traffic.

The one that gets it right: WordPress

WordPress’s export produces a WXR file containing posts, pages, custom post types, taxonomy terms, comments and custom fields. Media is not in the file, but the importer on the receiving end will fetch it from the live site, which is why you keep the old site up during an import.

The format is also the closest thing this industry has to a lingua franca. Squarespace writes it. WordPress.com reads it. Several other platforms read it. If portability matters to you more than any other single factor, that is the practical reason to prefer it, independent of any argument about features.

How to leave a platform that has no export

The procedure is the same in every case and it is not complicated, only tedious.

1. Screenshot every page, full height, at desktop and phone widths.
2. Copy the text of every page and post into a document, one heading per page.
3. Download every image you cannot regenerate.
4. Export whatever CSVs do exist — products, orders, contacts, form submissions.
5. Write the URL list into a spreadsheet as the left column of your redirect map.
6. Rebuild on the new platform, working down your traffic report so the important pages exist first.

Do all six while the account is active and paid. This is the whole reason the moving-day checklist puts exporting three weeks before building.

What to check before you sign up for anything

The question to ask a builder before you commit years of writing to it is not whether it has an export button. It is: what does the export contain, and is it written down?

A platform that publishes a precise list of what its file carries and what it omits is telling you it has thought about the day you leave. A platform that says nothing has also told you something. The full picture of how each one behaves on the way out is on the plan for switching website builders.