How to migrate from Squarespace, Wix, or GoDaddy in under a week (without losing SEO)

Why owners hesitate on migration

The most common reason small business owners stay on a platform they've outgrown — Squarespace's monthly bill creeping up, Wix's editor slowing down, GoDaddy's site looking dated — is fear of losing their Google ranking during migration. That fear is legitimate. Botched migrations do wreck search visibility for months.

The good news: it is entirely avoidable with a boring, checklist-driven process. The bad news: about 80% of migrations I've reviewed skip at least one of the three critical steps, and each skip costs weeks of ranking recovery.

Day 1 — Export everything from your current platform

Different platforms make this different levels of easy. Here is what actually works for each:

Squarespace export

Go to Settings → Advanced → Import & Export → Export. Squarespace exports in WordPress-compatible XML format. This gives you every blog post + page in structured format. Images and non-blog pages: you'll need to manually save. Squarespace's export is not exhaustive — plan to spend 2-3 hours manually saving remaining assets.

Wix export

Wix does not offer a comprehensive site export. This is not accidental — Wix's business model discourages it. You can back up your site content via their tools, but images and structural content require manual downloading. Budget 4-6 hours if your Wix site has 10+ pages.

GoDaddy export

If you're on GoDaddy's Website Builder, use their built-in "Export site" feature. If you're on GoDaddy managed WordPress, use standard WordPress export tools (Tools → Export → All content). If you have full SFTP access to a GoDaddy hosting account, back up the entire site's file tree — that's your safest bet.

Day 2 — Build your 301 redirect map

This is where most migrations fail silently. Every URL on your old site needs a 301 redirect to its equivalent on the new site. If your old site had 40 pages, you need 40 redirect entries. If a page's URL changes structure (which happens often), the redirect points from the old URL to the new URL. If a page is being retired, the redirect points to the closest thematic replacement (never to the homepage — Google reads that as "this content is gone").

Practical approach: open a spreadsheet with two columns, old URL and new URL. Crawl your existing site with a free tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs) to get every URL. Fill in the new URL column as you build the new site. Every empty cell in column B is a redirect you're about to forget.

Day 3 — Rebuild content on the new site (do not optimize yet)

Recreate pages one for one. Same headings. Same body copy. Same images. Same page structure. The temptation to "improve while we're at it" is real but wrong at this stage — you want a clean migration first, then optimization second. Mixing them makes it impossible to diagnose why search traffic dropped if it does.

The exception: your site's technical structure (Core Web Vitals, mobile responsiveness, load speed) can absolutely improve. Google rewards better technical scores on the same content.

Day 4 — Deploy 301 redirects at your new host

Where you configure this depends on your new host:

• nginx: location = /old-url { return 301 /new-url; } per line in your server config
• Cloudflare: Bulk Redirects (formerly Page Rules) — upload CSV, done
• Wordpress: the Redirection plugin — supports bulk CSV import
• Static hosts (Vercel, Netlify): configure in vercel.json or _redirects

Test 20-30 old URLs in your browser after deploying. Each one should land on the correct new URL with a 301 status code (not 302). Use a browser dev tools inspector or a tool like httpstatus.io to verify status codes.

Day 5 — DNS cutover with email preservation

This is where migrations most often break email — which then breaks the small business owner's ability to receive customer inquiries for 24-72 hours.

What to change in DNS: A record and AAAA record point to your new server's IP. That's it.

What to NOT change: MX records (email routing), TXT records for SPF and DKIM (email deliverability), and any CNAME records for third-party services (mail signing, marketing automation, etc.) unless you're also moving those services.

Do the DNS change during a low-traffic window. Google's crawler will see the new site within hours; humans will see it within 24-48 hours depending on DNS TTL settings you had in place before the change.

Day 6 — Submit to search engines + push IndexNow

The single most under-used step. Do all four:

1. Google Search Console: add the new property (or verify the existing one is picking up the new content). Submit your new sitemap. Manually request indexing on your top 20 URLs via the URL inspection tool.
2. Bing Webmaster Tools: same steps. Bing is 5-10% of US search traffic but a much larger share of AI-assistant traffic (Copilot, ChatGPT with browsing, Perplexity often source from Bing).
3. IndexNow: if your new host supports it, push a bulk URL notification. IndexNow (used by Bing + Yandex) triggers re-crawl within 24-72 hours instead of the weeks a natural crawl takes.
4. Google Business Profile: if you have one, update the website URL immediately. This is a strong signal to Google's local ranking algorithms.

Day 7 — Monitor + patch any 404s that appear

For the first 30 days after migration, check Google Search Console's "Pages" report daily. Every URL flagged as 404 is one you missed in your redirect map. Add the missing redirect immediately.

Also monitor your server access logs (or your host's analytics) for real 404 requests from Google's crawler or from actual visitors clicking old bookmarks. Each represents a real signal to search engines that content is missing — fix it fast.

What to expect during recovery

If you did all seven steps correctly, expect:

• Week 1: search traffic dips 20-40% as Google re-crawls and re-indexes. Normal.
• Week 2-3: traffic gradually recovers to 70-80% of pre-migration levels.
• Week 4-6: traffic reaches or exceeds pre-migration levels if the new site is technically faster and content is preserved.

If traffic is still down more than 30% at week 6, something in your redirect map or DNS setup broke. Audit both.

The shortcut

All of the above is doable yourself in 5-7 business days if you have the technical comfort. If you don't — or if you'd rather focus on running your business — fivedaylaunch includes migration from Squarespace, Wix, and GoDaddy at every tier. We handle the export, the redirect map, the DNS cutover, and the search-engine re-submission. 5 business days from signed contract to a launched, migrated site.