How to move off Wix, Squarespace or Framer without losing your rankings.

You can move a website off Wix, Squarespace or Framer without losing your rankings. The thing that decides whether you do is a URL map finished before launch day, not a clever technical fix applied after it.

Almost every replatform horror story is the same story. The new site went live, the old addresses stopped resolving, Google spent six weeks working out that most of what it had indexed was gone, and the owner concluded that moving was the mistake. Moving was not the mistake. Launching without a mapped destination for every address Google already knew about was the mistake.

What you can take with you, and what you cannot

The answer here surprises people, so get it settled before you start costing the job.

You can usually take the content. Text, product data and posts come out of all three platforms in some form. Squarespace will give you a WordPress-format XML export that covers pages and posts, though not everything on them. Wix has no general-purpose export, so you either copy text out screen by screen or pull it from a crawl of your own site. Framer is a design tool first, so the words live inside the design file rather than in a database you can dump.

You can take the images, though not always at the size you want and rarely with sensible file names. Set aside half a day to pull the media down and rename it so each file says what the picture is of.

You cannot take the design. Owners fight this one hardest and it is simply true. A Squarespace layout is Squarespace's blocks, templating and stylesheet. There is no file that moves into a custom build or into Shopify. What transfers is the design intent: the structure, the hierarchy, the colour and type decisions, the photography. Somebody rebuilds the rest. On an honest quote that rebuild is the project, which is why "just move my site over" is not a cheaper job than "build me a site".

You cannot take the forms, the bookings or the member area. Anything the platform handed you as a feature has to be replaced with something else and then tested from nothing.

Map every URL before launch, not after

Rankings do not attach to your website. They attach to individual addresses. Google holds a record of yoursite.ca/services/furnace-repair and the history, the links and the position all belong to that specific address. Change the address without telling anyone and none of it follows.

So you build one spreadsheet with one row per existing URL. Not the important ones. Every one of them, including the ugly old pages you forgot you published.

Four rules for filling that sheet in.

• 301, not 302. A 301 says moved permanently and passes the ranking signals along. A 302 says you will be back, and a lot of platforms default to it.
• Redirect to the closest equivalent page. Sending every retired URL to the home page feels tidy and is close to worthless. Google often treats a mass home-page redirect as a soft 404 and passes nothing through it.
• One hop. If the old site already redirected /furnace to /services/furnace-repair, update the old rule so it points straight at the new address. Chains lose signal and eventually break.
• Test the list, do not eyeball it. Put the old URLs through a crawler after launch and confirm every one returns a single 301 to a page that returns a 200.

Keep the titles and the H1s, at first

A new site invites new copy, new headings and a better structure all at once. Resist for roughly eight weeks.

If a page ranks today, its title tag and its H1 are part of the reason. Change the address, the title, the heading, the body copy and the internal linking in one release and you have made five changes with one measurement. When something moves, you will not know which change moved it, and you will not know whether to push further or roll back.

Launch with titles and H1s as close to the old ones as you can bear. Confirm the redirects resolved and the positions held. Then improve the copy on purpose, in small batches, a week apart. That sequencing is the whole difference between a move that holds and a move that turns into a three-month investigation.

Do not change the domain at the same time

If you are also rebranding, split it into two releases with at least a month between them.

A platform move changes your URLs. A domain change changes every URL plus the host, and it forces Google to re-evaluate a brand new site rather than a reorganized one. Stacked together, they produce exactly the pattern that frightens everybody: traffic halves, nobody can say why, and there is no way to isolate the cause.

Move platforms first on the domain you already have. Let it settle for four to six weeks and confirm Search Console looks normal. Then do the domain change on its own, with its own full redirect map, a change of address submission in Search Console, and updates to your Google Business Profile, your citations and your email records. Also check who holds the domain before you plan any of this, which is covered in who actually owns your website.

What actually causes the traffic drop

In order of how often it is the real culprit.

1. Unmapped URLs. Pages that simply stopped existing. This is the big one and it is almost always most of the loss.
2. Everything redirected to the home page. Technically present, practically a dead end.
3. A noindex tag or a robots.txt block left on from staging. The new site was hidden from search while it was being built, and nobody removed the hiding. It is embarrassingly common and costs weeks.
4. Changing the copy, the structure and the addresses in one release. The drop may be real, temporary or imaginary, and you have no way to tell which.
5. Internal links still pointing at old addresses. Every one of those is an unnecessary hop and a signal that the site does not know its own shape.
6. A slower site. Design tools and page builders can produce pages far heavier than what they replaced. Worth checking against core web vitals for a small business site.
7. Seasonality mistaken for a penalty. A roofer who relaunches in November is going to see a quieter December whatever happens.

Notice that six of the seven are process failures rather than technical ones. That is the genuinely good news here, because process failures are preventable with a spreadsheet and a sequence.

Launch week, in order

1. Confirm the redirect rules are loaded and tested on the new host before you repoint anything.
2. Repoint the DNS. Lower the record's time to live a day beforehand so the switch propagates quickly.
3. Remove every noindex, every staging password and every robots.txt block. Then check the live site's source to be certain.
4. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and request indexing on your ten most valuable pages.
5. Crawl the full list of old URLs and fix anything that is not a single clean 301.
6. Walk the site on a phone and submit every form. Confirm each one arrives in an inbox a human opens.
7. Check analytics is recording and that your conversion events still fire.
8. Update the website link on your Google Business Profile, your social profiles and your main directory listings.

What normal looks like afterwards

Expect a wobble. For one to three weeks, impressions move around while Google re-crawls and settles. Watch the coverage report in Search Console rather than daily rankings, because the useful question is whether your pages are indexed, not where they sat on Tuesday.

By week four to six, a well-mapped move should be back to where it was or ahead of it. Ahead is common when the old site was slow and badly structured, though we will not promise it, because the gain depends entirely on how bad the thing you left behind actually was.

If it is still down at week six, the cause is almost always on the list above rather than something exotic. Work through it in order.

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We do these moves on fixed quotes, and the URL map is built in the planning phase rather than discovered during launch week. If you are on a closed platform and want to know what the move involves for your specific site, send us the URL and we will crawl it and tell you how many pages are actually in play.