Thinking of Moving Off Wix? An Honest Guide to Website Migration

Thinking about moving your website off Wix? You're not alone — it's one of the most common questions we get from small businesses across Chester and the North West. Usually it arrives as "my Wix site needs improving", and somewhere in the conversation the question underneath it comes out: should I move to proper hosting, and is it worth it?

Here's the honest answer, without the sales spin: sometimes yes, and sometimes absolutely not. This guide walks you through when a migration actually pays off, when you'd be paying for a Ferrari to do the school run, and how the main platforms — Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, GoDaddy and WordPress — really compare to a custom build on AWS.

First, the question nobody in the industry likes to ask

Most "I need to move off Wix" requests are really one of these four things:

• "It looks dated." → That's a design refresh. You can often do that on Wix.
• "It's slow / not showing up on Google." → Partly the platform's ceiling, mostly bloated images, too many apps, and thin content. Migrating won't magically fix it.
• "I want a feature it can't do." → Now we're getting somewhere. This is the one that genuinely justifies moving.
• "I've outgrown it and want to own my site properly." → Fair, and increasingly common as a business grows.

If you're in the first two buckets, a migration is often the wrong recommendation. We'll happily tell you that — improving what you've got is cheaper, faster, and gets you the result you actually wanted. It's the last two buckets where moving to something like AWS starts to earn its keep.

The honest platform comparison

Here's how the common platforms stack up against a custom build on AWS (the infrastructure we use — the same cloud that runs Netflix, Airbnb and the BBC).

	Wix	Squarespace	Shopify	GoDaddy / Weebly	WordPress (self-hosted)	Custom build on AWS
Best for	Simple brochure sites	Design-led brochure sites	Selling products	Quick, cheap starter sites	Content-heavy / blogs	Anything custom or growing
Who maintains it	Wix	Squarespace	Shopify	The provider	You (or your agency)	You / your web partner
Monthly cost	~£10–30	~£12–35	~£25–290+	~£8–25	Hosting from ~£5, plus plugins	From £29 with us
Design freedom	Template-bound	Polished but bound	Theme-bound	Limited	Flexible	Unlimited
Custom features	Limited (Velo)	Very limited	E-commerce focused	Very limited	Plugin-dependent	Unlimited
Performance ceiling	OK for small sites	OK	Good for shops	Low	Depends heavily on setup	Highest
SEO	Fine (the old "Wix is bad for SEO" myth is outdated)	Fine	Good for products	Weakest	Strong with work	Strong, fully in your control
You own your site	No — hard to export	No — hard to export	Partly (data yes, theme no)	No	Yes	Yes
Ongoing upkeep burden	None (handled for you)	None	Low	None	Medium–High	Low–Medium (shared with us)
Vendor lock-in	High	High	Medium–High	High	Low	None

A few things worth calling out from that table, because they matter more than the marketing suggests:

• SEO is not a reason to leave Wix on its own. The "Wix is bad for Google" line is years out of date. Rankings are mostly about content, structure and speed — all of which we can improve without a migration.
• The real cost of a builder isn't the monthly fee — it's the lock-in. When your whole site lives inside Wix or Squarespace, exporting it cleanly is painful. You don't fully own it.
• A custom build isn't automatically "better." It's better when you need what it unlocks — custom features, real performance headroom, full ownership, and no ceiling as you grow. For a simple 5-page brochure site, a builder is often the sensible choice, and we'll say so.

Migrating to AWS — the real pros and cons

The upside

• You own everything — your code, your content, your infrastructure. No lock-in.
• No platform ceiling — if you can describe a feature, it can be built. Booking systems, customer portals, custom pricing, AI and automation.
• Genuine performance headroom — CloudFront CDN, next-gen image formats, and Core Web Vitals tuning. Fast sites rank higher and convert better.
• Enterprise reliability — 99.9% uptime, daily backups, health monitoring and SSL as standard.
• UK/EU data centres — your data stays in the eu-west-1 (Ireland) region, GDPR-friendly by default.

The honest downside

• Higher upfront cost. A custom build is an investment (ours start at £499 for a Starter site and rise with complexity), where a builder is a low monthly fee.
• Someone has to maintain it. Servers need patching, SSL renewing, backups checking. With us that's a support plan from £49/month — but it's a real, ongoing responsibility, not a "set and forget".
• It takes longer to launch than dragging blocks around a builder — days versus weeks.
• It's overkill for a simple brochure site that will never need more than a few pages and a contact form.

The rule of thumb: if a builder can do everything you'll realistically need in the next two years, stay on it and spend your money improving it. If it can't — or you're already hitting walls — that's when moving to AWS pays for itself.

Which of these is you?

Most of the enquiries we see fall into a handful of recognisable types. Here's the honest recommendation for each — including when not to migrate.

The local trade or service business (groomers, gardeners, cleaners, trades, clinics) You mostly need to look professional, load fast, and get found locally on Google. A tidy 5-page site does that. Usually: improve or rebuild on solid hosting — but you rarely need enterprise anything. Migration makes sense if you want online booking or a customer area a builder can't handle.

The shop that's outgrowing its builder If you're wrestling with Wix or Squarespace's shop tools, or paying Shopify's rising fees and still hitting limits, a custom store gives you full control over checkout, inventory and integrations. Migration often worth it once product volume or custom workflows justify it — below that, a Starter store or staying put is fine.

The business that wants a real feature (booking, portals, quoting, automation, AI) This is the clearest case for moving. Builders simply can't do bespoke functionality well. Migrate — this is exactly what a custom build is for.

The "it just looks old" enquiry Nine times out of ten you don't need to move at all. A redesign — sometimes on your existing platform — gets you the result for less. We'll tell you if that's the case rather than sell you a migration you don't need.

The "I need to be found on Google" enquiry Moving platforms won't lift your rankings on its own — Google cares about content, structure, speed and local signals, not which website builder you happened to use. Usually: don't migrate for SEO alone. A focused SEO push — or a one-off audit to find the quick wins — does far more here than a rebuild. If your current site is genuinely holding you back on a technical level, then a rebuild becomes part of the SEO plan rather than the whole of it.

The growing business that wants to own its site Ownership, no lock-in, and room to grow are all legitimate reasons on their own. Migration worth it if you're building for the long term and want the site to be an asset you control.

Will I lose my Google rankings if I move?

This is the number-one fear, and it's a fair one — a botched migration can tank your search visibility. Done properly, it doesn't. The key is 301 redirects: every old page URL points to its new home, so Google (and anyone with an old link) lands in the right place and your rankings carry over. We map every URL and set up redirects as standard on any migration, and we'll migrate your existing content so nothing gets lost.

So — should you move?

Strip away the jargon and it comes down to this:

• Staying put and improving is right when a builder already does what you need and the problem is really design, speed or content.
• Moving to a middle ground (a managed WordPress or a modern build on solid hosting) suits businesses that have outgrown a builder but don't need bespoke systems.
• Moving to a full custom build on AWS is right when you need real features, real performance, full ownership, or room to scale — and you understand it's an investment with ongoing upkeep.

There's no single right answer, and anyone who tells you "everyone should be on [platform X]" is selling something. The right choice is the one that matches what your business actually needs over the next couple of years.

Not sure which bucket you're in?

Start with a free, no-obligation website health check at porkenpence.com/audit — it'll show you where your current site stands on speed, SEO, security and accessibility, with no sign-up needed for the summary. If you'd like a straight answer on whether a migration is worth it for your situation, get in touch. We'd genuinely rather tell you to keep what you've got than sell you something you don't need — that's how we like to work.