Leaving Wix or Framer without losing your rankings

Site builders are a good way to start. They are a poor place to stay once the site starts earning: the pages are slow, you cannot touch the code, the SEO settings are limited, and the monthly fee never ends. The move off is not risky if you respect one thing. Google has indexed your current addresses, and every one of them is a place people and other sites point at.

The one mistake

Launching the new site with new addresses and no redirects. The old ones start returning “not found”, Google drops them over the following weeks, the new pages start from zero, and the site loses most of its search traffic for months. It is the single most common way a rebuild goes wrong, and it is completely avoidable.

Before you build anything

1. List every address the old site has. Your builder’s sitemap, usually at /sitemap.xml, is the start. Add whatever Google Search Console lists under Pages, because that is what Google actually knows about.
2. Note which ones matter. The Performance report in Search Console tells you which pages get clicks. Those get the most care. Old pages with no traffic can point to the closest relevant page, or be retired.
3. Write the map. A two-column list: old address, new address. Keep the same address wherever you can. A page that stays where it was needs no redirect at all.
4. Copy the titles and descriptions. The page title and the short description under it in Google are part of why a page ranks. Take them with you. Improve them later, not on launch day.

Where the redirects live

This is the part that confuses people. When you leave Wix or Framer you cannot set redirects there for addresses that will soon point somewhere else. Once your domain points at the new host, every old address arrives at the new server. So the redirects live on the new site.

They must be permanent redirects, status 301, one hop each: old page straight to its new page. Never send everything to the homepage as a catch-all. Google treats a redirect to the homepage much like a page that no longer exists.

On WordPress a redirects plugin handles this from a simple list. On a custom Next.js or Laravel site it is a small config file. Either way the two-column map from earlier is the whole input.

Launch order

1. Build the new site on a temporary address and finish it there.
2. Add the redirects to it and test a handful from your map.
3. Give the new site a sitemap of its own.
4. Point the domain. If the builder registered the domain for you, you can still point it away, but check where it is registered before launch week, not during.
5. Within the hour, open Search Console and submit the new sitemap. If the domain itself changed, use the Change of address tool as well.
6. Keep the old site alive for two weeks in case anything was missed, then close the account.

The month after

Watch Search Console, under Pages, for a rise in “Not found” addresses. Each one is a redirect you missed. Fix them as they appear. Expect rankings to wobble for two to six weeks and then settle at or above where they were. A faster, cleaner site tends to end up higher, which is much of the point of the move.

We do this as part of every rebuild. If you want a sense of how the current site stands before deciding, the scanner shows its speed, its SEO basics and how old the tech underneath is.