Two of my recent clients came to me from Wix. Neither had anything against it. Both had simply reached the point where it was costing them more than it was giving them.

What outgrowing it actually looks like

It is rarely one dramatic failure. It is a slow accumulation of small frustrations.

Katie Allan built MAYFIVE Hair’s original website herself, in Wix, and ran her salon on it for seven years. Her words, not mine: “it ran slowly, never felt as slick as I wanted and honestly I was never proud of it.”

That last part is the bit people don’t tend to say out loud. The site works. It just doesn’t represent the business any more, and you feel a bit awkward when someone asks for the link.

For Roger Atkins it showed up differently. Publishing had become a chore, so he published less. And he was paying for services he had stopped needing years earlier.

The cost nobody checks

When we went through Roger’s setup properly, his email hosting alone was costing over £800 a year more than it needed to. Moving it across to Google Workspace saved that, every year, with no change to how he works.

That is worth doing on its own, regardless of the website.

So go and look at your billing page. Not the headline subscription… the add-ons. Email, apps, storage, that plugin you installed once and forgot about. Most people find something.

Signs it is time

• You have stopped publishing because publishing is annoying
• You need someone else for changes that should take a minute
• The site is slow on a phone and you have stopped checking
• You are paying for things you can’t remember choosing
• You would rather not send someone the link

What a migration actually involves

The design is the visible part and the least risky.

The parts that matter are the ones nobody sees.

Redirects. Every URL that changes needs to point somewhere sensible. Get this wrong and you lose whatever search visibility you had built up. It is the single most common thing done badly.

Email. If your email is tied to the platform, moving it is a separate job from moving the website. Worth planning properly so nothing bounces on the day.

Content. A migration is a good moment to stop carrying across pages nobody visits.

The handover. Whatever you move to, you should be able to update it yourself. Otherwise you have swapped one bottleneck for another.

Don’t do it overnight

With Roger we launched in phases rather than replacing everything in one go. That let us test the new site, gather feedback and manage the redirects carefully before the old one came down.

Slower, and far less likely to go wrong.

Is Wix ever the right answer?

Yes. If you need something live this week, you are the only person who will ever touch it and the site is essentially a business card, Wix will do that perfectly well.

The trouble starts when the business grows past that point and the website stays where it was.

A test worth doing today

Open your site on your phone. Try to do the main thing a customer would want to do… book, enquire, find your prices. Time yourself.

Then look at your billing page.

Between those two, you will usually know.

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Both migrations are written up in full — the Roger Atkins case study and the MAYFIVE Hair case study. You can browse all my recent work here.