Moving off Squarespace, Wix or GoDaddy without breaking Google

Not just pages. Every address Google has indexed, every link another site points at you, every image people have saved, the blog you wrote at midnight for three years, and whatever the builder was doing behind the scenes: a booking calendar, a form, an event list, a newsletter signup.

Make the list before anything gets built. Export the site map from the old platform, or crawl it, and write down every URL that gets traffic. That list is the migration plan.

For every old address, decide where it lands on the new site. Page to page where there is a match, page to the closest parent where there isn't, and never to the home page as a catch-all. A redirect to the home page tells Google the old page is gone and the link value mostly evaporates.

Use permanent redirects, test every one after launch, and keep them in place for years. They cost nothing to keep and they are the reason your rankings survive.

This is the part that bit a lot of people. The owner keeps editing their schedule in the builder's app because it is on their phone and it works. The blog gets written there too. If the new site simply replaces the old one, those habits break on day one.

When we moved Greene Dog Consulting off Squarespace, the trainer kept managing his class calendar in the Squarespace app he already used. The new site reads that calendar live and shows the week's sessions, and his journal posts flow onto the new site within minutes of him publishing. His Squarespace plan stays active for exactly that reason. He changed nothing about how he works. The site just got faster, bigger and easier to find.

If the old blog ranks for anything, carry the posts over word for word under the same titles. Rewriting them is a separate decision for later. For Greene Dog that meant twenty-six articles came across untouched, with a search-friendly title and a short summary added around each one rather than inside it.

The same goes for service descriptions people have linked to. Improve the design around the copy before you improve the copy.

Build the new site on a temporary address and finish it completely. Test it on a phone. Then move the domain's records to the new host during a quiet hour. Keep the old builder's site up for at least a couple of weeks after, so a stray cached visit still lands somewhere.

Lower the DNS time-to-live a day before the switch so the change spreads quickly, and do the switch yourself or watch it done. A domain change made by someone who is guessing is the most common way a migration takes the email down with it.

Email almost never needs to move for a website change. If someone tells you it does, ask them to show you which record they are changing and why.

A site builder's contact form, booking widget or newsletter signup is usually wired into that builder's account. When you leave, those stop. Before launch, list every place on the old site where a visitor could send you something, and decide where each one goes on the new site and where the message lands.

Test each one from a phone after launch, and then test the inbox. A contact form that looks fine but delivers nowhere is the most common thing we find on sites that were moved without a checklist, and it can go unnoticed for weeks because nothing looks broken.

If a booking tool or a newsletter list is staying on the old platform for now, link to it clearly. A working link to the old tool beats a broken new one.

Submit the new site map in Google Search Console and check the coverage report daily for a week. Click through your own old links from Facebook, from directories and from old emails. Search your business name and your main services and confirm the new pages are the ones showing.

Then leave it alone. Rankings wobble for a few weeks after any move. The redirects do their work and it settles.