Move your website to CMS Pros
Whatever platform your website is on today, moving it to the CMS Pros Platform is almost certainly easier, safer and less disruptive than you expect - and it ends with a website that is easier to run, readable by Google and AI, and genuinely yours. This page explains how a move works in general, and links to a detailed, honest guide for each platform people move away from.
People come to us from every direction. Some are exhausted by WordPress updates and the recurring fear of being hacked. Some are trapped on a builder that will not let them export. Some are staring down the end of life of an ageing system with no safe upgrade path. Some simply want a European company, European hosting, and a real person to answer the phone. The starting points differ; the destination is the same: a website that works for the business instead of the other way round.
Even without backend access, your content comes with you
One of the most common reasons people feel stuck is access. The developer who built the site has vanished. The login was never handed over. The platform simply does not let you export. Any of these can make a website feel like a hostage.
It is not. With your written authorisation - a simple confirmation that you own the site and want it captured - we can crawl your live website directly and rebuild its content from what is publicly published: every page, every image, your contact details, your structure. You do not need a working login, and you do not need cooperation from whoever built it. Your content is on your public website, and your public website is something we can bring across. That capture step is stage zero of every migration, and it is why "I can't get into the backend" is never the end of the story.
Choose your starting point
Each platform has its own quirks, its own pain, and its own migration path. Pick the one you are on for a detailed guide - including, in each case, an honest note on who should not move.
- From WordPress - for owners tired of the plugin treadmill, the update anxiety, and the recurring bill for maintenance and security.
- From Wix - for people who have discovered that Wix has no real export and that leaving normally means rebuilding from scratch. It does not have to.
- From Squarespace - for owners facing rising renewals and the same ownership questions.
- From Joomla - for businesses who love what Joomla can do but no longer want to manage it. As Joomla specialists ourselves, we will tell you honestly whether to keep it or move.
- From Drupal - especially for the many small businesses still running Drupal 7 after its end of life, with no safe upgrade path.
- From a website builder - GoDaddy Website Builder, Weebly, a "free" builder with ads or a subdomain, or anything similar.
Why a move is far less disruptive than it sounds
The word "migration" makes people picture their website vanishing for a week while something is rebuilt behind a holding page. That is not how it works. Your existing site stays live and unchanged the entire time we prepare the new one. We build and test the new site separately, check every page on desktop and mobile, and only switch your address over to it once you have seen it and signed off. The cut-over itself is quick and planned, usually timed for a quiet moment for your business. From your customers' point of view, one day the site is the old one and the next it is the new one - there is no window where you are offline, no "under construction" page, and no enquiries lost in between.
Throughout, you carry on running your business exactly as normal. The migration happens in the background; the only moment you actively take part is the sign-off before go-live, when you get to look at the finished site and say yes.
Stage zero: how content capture works
Every migration begins by getting your existing content safely in hand, and we do it the same way whether or not you can log in to your current site. With your written authorisation, we crawl your live website politely - at a gentle pace, identifying ourselves honestly, and staying strictly within your own domain. From that crawl we extract everything that makes up your site as the public sees it: each page and its text, your images at their original quality, your contact details, and the way the whole thing is structured. That becomes the raw material for your new site, and it means a lost password or a vanished developer never stops a move.
Two things we deliberately do not do. We do not need, or ask for, your passwords to a third-party builder. And we do not copy a builder's template design - those layouts are the builder's licensed property, and cloning them would only move the ownership problem to a new address. We capture your content and your brand, and put them into a design that is genuinely yours.
Your content, in a design that is actually yours
Once your content is captured, you choose how the new site looks. Drop it into one of our 66+ ready-made designs, each built for a specific kind of business, and be live in days for the lowest cost. Or have our designers build a custom look over a little longer, starting from your brand or from a ready design you like as a base. Either way the result is a design you own outright, running on a platform you can export from at any time - not a rented template you are permitted to use only while you keep paying. The full offer is on the Ready Websites and custom design pages, and the platform itself is described on the platform overview.
What does not change when you move
A good migration keeps everything that is genuinely yours and changes only the engine underneath. Your domain name - the address on your cards, your van and your signage - comes with you and keeps working exactly as before. Your brand, your words and your photos come across intact. Your customers see a site that is recognisably yours, only faster and easier for you to keep current. What changes is the part you never wanted to deal with in the first place: the updates, the security, the maintenance, and the quiet anxiety of a site you were afraid to touch.
What every move preserves
The single biggest fear about changing platforms is losing the search rankings and the links you have built up over years. A careless migration can do exactly that. A careful one does not, and preserving your position is the core of how we work:
- Your web addresses. Wherever possible we keep your existing page addresses. Where an address genuinely has to change, we put a permanent (301) redirect in place so the old link, and the ranking attached to it, carries over to the new page instead of dying in a "page not found."
- Your search metadata. The page titles and descriptions search engines already know are carried across, not thrown away and rewritten from scratch.
- Your content and structure. Your pages, your headings, your images and the way they are organised come across intact, so the site a visitor lands on is recognisably yours.
- Your images at full quality. We take the original images, not shrunken thumbnails, so the new site looks as sharp as the old one.
The goal is a move your customers barely notice and search engines treat as the same site in a better home - not a relaunch that resets everything to zero.
What you get after the move
A migration is only worth doing if the destination is genuinely better. On the CMS Pros Platform, the day after your move you have a website that is:
- Easy to run yourself. Update prices, hours, photos and news in under a minute, from your phone. See how editing works.
- Found by Google and AI. Every page is server-rendered with structured data, so search engines and AI assistants can read and recommend you. Why that matters.
- Looked after. Security, updates, backups and monitoring are handled for you by one accountable team - not another task on your list.
- Complete. Bookings, payments, listings and a shop are built in when you need them. See the features.
