Leaving Wix is easier than staying.
A stacked Wix plan runs $50-$150/mo forever, and at the end of it you still do not own the site. Migration is 10-14 days. Your content moves. Your domain moves. Your SEO baseline transfers. You’d own the new site outright - no Wix monthly trap, source files at delivery.
Four reasons to leave Wix.
The site is slow. Page-builder platforms ship framework code your visitor has to download before your content appears, and Google measures that. Our own site scores 100 on SEO, accessibility and best practices on mobile and desktop, with performance at 92 mobile and 99 desktop, measured 2026-08-27. The tool is free, run it on both.
“I can’t rank for local searches.” Wix gives you a single SEO panel and limited control over schema. We hand-write LocalBusiness JSON-LD per page, optimize URLs, and run city + industry landing pages that Wix doesn’t let you build cleanly.
The monthly keeps climbing. Started at $29 (Combo plan). Then added Wix Email ($6/mo). Then Wix Bookings ($30/mo). Then Premium plan to remove ads ($28/mo). Then Forms app ($15/mo). Then a premium template ($120 one-time). Then SEO Wiz upsell. Sound familiar? See the year-over-year math.
Platform updates change the site under you. Page-builder platforms push template updates that can break custom layouts without warning. Hand-coded sites don’t change unless we change them.
Five-year math, side by side.
Apples-to-apples for a typical local-business setup. Your numbers may differ - we’ll calculate yours when you request a quote.
| Cost | Wix Premium | SWS T2 |
|---|---|---|
| Build / setup | $0 (DIY) or $500-$2,000 (Wix Pro) | $1,200 once |
| Monthly platform | $28-$59 (Premium plans) | $95 |
| Common add-ons | $25-$80/mo (forms, bookings, email) | Included in hosting |
| Lighthouse, SEO / accessibility / best practices | varies | 100 / 100 / 100 |
| 5-year total | ~$5,400-$10,800 | $6,900 |
| Site portability | Locked to Wix | Standard HTML/CSS, yours forever |
What gets kept, what gets rebuilt.
No black box. Here’s exactly what happens to your existing Wix site during the switch.
Kept (transferred to SWS)
- ✓ Domain name - you keep ownership, we just point DNS
- ✓ All page content (text, photos, service descriptions, business info)
- ✓ Blog posts - URLs preserved or 301-redirected so SEO isn’t lost
- ✓ Google reviews (they’re on Google Business Profile, not Wix - nothing changes)
- ✓ Email forwarding setup (we route through Resend so nothing breaks)
Rebuilt (because it’ll be better)
- ↻ Page layouts - hand-coded HTML instead of Wix widgets (5MB → 50KB)
- ↻ SEO schema - per-page LocalBusiness + BreadcrumbList + Service JSON-LD
- ↻ Contact form - routed through SWS infrastructure (no Wix add-on fee)
- ↻ Photos - optimized + served as WebP. The same screenshot on our own site is 93 KB as PNG and 53 KB as WebP, 43% smaller
Left behind (intentionally)
- × Wix subscription - cancelled day 1 of launch month
- × Wix add-on apps - replaced with self-hosted equivalents in hosting plan
- × Wix-branded URLs (yoursite.wixsite.com) - 301-redirected to clean URLs
Features that don’t directly migrate.
Wix has several proprietary apps that don’t have a 1:1 SWS equivalent. Here’s the honest list of what won’t carry over and what we’d do instead.
Wix Forms (custom form builder)
Replacement: SWS contact form via Cloudflare Worker. Same fields, sends to your email, you own the data. Included in every build.
Wix Bookings (appointments)
Replacement: Cal.com or SimplyBook embed (both have free tiers), or we can build a basic booking flow into your site. Cost depends on complexity - flag this when you quote and we’ll scope it.
Wix Stores (e-commerce)
Replacement: SWS E-commerce tiers (E1 catalog $1,000 / E2 buy-now $3,500 / E3 full store $5,500+$250/mo). Native Stripe checkout, no transaction fees beyond Stripe’s standard 2.9%+30¢.
Wix Members / Login portal
Replacement: Rarely needed for local-service businesses. If you genuinely need member areas (gated content, customer dashboards), this becomes a custom build - let’s talk first.
Wix Chat widget
Replacement: Crisp or Tawk.to (both free tiers) embed cleanly into hand-coded sites. We can wire it in during the build.
Wix Email Marketing / Ascend
Replacement: Mailchimp, ConvertKit, or Resend depending on volume. Existing subscriber list exports cleanly. Honest note: if Wix Ascend was core to your workflow, this requires migration work that’s outside the build itself.
Bottom line: if your Wix site is mostly pages + a contact form, migration is straightforward. If you’ve built half your business inside Wix apps, we’ll talk through which ones replace cleanly and which would mean compromising on functionality.
The full migration walkthrough.
If you want the step-by-step on how to actually do the Wix-to-hand-coded move without losing rankings, we wrote a 10-minute read covering the 301 redirect map, schema preservation, the 30-day overlap, and an honest list of when you should NOT switch.
Cheaper way in
Don’t want a redesign? You don’t need one.
A Site Transfer rebuilds what you already have on our stack for $400 one-time plus a monthly plan. Same words, same layout, same photos. What changes is the part Google reads.
Want the version we would have built instead? Add it for $350, during the transfer or a year later.
Get a real number. 30 seconds.
Switcher special: SEO Onboarding fee ($400) is waived. You already have established content; we just need to rebuild the structure around it.
8 measurable promises by day 30.
Lighthouse 90+ or we fix it free, LocalBusiness schema on every page, submitted to Google on launch day, mobile-tappable phone everywhere, contact form delivers through a relay we run and health-check end to end every week, 301 redirects from every old URL, 30-day overlap window, weekly ranking monitoring from launch. Miss a technical promise, we fix in 7 days or refund 25% of that month’s hosting.
No 12-month contracts. Month-to-month hosting. You own your code. Your domain stays in your name. One-click site export in your client portal anytime.