What your website platform will and won't let you take with you

Nobody chooses a website platform by reading its export documentation. You choose one because the templates look good, or your designer likes it, or it was the one you’d heard of.

Then three or five years later you want to move — better pricing, a rebrand, a platform that does something yours doesn’t — and you discover what you’re allowed to take.

The answers vary enormously, and every one of them is published. Here’s what four major platforms say in their own documentation.

The short version

Platform	Can you export the site?	What you actually get
WordPress	Yes, fully	An XML file with posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies and users
Squarespace	Partly	An XML file for WordPress import — but only one blog page, and no style settings or custom CSS
Wix	In pieces	Contacts (CSV), physical products (CSV), CMS collections (CSV). No whole-site export
Framer	No	No HTML export and no self-hosting, by design

Not one of them exports your design. That’s the part worth internalising before you spend money on one: the layout, the styling, the visual decisions you paid for — on every platform here, those stay behind. What travels is content.

What each one says, in its own words

WordPress — the full export

WordPress’s own documentation describes exporting “posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, and users” into a WXR file, with an “All content” option covering “all of your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, terms, navigation menus, and custom posts.”

That file imports into another WordPress site. It’s the most portable option of the four, which is the practical upside of open-source software: your content isn’t a hostage because nobody’s business model depends on keeping it.

Squarespace — one blog page, and no design

Squarespace publishes a clear list, and it’s more restrictive than most owners realise.

What exports: layout pages, one blog page including its posts and up to 1,000 comments per post, text blocks, image blocks, gallery pages.

What doesn’t: more than one blog page · content in page-specific headers, footers and sidebars · dropdowns · audio blocks · product blocks · video blocks · drafts · style settings · custom CSS.

Their documentation is upfront about why: “Not everything will export, as many features rely on our platform’s JavaScript and CSS.”

And one line that surprises nearly everyone: “It’s not possible to export content from one Squarespace site and import it into another.” The export exists to get you to WordPress. It doesn’t get you to a different Squarespace site.

If you run two blogs — say a journal and a resources section — one of them isn’t coming.

Wix — pieces, not a site

Wix documents several separate exports rather than one whole-site export:

• Contacts — CSV, up to 50,000 at a time, and only the site owner can do it.
• Store products — CSV, up to 5,000 rows per file, and digital products are not currently supported.
• CMS collections — CSV.

Useful, and genuinely more than nothing — your customer list is the most valuable thing there and you can get it out. But there’s no documented path that hands you your pages. If you’ve built a marketing site with a dozen carefully written pages, plan on rewriting them somewhere else.

Framer — no export, stated plainly

Framer’s help centre answers this directly and without hedging: “Framer does not offer HTML export for self-hosting.” Asked whether you can download your HTML files: “No. Framer does not provide a way to export published sites as HTML files or static website bundles.”

The reason given is technical rather than commercial, and it’s credible: published Framer sites aren’t fully static. They rely on backend services — page pre-rendering, dynamic image resizing, font subsetting, server-side rendering, global caching — that can’t be reproduced by shipping you a folder of files.

Their documentation also includes an unusually straight sentence: “If you require complete control over hosting infrastructure or need to export source code, Framer may not be the right solution for that workflow.”

That’s more honest than most vendors manage. It’s still a total dependency, and you should choose it knowingly.

Where we stand, since we build on one of these

We build client sites on Framer, and we’ve just told you Framer has no export. Both those things are true, so here’s the reasoning rather than a dodge.

What matters most isn’t the HTML — it’s everything around it. Your domain, registered in your name. Your email list, in your own CRM. Your analytics, your ad accounts, your content. Those are the assets that compound, and they end up yours either way: on a custom build they sit in your own accounts from the start, and where a fixed-price package runs some of the plumbing on our tools, everything it produces still comes to you. A set of exported HTML files is worth considerably less than any of them.

A design doesn’t export from anywhere. Not Squarespace, not Wix, not a WordPress theme in any usable way. So “can I export the site?” is a less useful question than it sounds. The realistic question is what would rebuilding cost me, and do I still have everything else?

But we’re not going to pretend it’s nothing. If total infrastructure control matters to you — if you want the files, on your server, no vendor in the middle — Framer is the wrong choice and we’d tell you that before taking the work. A studio whose whole promise is that nothing is held hostage has to be straight about the one place the lock-in is real.

What to actually do

If you’re choosing a platform right now:

1. Read the export page before you build. Every platform here publishes one. It takes ten minutes and it’s the single most predictive document about your next five years.
2. Ask what happens to your list. Contact export is more important than page export. A rebuilt page costs you a weekend; a lost list costs you a launch.
3. Assume the design doesn’t travel. Budget for a rebuild whenever you move, on any platform.
4. Keep the domain in your own registrar account. This is the one that traps people hardest, and it’s entirely avoidable.

If you’re already on one and thinking about moving:

1. Export everything you can, today, before you’re mid-migration and rushed. Contacts first.
2. Keep your own copy of your words. Paste every page’s text into a document you own. That’s the asset the platform genuinely can’t take from you, and it makes any future rebuild dramatically cheaper.
3. Save the images at full resolution somewhere that isn’t the platform.
4. Plan the redirects before you switch, not after. Changed URLs with nothing pointing old to new is how a site loses its search visibility overnight.

Common questions

Does “no export” mean they own my content? No. Your words and images are yours; the ownership question is about the built site — the code and design — and the practical question is whether you can get it out in a usable form. Read the intellectual-property clause in your platform’s terms for the legal side; read the export page for the practical one.

Which platform is best for portability? WordPress, clearly, and it isn’t close. Whether that outweighs everything else — cost, maintenance, security, how it feels to use — is a different question, and portability alone is a poor reason to choose a platform you’ll dislike using.

Can’t a developer just scrape my site? They can copy the visible pages, and there are tools that do it. What you get is a static snapshot — not an editable site, not your CMS, not anything you can maintain. It’s a backup, not a migration.

I have two blogs on Squarespace. What happens? One exports. Plan to move the other manually, and start by copying its text somewhere safe.

How often does this change? Regularly. Everything above was read on each platform’s own documentation the week this was published. Check yours before you act on it — including against this page.

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Sources: WordPress.org documentation on the Tools → Export screen · Squarespace’s “Exporting your site” support article · Wix support articles on exporting contacts, product lists and CMS collections · Framer’s help article “Can I export my website to HTML and self-host it?” All read directly, all publicly available.