Leave Wix, Squarespace, or GoDaddy: keep your domain and protect your search traffic

Most businesses that leave a website builder don’t lose money on the way out. They lose something worse: the domain, because it was registered through the builder and nobody was watching its renewal; or a good share of their search traffic, because the new site used different page addresses and every old link went dead. Both are avoidable. The whole trick is doing the steps in the right order, and the order is not the one most people guess.

The rule that prevents almost every disaster: cancel last. Nothing on this page involves cancelling until the final step.

Step 1: Find out who actually holds your domain

Type your domain into the ICANN lookup (for .com, .net, .org and most others). The “Registrar” line tells you which company the domain lives with. It might be GoDaddy, it might be Wix’s registrar partner, it might be a registrar you have never heard of that your web designer used.

Three outcomes:

• The registrar is the builder or its partner (Wix, Squarespace Domains, GoDaddy for a GoDaddy Website Builder site). The domain is a separate product with its own renewal, even if you bought it with the website. Wix and Squarespace let you keep the domain after cancelling the website plan, but its renewal stays with them, at their price. We recommend Step 2 so the domain sits at a registrar you control. Do it while you still have the login and everything is paid up, and check the domain’s own renewal date before you cancel anything.
• The registrar is a separate company and you have the login. Skip to Step 3.
• The registrar is a separate company and someone else has the login (a designer, an agency, an ex-employee). Stop here and work through the ownership handoff checklist first. You cannot transfer a domain you can’t log in to.

Step 2: Transfer the domain to a registrar you control

A domain transfer is a standard, protected process. It does not take your site offline, and it does not change your address. Here’s what actually happens:

1. Pick the new registrar. Our domain comparison covers renewal prices, which is what you’ll pay from now on. Open an account there first.
2. Unlock the domain at the current registrar. Look for “transfer lock,” “domain lock,” or a status reading clientTransferProhibited. Turn it off.
3. Get the authorization code. Also called the EPP code, auth code, or transfer key. The current registrar must give it to you, usually by email, usually within a day. This is the step builders make hard to find, not impossible.
4. Start the transfer at the new registrar. Paste the code, pay for the transfer. For most extensions the transfer price includes a full extra year added to whatever time was left, so it is not wasted money.
5. Approve the confirmation email if one arrives. Transfers complete within about five days, often faster.

Two rules that trip people up:

• The 60-day lock. A domain cannot be transferred within 60 days of being registered, or (for most extensions) within 60 days of a change to the registrant’s name or email. If you just bought the domain or just updated the contact details, expect to wait. Some registrars let you opt out of the post-change lock when you edit contact details, so ask before changing anything, and don’t change contact details at the old registrar right before transferring. A domain transferred in the last 60 days usually can’t move again yet either.
• DNS may not follow. If the old registrar was also serving your DNS records (very likely with a builder), those records can vanish when the transfer completes, taking email with them. The safe move is to copy every DNS record down first, and ideally set up DNS at the new registrar or at Cloudflare before the transfer so the switch is instant. If you don’t know what DNS is, read this first.

If the builder won’t release the domain: you are entitled to transfer. For .com and other ICANN-governed extensions, the registrar must provide the authorization code and cannot refuse a transfer unless the domain is inside the 60-day window, in a dispute, or unpaid. ICANN’s transfer complaint form exists for exactly this. For .ca, CIRA handles registrar complaints directly.

Step 3: Write down every page address before you rebuild

Open your current site and list every page’s full address: yourbusiness.com/services, yourbusiness.com/about, and so on. Include the blog posts if you have any. These addresses are what Google has indexed and what other sites link to.

Your new site should use the same addresses. If the old site had /services, the new one has /services, not /our-services or /what-we-do. Keeping each page’s address is the single biggest thing you can do to protect your search traffic. It isn’t a guarantee (changes to the content, titles, and layout still matter, and rankings often wobble for a few weeks after any move), but it removes the riskiest part. Where an address has to change, add a permanent (301) redirect from the old one so Google can carry the page’s history across. Without one, every old link to that page leads to an error.

On Cloudflare Pages those redirects live in a plain text file called _redirects in the same folder as your index.html (in a framework project, that’s usually public), one line per changed page: the old address, the new address, then 301. For example: /our-services /services 301. Leave off the 301 and Cloudflare uses a temporary (302) redirect instead.

Builders sometimes append odd suffixes to page addresses or generate addresses you never chose. Check what Google actually indexed: search site:yourbusiness.com and read the addresses in the results.

Step 4: If your email was bundled, move it before you cancel

If the builder sold you email at your domain (Wix and Squarespace both resell Google Workspace; GoDaddy sells Microsoft 365), check whether the mailbox is billed with the website plan or separately. A separately billed mailbox keeps running after you cancel the website; one billed with the plan may not, so confirm with the builder. If you’re moving it, do this before Step 6:

1. Decide where email will live next. The free receiving route or a paid mailbox both work.
2. Export or forward anything you need from the old mailbox.
3. Set up the new address and its DNS records while the old one still works.
4. Send a test from an outside address, confirm it arrives at the new place, then switch.

If the email is a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account that the builder merely resells, you can often ask to have the subscription transferred to direct billing instead of cancelled, which keeps the mailbox and its history intact. It’s worth one support message before you export everything.

Step 5: Rebuild, deploy, and point the domain

Now the actual website. Build the new site (pointing the AI at your existing pages works well and keeps the wording consistent), deploy it to Cloudflare Pages, and connect your domain there. Test it thoroughly on a phone: every page loads, every phone number and email link works, the contact form sends.

Until you change the DNS records to point at the new host, customers keep seeing the old site. When you do, the switch takes minutes. Your address never changed, so nobody notices except you.

Step 6: Cancel

Only now. Cancel the website plan and any add-ons you’ve replaced. If the domain or a mailbox is still with the builder because you chose to keep it there, leave those subscriptions running. Check your card statement a month later to make sure nothing you cancelled kept renewing. Then put the domain’s renewal date, wherever it now lives, in the ownership checklist and download the reminder.

What this costs

Nothing beyond the domain transfer, which mostly buys you a year of renewal you’d have paid for anyway. The rebuild is your afternoon or the AI’s, and the hosting is free. If you keep the domain with the builder instead, you keep paying its renewal price there. If you’d like to know what you were paying for all of it before, the savings calculator will tell you.