Leaving Wix? Take a Copy of Your Site First

If you are moving off Wix, copy the public site before you cancel anything. Wix has no export that hands you your pages, and its architecture does not support hosting a Wix site anywhere else. Once the plan ends, the site you spent years on is only visible to you inside the editor, and only for as long as the account lasts.

Every migration guide starts at the new platform. This is the step before that.

What Wix lets you take with you

Not much, and less than people expect.

• Contacts and orders. Downloadable as files from the dashboard.
• A product list. If you run Wix Stores, products can be exported as a CSV and imported elsewhere.
• Blog posts: no. At the time of writing, Wix states that exporting blog posts to other platforms is not possible. There is an importer for moving posts between two Wix sites, capped at 5,000 posts, and it skips drafts, scheduled posts, and comments. That does not help you leave.
• Pages, layout, design: no. There is no file that contains them.

So the text of every page, the way it was laid out, and the images as they appeared are yours to copy or yours to lose.

Why the old site matters after you have moved

People assume the old site stops mattering the day the new one goes live. In practice the first month after a migration is spent referring back to it.

• Checking the rebuild. Page by page, does the new one say what the old one said? Without the old site up, you are working from memory.
• Copy you did not realise you needed. Service descriptions, FAQ answers, staff bios, the exact wording of a guarantee. It is always more text than anyone remembers writing.
• Redirects. Your new platform needs a redirect for every old URL that has links or rankings pointing at it. A list of the old pages is the input to that job.
• Client questions. "The old site had a page about X, where did it go?" is much easier to answer with the old site in front of you.
• Proof. If a client or a partner disputes what was published, a dated copy settles it.

How to copy it

By hand. Use Save As in your browser on each page. You get an HTML file and a folder of assets per page. It is fine for five pages and miserable for fifty, and Wix loads parts of the layout with scripts, so the saved copy often looks wrong.

With a desktop crawler. HTTrack or SiteSucker can walk the site into a folder. Wix serves images from a separate host, so you have to allow that host in the crawler settings or the copy comes out without pictures. Script-driven sections may not render.

With a service. Dead Simple Backups crawls the public site and saves every page as HTML, takes a full-page screenshot of each page in a real browser, and copies the images, styles, and fonts alongside, so the pages open on your own machine and still look right. It also writes a list of every page it found, which is the redirect list you are going to need. No Wix login, because it only reads what is already public.

The order of operations

1. Copy the public site while it is still live. Whole site, every page, with screenshots.
2. Download what Wix does give you. Contacts, orders, product CSV, and the full-resolution images from the media manager. Wix serves resized images to visitors, so the copy holds the display size, not your originals. Get those out while you have access.
3. Build the new site. Use the copy as the reference.
4. Write the redirects from the old page list to the new URLs.
5. Move the domain, then watch search traffic for a few weeks.
6. Only then cancel. And keep the copy. It costs nothing to hold and it is the only record of what the site was.

Most people do step 6 first, because cancelling feels like the finish line. It is the one step that cannot be undone.

What a copy is not

It is not a restore. Nothing can push these files back into Wix, and nothing can turn them into a WordPress or Squarespace site automatically. It is a faithful record of the public site: the words, the structure, the pictures, and how each page looked on the day it was taken. Rebuilding is still work. Rebuilding from a copy is a much smaller job than rebuilding from memory.

Try one page free: paste your address on the Wix page and you get that page as HTML with a full-page screenshot in about a minute, no account needed.

Q: Can I export my Wix site to WordPress?

Not directly. There is no Wix export that WordPress can import as a site. Some tools scrape the public pages into WordPress posts, with mixed results on layout. Whichever route you take, having your own copy of the public pages first makes the rebuild and the checking far easier.

Q: Will my Wix pages stay up while I build the new site?

Yes, as long as the plan is paid. Keep it running until the new site is live and the domain has moved. The overlap is worth one extra month of billing.

Q: What about my images?

Download the originals from the Wix media manager while you have access. Any copy of the public site can only capture the resized versions Wix serves to visitors.

Q: Do I still need a copy if I am staying on Wix?

Different reason, same answer. Site History protects you from a bad edit while you can log in. It does not survive losing the account, and it cannot be opened outside Wix.