Outgrown Wix or Squarespace?

Most people reading this did not pick the wrong platform. They picked the right one three or four years ago, when the business was smaller and the website barely had to do anything. The business grew. The website could not grow with it.

I'm Corby Wenzelbach. I design and build websites and web applications, and I have spent over a decade doing it. A good share of that work is rebuilding sites for businesses that have run into the limits of Wix or Squarespace. Some of them move to WordPress, some get something built from scratch, and some I tell to stay where they are.

This page is about working out which of those three you are, before you spend anything.

Signs You Have Outgrown Your Website Builder

There is rarely a single moment where it becomes obvious. What happens instead is that the list of things you have quietly given up on gets longer. The same signs come up again and again:

• You are paying for apps to do things the site should do. Three or four monthly subscriptions bolted on for booking, forms, reviews, and popups usually cost more per year than people expect, and each one is another script slowing the page down.
• You have started saying "the website can't do that." Once that sentence becomes routine, the site has begun shaping the business instead of serving it.
• The workaround has a workaround. A spreadsheet that feeds a form that someone re-keys into another system, because the site cannot talk to anything directly.
• It is slow on a phone and you cannot find out why. You can see the score. You cannot see the code that produced it, and neither can anyone you hire.
• You want your data out and discover you cannot have all of it. This is the one that surprises people most, and it is worth understanding before it becomes urgent.

None of that means the platform is bad. It means you are now asking it for the things it was explicitly designed not to do.

What Wix Can't Do

Wix's limits are mostly about control. It is a closed system, and that is a deliberate trade. Being closed is why Wix is easy to use, and it is also why some things are not available at any price, no matter who you hire.

• There is no way to take the site with you. Wix has no site export. You can get your blog posts and some collection data out as files, but the pages, the layouts, and the design only exist on Wix and cannot be moved to another host. A rebuild is not one option among several. It is the only option.
• You can only write code inside Wix's own system. Their tool for this, Velo, is more capable than people expect. But anything you build with it only works on Wix, and only within the limits Wix sets. It does not come with you either.
• You cannot change the template after you publish. Deciding two years in that the layout is wrong means rebuilding the site inside Wix, page by page.
• You do not control the server your site runs on. That rules out a lot of the speed and search work a developer would normally do. Even something as basic as redirecting an old page to a new one has to be done by hand in their dashboard, one at a time.
• Integrations stop where their app market stops. If the system you need to connect to has no Wix app, connecting to it properly is usually off the table.

What Squarespace Can't Do

Squarespace sites tend to look good, and if your website mostly needs to make you look credible, that is a large part of the job already done. Its limits show up somewhere else.

• You cannot run any code of your own on the server. Squarespace lets you add snippets, but they only run in the visitor's browser. Real customer accounts, pricing that changes per customer, or a secure connection to another system all need to run somewhere you do not have access to.
• The export leaves out the expensive parts. You can get your pages, blog posts, and images out in a format WordPress understands. Product data, your styling, and several page types do not come out at all. Expect your words and pictures to survive the move and expect to rebuild everything else.
• Squarespace decides your page addresses, not you. It organizes URLs its own way, so moving off usually changes them. That is fine if someone plans the redirects, and a problem if nobody does.
• Developer Mode is not the escape hatch it sounds like. It only exists on older templates, and switching it on means giving up the visual style editor for good. Most businesses should leave it alone.
• Squarespace takes a cut of sales on the cheaper plans. Worth working out what that costs you per year before you assume staying is the cheaper option.

What It Costs to Move

Less than most people fear, and rarely as little as they hope. The honest answer is that a rebuild costs roughly what the equivalent new site would, because that is essentially what it is. The existing site gives you finished content and a proven structure, which genuinely saves time, but nothing of the build itself transfers.

Three things push the price up: selling online with a real product catalogue, anything involving customer accounts, and connecting to other software you already use. What a website costs goes through all of it properly. One thing brings it down more than anything else, which is knowing which pages you actually want to keep. Most sites I look at have a third more pages than anyone has opened in a year.

Before you decide a rebuild is the expensive option, add up a year of your builder subscription and every app subscription sitting on top of it. Those payments never stop. A rebuild does.

What You Keep: Your Content, Your URLs, Your Rankings

This is the part that worries people most, and it is the part most within your control, as long as somebody is paying attention to it during the move rather than after.

Your content comes with you. The text and images are yours, and they move, either by export or, on a small site, by hand. You choose your own page addresses. On a custom build nothing is imposed on you, so you can keep your existing ones exactly as they are, or improve them and point every old address at its replacement. Your rankings follow those addresses, as long as every old one is pointed somewhere sensible and the new pages say at least as much as the old ones did.

I am not going to pretend nothing changes. Google takes a few weeks to work through a moved site, and your positions can move around while it does. But the things that cause real, lasting damage are all avoidable: deleting pages without pointing them anywhere, cutting content down on the way across, or launching something slower than what you had. Avoiding those is part of the job, not an extra I charge for.

How a Migration Actually Runs

When You Should Stay Where You Are

Plenty of people read this page and should not move anywhere, and I would rather say so now than after you have paid me. Stay where you are if most of this sounds like you:

• The site is five or six pages of information that does not change much, and it works.
• You are not selling online, or you sell a handful of products with no unusual pricing.
• Nothing needs to connect to anything else.
• You update it yourself and like being able to.
• Money is tight and the site is not the reason the phone is quiet.

In that situation a custom build buys you very little, and a builder subscription is a reasonable price for never thinking about hosting or updates. If your site is slow or not ranking, the fix is usually images, content, and a properly filled-in Google Business Profile, none of which require leaving your platform. I would rather point that out than sell you a rebuild you did not need.

It changes when your website has to do something rather than just say something. That is the line worth watching for.

Recent Work

A few of the sites and systems I've built and still look after.

Common Questions