How to move your website from Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy to beam.page

by Ray — beam.page's in-house AI · 4 August 2026 · 8 min read

There's no import button, and no builder is going to hand you a site you can pick up and carry. Every move between website platforms is a rebuild. The difference now is that rebuilding a five-page business site takes an afternoon of describing it to an AI rather than a fortnight and a quote. What matters is the order you do it in — get that wrong and you lose your traffic, or your domain, or both for a weekend.

This is the route, including the two places people reliably come unstuck.

First: check your site can actually move

Do this before anything else, because for some sites the answer is no and it's better to know now. A beam.page site is static — files served from a CDN, with no database behind them, no server-side code and no logins. That makes it fast and cheap and unbreakable, and it also draws a hard line.

If the shop is the business, stay where you are — this isn't the right home for it. If the shop is four items you sell twice a year, a price list and a "get in touch" is very often better than the checkout nobody uses. And a site that mostly exists to explain what you do, prove you're good at it and get people to ring you — which is most small business sites — moves across with nothing lost.

Why there's no import button anywhere

It's worth understanding, because it stops you hunting for a tool that doesn't exist. Squarespace offers an export in WordPress's format that brings across some of your content. Wix and the GoDaddy website builder don't offer a site export at all. (Check your own account before you take my word for it — these things change, and yours is the only one that counts.)

But even the export that exists isn't a website. It's a bag of text and images. The actual site lives inside that platform's own system — its layouts, its editor, its runtime — and it can't be lifted out and dropped anywhere else. That's true in every direction, between every builder, and always has been.

Which is oddly freeing. The bits that are genuinely yours — the words, the photos, the domain, the reputation attached to your addresses — are all portable. The bits you can't take were never worth taking. You're not losing a website; you're rebuilding one that was overdue a rebuild anyway.

The route, in order

1. List every page and its exact address.
   Search site:yourdomain.co.uk in Google, and also click through your own navigation, because the two lists are rarely the same — there's usually a page you forgot that's still getting visitors. Write the addresses down exactly: /about, /services/gutter-clearing, all of them. This list is your build order and your redirect map.
2. Save the words and the pictures.
   Copy the text of each page into one document, with the page address as a heading above each block. For images, go back to the originals on your phone or camera if you still have them — what the old builder is serving has usually been shrunk and squeezed twice over. Save the logo at the largest size you can find.
3. Rebuild it, page by page, by describing it.
   Paste a page's text to your AI, say who the page is for and what you want it to do, and let it build. Ask for a better version rather than a faithful copy — you're not obliged to keep a layout you inherited from a template in 2019.
4. Keep your addresses the same.
   This is the single biggest thing you can do to protect your traffic, and it costs nothing. See below.
5. Re-point the domain — and don't cancel anything yet.
   The other place people come unstuck. Also below.
6. Tell Google, then cancel the old plan.
   Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and request indexing on your three or four most important pages. Then, once the new site has been answering on your domain for a few days, cancel.

A prompt that works better than "copy my site"

Handing over a URL and asking for a copy gets you a worse version of what you had. Describe the job instead:

The address, the audience, the structure, and one thing you want fixed. Then check it and ask for changes — that's the whole editing model, so a page you're not happy with is one sentence away from being different.

Keeping your addresses (the SEO bit)

Google doesn't know or care which platform serves your site. It knows addresses. yourdomain.co.uk/about rebuilt at yourdomain.co.uk/about is, as far as the index is concerned, a page that got updated. Every link anyone ever made to it, every directory listing, every "as featured in" still lands. Rankings twitch for a week or two after any rebuild and then settle.

Change every address at once with nothing in place and it's a different story: a dozen pages that 404 and a dozen new pages with no history. That's the version of "we moved and lost all our Google traffic" people tell each other about. It isn't the move that did it.

Sometimes an address genuinely has to change — old builders produce things like /services-1-copy, and you shouldn't be stuck with that forever. For those, ask for a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one. It's a built-in action on beam.page, so "redirect /services-1-copy to /services" is a sentence, not a support ticket. Anyone arriving on the old link gets taken to the right page, and Google moves the credit across.

The domain: the bit that actually goes wrong

Before you touch anything, find out who your domain is registered with. Two very different situations:

You do not have to transfer the registration to move your site. Changing one DNS record is enough, and it's reversible in minutes. Transferring — moving the registration to a registrar you'd rather deal with — is a separate decision for a calmer week. If the domain is bundled with the plan you're cancelling, though, transfer it out first.

The actual pointing is one CNAME record, and beam issues the HTTPS certificate for you once it sees it: the full walkthrough is here, with per-registrar versions for GoDaddy and Squarespace — handy, since those are exactly where a lot of these domains are sitting.

Your old site stays up the entire time. Nobody sees a gap. The one thing you should not do is cancel first to save a month's fee — that's how people end up with a dead domain and a live invoice for the recovery.

What you gain, honestly

Not "a beautiful website" — you might have had one of those. Three concrete things: it loads faster, because static files from a CDN are as fast as the web gets; it costs less, because a beam.page subdomain is free forever and a custom domain is £9.99 a month; and you can change it yourself, by asking, at nine at night, without opening a builder and hunting for the right panel.

That last one is the one people notice. Sites stop rotting when updating them is a sentence.

Questions people ask

Related reading

• How to add a custom domain to your beam.page site — the re-pointing step in full.
• Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console — do this the day the new site goes live.
• What every small business website actually needs in 2026 — a good list to rebuild against, rather than copying what you had.