Pick a website platform by what it costs to leave it.

Every comparison of website platforms ranks the same things: templates, monthly price, how easy the editor feels in the first hour. All of it is real, and none of it is what you will care about later.

The question that decides this is duller and it arrives in year three. You rebrand, or you change agency, or you need something the platform will not do. What can you take with you?

Each of these companies answers that in its own documentation. The answers are not close.

Wix: the site stays

Wix is direct about it, which is more than most resellers are. Its help centre states that your site must run on Wix's servers, and explains that the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting because it uses Wix's proprietary technology and depends on Wix services to operate.

There is no download. No files to hand a new developer, no folder to hand yourself.

Wix's terms say the content you build belongs to you, and that is true in the sense that matters legally. It is not the same as being able to move it. Leaving means someone rebuilds the site somewhere else while you copy the words across by hand.

Squarespace: an export with a specific shape

Squarespace does give you an export, as an XML file built for importing into WordPress. Worth knowing what travels in it before you rely on it.

It carries your layout pages, text and image blocks, and one blog page with its posts. Just one. If you run several blogs, the others stay behind.

The exclusion list is where the surprise lives, and it is long: album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio and store pages; anything in page-specific headers, footers or sidebars; dropdown, audio, product and video blocks; drafts; style settings; custom CSS. Squarespace explains why in one sentence, which is that many features rely on its own JavaScript and CSS. The export also cannot be used to move between two Squarespace sites, which tells you what it was built for.

So an online store on Squarespace exports without the store, and a portfolio exports without the portfolio pages.

Read that exclusion list against what your site actually is.

WordPress, and the two things sharing the name

Self-hosted WordPress sits at the other end, because you hold the files and the database by definition. Its built-in export produces a WXR file containing posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies and users, with navigation menus included when you export everything.

Note what that is: your content. Not your design, not your plugin configuration, not a site in a box. Moving a WordPress site properly is a database and files job, and the export tool is one part of it rather than the whole thing.

The trap here is the name. WordPress.com is a hosted service with plans and platform limits; WordPress.org is the software you can run anywhere. People sign up for the first believing they bought the second, then discover a restriction they were told did not exist. If somebody proposes WordPress, ask which one they mean and what happens to your plugins on the plan they are quoting.

When a builder is genuinely the right answer

We build custom sites for a living, so read this in that light: plenty of businesses should use a builder, and we say so on calls that end with no project.

If the site is a brochure that will barely change, if nobody at the business will maintain anything, and if the whole job is to look credible and list your services, a builder is a sound decision. Lock-in only costs you when you need to leave. A five-page site you never edit is cheap to rebuild if that day ever comes, and the rebuild is a weekend rather than a project. Paying for a custom build to sit untouched for four years is the more common waste. It is also the one an agency will never talk you out of, because the invoice is larger and the regret arrives long after the handover call.

The wall appears when the website has to participate in how the business runs rather than describe it. Booking that writes into your CRM, a page per service area, forms that trigger the follow-up automations that actually catch leads, anything where the site is a working part rather than a leaflet. That is when platform limits stop being an inconvenience and start being the reason a project cannot happen.

If you are already on one

Do not migrate because a blog post made you nervous. A site that works is not an emergency, and a rushed move loses rankings, breaks links, and burns money to arrive somewhere no better.

The honest trigger is a need the platform cannot meet, or a rebuild you were going to do anyway. Until then, keep a copy of your own words in a document you control, take your images out of the media library while you still have an account, and make sure the domain is registered to you rather than to whoever built the thing. That last one causes more trouble than any platform choice, and it is the same failure as letting a vendor hold your Google profile.

If you are weighing a platform now, or trying to work out whether the thing you are stuck on is worth escaping, book a strategy call. We will tell you when the answer is to stay put, which is more often than you would expect from people who sell the alternative.