Wix or Squarespace to a custom site without losing Google rankings

The fear is reasonable. You've spent years earning the few Google searches that send you customers, and a new website is exactly the kind of change that can wipe them out overnight. It happens all the time. It's also almost entirely avoidable. Rankings rarely disappear because a site moved. They disappear because the old addresses stopped working and nobody told Google where the pages went.

First: should you move at all?

Sometimes the honest answer is no. If your Wix or Squarespace site is fast enough, you can edit it yourself, and your real problem is that nobody finds it, a rebuild won't fix that. Better page titles, clearer service pages, schema markup, and a finished Google Business Profile all work on the platform you're already on.

Moving tends to make sense when:

• The site is slow on a phone and the platform won't let you fix the cause.
• You need something the builder can't do well: a real quote flow, a booking system tied to your software, a custom store.
• You're paying for apps and add-ons that a custom site would do once, for good.
• You want the code, the hosting, and the data in your own name instead of rented from the builder.

Before anything moves: take inventory

The most important work in a migration happens before any design work starts. You need a list of every address the old site answers to, and you need to know which ones matter.

• Every URL. Your current sitemap (usually at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) is the starting list. Add anything else you know links to you: old blog posts, product pages, a PDF menu.
• Which pages earn traffic. In Google Search Console, the Performance report shows the pages that get clicks and the searches behind them. Export it. Those pages are the ones the move has to protect.
• What each important page says. Save the page title, meta description, and main heading for your top pages. The safest move keeps those close to the same at launch. Rewrite later, once the new site has settled.

If you haven't set up Search Console yet, do it now, weeks before the move. A before-and-after comparison is only possible if the "before" was recorded.

The redirect map is the whole game

Wix and Squarespace each have their own URL habits. A blog post or product page on the old site will almost never live at the same address on the new one. A redirect map is a plain list: old address on the left, new address on the right, one row for every URL in your inventory.

• Use permanent (301) redirects. That tells Google the page moved for good and to carry its standing over to the new address.
• Redirect to the closest match, not the homepage. Sending every old page to the homepage looks like the content was deleted, and Google treats it that way.
• Don't forget the odd ones.Old blog posts, image and file links, pages you "hid" but never deleted, and the version of your address with and without www.
• Test every row on launch day.Click through the whole list. A redirect map that's 90% right still leaks rankings through the other 10%.

The parts that break besides rankings

• Your domain.If you bought the domain through Wix or Squarespace, decide whether to transfer it to a registrar in your name or just point it at the new host. Either works, but plan it. Don't discover it on launch day.
• Your email. If your business email runs on that domain, the email records have to come across exactly as they are. This is the step that most often takes email down for a day.
• Forms, bookings, and store data. Contact form destinations, booking integrations, product data, and customer lists all need a home on the new site, with a record of what moved where.
• Your Google Business Profile. Make sure its website link still lands on a working page.

After launch: watch, don't guess

• Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and request indexing for your most important pages.
• Watch the Page indexing report for new "Not found (404)" errors, and fix each one with a redirect.
• Compare clicks for your top pages against the numbers you exported before the move, week by week.

Some movement in the first few weeks is normal while Google re-crawls the site. A steady slide on specific pages usually points at a redirect that's missing or pointing to the wrong place, which is why you kept the list.

How we do it

Every migration we take on includes a full redirect map, data exported and re-imported with a record of what moved where, the domain and email cutover, and traffic measured before and after launch. Moves off Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, and older WordPress sites typically run two to five weeks. When we rebuilt Upright Roofing's site, the redirect map covered every legacy URL from the old site so its existing search rankings carried over.

More detail is on our migrations & rescuepage. If you're not sure yet whether you need to move at all, the free audit below checks speed, indexing, and AI search visibility on the site you have now, and tells you whether the platform is actually the problem.