Moving Your Website Off GoDaddy, Wix or Squarespace

Moving a small business website off a site builder is three separate jobs that people tend to treat as one: the domain name, the email, and the website itself. The domain transfers cleanly if you own it. The email does not need to move at all if it is set up right, and should not be touched until the end. The website almost never transfers; it gets rebuilt. Knowing which job is which is most of what keeps a move from turning into a week without email.

I do these moves for businesses in central Connecticut fairly regularly. Here is how I sequence it and where the traps are.

First, figure out what you actually have

Before anything moves, write down three things:

1. Where the domain is registered. This is the account that renews yourname.com every year. It may be GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace, Google (now Squarespace), Namecheap, or somewhere the original designer picked. Look it up at a WHOIS service such as lookup.icann.org if you are not sure.
2. Where your email is hosted. Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, GoDaddy email, or the builder's own email product. Your email provider is not necessarily your website provider, even if you pay for both in one place.
3. Where the website is hosted. On Wix and Squarespace the answer is "with them." On GoDaddy it might be their website builder or a WordPress plan.

If the domain is registered in someone else's name, stop and fix that first. Who owns your website covers how to check and what to ask for.

The domain: moves cleanly, with two timing rules

A domain transfer between registrars is a standard process. You remove the transfer lock at the old registrar, get an authorization code, and start the transfer at the new one. It usually completes within a few days.

Two rules trip people up:

• The 60-day lock. Under ICANN's Transfer Policy, a domain generally cannot be transferred within 60 days of being registered, transferred, or having its registrant contact information changed. If you just updated the owner name or email on the domain, you may be waiting two months. Plan around it rather than discovering it mid-move.
• You do not have to transfer it at all. A domain can stay at GoDaddy while the website is hosted somewhere else entirely. The domain's DNS records just point at the new site. Transferring is about consolidating accounts, not a requirement for moving the site.

What I usually recommend: move the website first, confirm it is working, and transfer the domain afterward if you want everything in one place.

Email: the thing you must not break

This is the part I want to be clearest about, because it is where moves go wrong.

Your domain email is separate from your website. If you use Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, your mailboxes are stored with Microsoft or Google. The website builder has nothing to do with them. What connects your domain to that email is a handful of DNS records (MX, SPF, DKIM, and so on). As long as those records are carried over exactly, your email does not notice the website moved.

Where it breaks: the DNS records are managed by whoever hosts your DNS, and on a lot of Wix and Squarespace setups that is the builder itself. When you cancel the builder, or move the domain's nameservers to a new provider, those records go with it. If nobody copied them first, email stops the moment the switch flips, and it does not come back until someone recreates every record correctly.

The safe sequence:

1. Before changing anything, export or screenshot every DNS record on the domain. All of them, not just the ones that look important.
2. Set up the new DNS provider with the same records, especially MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, before pointing the domain at it.
3. Change the nameservers (or just the website records) only after the email records are in place at the new provider.
4. Send yourself a test email from an outside account afterward and confirm it arrives.

If your email is the builder's own product (Wix email, or a GoDaddy mailbox bundled with the site), that is different: the mailboxes themselves are with the builder and will need to migrate to a real provider. That is a separate project, and it should happen before the website move, not during it. I generally move businesses to Microsoft 365 for that.

Two recent ones. A Bristol shop with 131 products on a Wix store moved to a site we build and host: the products, photos and categories came over, the Wix-only checkout did not, and we rebuilt it. And this month a client wanted to cancel Squarespace but keep his email, which meant moving the domain out first so the mailboxes kept working after the site was gone.

The website: assume a rebuild

This is the honest part. The site builders are designed so that your site works on their platform and nowhere else.

• Wix states plainly in its own support documentation that a standard Wix Editor site cannot be exported or hosted elsewhere (Wix: exporting or embedding your site elsewhere). You can copy your text and download your images. The design does not come with you.
• Squarespace offers an XML export aimed at WordPress. It carries pages and one blog, but not the layout, styling, store data or the image files themselves, which stay on Squarespace's servers until you download them (Squarespace: exporting your site).
• GoDaddy Website Builder is in the same family as Wix: content comes out by copy and paste, design does not.
• GoDaddy WordPress hosting is the exception. A WordPress site is portable. It can be backed up and moved to any host that runs WordPress, design and all.

So for most builder sites, the plan is: pull out every piece of content (text, images at full resolution, your list of pages, any blog posts, contact details, hours), and rebuild on the new platform. The new site can look the same or better. It just is not a file you move.

The upside is that a rebuild is a chance to fix what was wrong with the old site. If you are unsure whether the old design is worth keeping, is it worth updating your website is the checklist I use.

Keeping your Google rankings: redirects

Google knows your site by its page addresses. If the old site had yourname.com/our-services and the new one has yourname.com/services, that old address now returns a "page not found," and the ranking it had built up is gone.

The fix is a 301 redirect for every old address that changes: a permanent instruction that tells browsers and Google "this page moved here." Done properly, rankings carry over to the new address within a few weeks.

How to do it without missing any:

1. Before the old site comes down, make a list of every page address on it. The old site's sitemap (usually yourname.com/sitemap.xml) is the fastest way.
2. For each one, decide where it lands on the new site. Same page, a merged page, or the closest equivalent.
3. Set the redirects up on the new site, then test each old address.
4. In Google Search Console, submit the new sitemap and watch the coverage report for "not found" errors over the following weeks.

Keep the same page addresses wherever it is practical. The fewer redirects you need, the less there is to get wrong.

A realistic order of operations

For a typical Connecticut small business on Wix or Squarespace with Microsoft 365 email, this is the sequence I follow:

1. Confirm who owns the domain and where the DNS is managed.
2. Export every DNS record.
3. Build the new site in a staging location and get the owner's sign-off.
4. Collect the list of old page addresses and set up redirects on the new site.
5. Recreate the DNS records at the new DNS provider, email records first.
6. Point the domain at the new site. Test the site, then test email in both directions.
7. Submit the new sitemap to Search Console.
8. Keep the builder subscription for one more billing cycle in case something was missed, then cancel.
9. Transfer the domain if consolidating, after the 60-day rules allow it.

None of that is difficult. It is just order-sensitive, and the builders' cancel buttons do not warn you about any of it.

The bottom line

The domain transfers. The email stays where it is as long as its DNS records are copied before anything changes. The website is a rebuild, not a transfer, on every major builder except WordPress hosting. Redirects are what carry your rankings across. Get the sequence right and the move is uneventful, which is the goal.

Thinking about leaving a site builder? We rebuild and host small business sites for a $500 flat-rate build and $35 a month for hosting and care, with the DNS and email handled as part of the move. See web solutions, or contact us and tell us where your site is today. If you are weighing whether to leave at all, Wix vs Squarespace vs a local web designer is the comparison to read first.