- Yours. One-click export and self-hosting mean you can leave again any time. Read the ownership promise.
The quiet cost of staying put
It is easy to underestimate what an ageing or rented website costs, precisely because the cost is spread out and invisible. A rented builder charges you every month, indefinitely, for something you will never own. An unmaintained open-source site carries a security risk that only turns into a number on the day it is exploited - and that number, once malware removal, lost trade and repair are added up, is rarely small. And any site that AI assistants cannot read is quietly missing from a fast-growing share of the recommendations customers now ask for, which shows up not as a line on an invoice but as business that simply goes to someone else. Doing nothing is not free; it is just billed later, and often all at once.
You can always leave again
It would be a strange thing to spend a page persuading you to move platforms and then quietly lock you into the new one. We do the opposite. The same one-click export and self-hosting that make a move to us painless make a move away from us painless too. You are not swapping one cage for another; you are moving to a platform where the door is permanently open - which, in practice, is exactly why people find they never want to use it.
Doing it properly: authorisation and respect for your data
Because a capture involves us reading your live site, we never start one without your explicit written authorisation confirming you own the site and want it moved. We stay within your own domain, we do not touch anyone else's property, and we handle the customer data we bring across - enquiries, contacts - under EU data-protection rules, with EU hosting available. Ownership and privacy are not afterthoughts bolted on at the end; they are how the whole process is designed, which is the same reason the finished site is one you genuinely own.
A typical timeline
Most small-business migrations are measured in days to a couple of weeks, not months. After the free audit, capture and content preparation take the first stretch; choosing and applying your design - a ready-made one for speed, or a custom design over a little longer - comes next; then we set up redirects, test everything, and go live. You keep running your business throughout, and the old site stays up until the new one is ready to take over cleanly.
Who should think twice
We would rather tell you the truth than win every job. A move to the CMS Pros Platform is not the right answer for everyone. If your website is really a bespoke web application - a complex portal, a custom booking engine with unusual logic, a large catalogue with deep integrations - a brochure-and-business-features platform may not fit, and we will say so plainly. Each platform guide has a specific "who should not move" section, because being honest about that is part of being the kind of business you can trust with the move.
Two capture paths: direct or by crawl
How we get your content depends on what access you have, and both paths lead to the same result. When you can give us backend or database access - common with WordPress, Joomla and Drupal - we read your content directly at the source, which is the most precise route: every page, every field, exactly as stored. When you cannot, because the login is lost or the platform simply does not allow export, we use the crawl-based capture described above and rebuild from your live, public site. Neither path asks you to copy and paste your website into a new system by hand, and neither leaves your content behind. The right path is chosen for your situation, not forced on it.
How your search rankings actually transfer
It is worth explaining why a careful move does not reset your rankings, because the fear that it will is the single biggest thing that keeps people on a platform they have outgrown. Search engines follow permanent redirects: when the old address of a page returns a 301 pointing at the new address, the engine understands that the page has moved and carries its accumulated standing across to the new location. Keep the addresses the same where you can, redirect them properly where you cannot, preserve the titles and descriptions, and keep the content intact, and a search engine treats the whole thing as your site relocating rather than a new site appearing. There is usually a short settling period while everything is re-crawled, which is why we help you submit an updated sitemap at go-live to speed the re-indexing along. Done this way, the move protects the visibility you have earned instead of spending it.
Bringing your customer data across
A website is not only pages; it is also the records it has gathered - enquiries, contacts, and where accessible, orders and bookings. Where that data is reachable, we bring it with you rather than leaving years of customer history stranded on the old platform. It is handled under EU data-protection rules throughout, with EU hosting available, because your customers' details are exactly the kind of information that should be treated carefully and kept somewhere you trust. Being able to take your customer data with you is part of the same ownership principle as being able to take your pages.
From many moving parts to one point of contact
A common hidden cost of the old setup is the sheer number of parties involved: a hosting company, a domain registrar, a builder subscription or a pile of plugins, and perhaps a developer who comes and goes. When something breaks, the first job is often working out whose fault it is. After a move to the CMS Pros Platform there is one accountable place for the software, the security, the updates and the support - a named European business you can actually talk to. Fewer moving parts is not a minor convenience; it is the difference between a website that is a standing worry and one that simply works.
More than one site?
If you run several websites - a group of locations, a portfolio, or a handful of brands - moving them onto one platform turns a scattered collection of subscriptions, logins and maintenance obligations into a single, consistent estate that is easier to run and easier to keep secure. Tell us about all of them in the audit and we will map out an order of migration that keeps every site trading throughout.
Why a European platform matters
For a business in Europe, the location and jurisdiction of your website is a genuine feature, not a technicality. EU hosting keeps your site and its data inside the EU; an EU company keeps your relationship, your contract and your recourse under European law; and GDPR compliance is built into how the platform works rather than bolted on to satisfy an auditor. In a world where the rules around cross-border data keep shifting, a European site run by a European company is simply the structurally simpler, calmer choice.
What the free audit covers
The audit is where the abstract becomes concrete for your specific site. We look at your current platform, your pages, your addresses and your search presence, and we come back with a straight answer: what we can bring across, what we would preserve, what would need a redirect, roughly how long it would take, and what it would cost. If the honest conclusion is that you should stay where you are, we will tell you that too. There is no obligation and no pressure - the point is to give you a clear picture so you can make a good, unhurried decision, not to talk you into a move you do not need.
Frequently asked questions
Will I lose my Google rankings? A careless migration can; a careful one should not. We preserve addresses where we can and use permanent redirects where we cannot, so your rankings and links carry over.
What if I have lost access to my current site? With your written authorisation we capture your content directly from your live website, so a missing login is not a blocker.
How long does it take? Usually days to a couple of weeks for a small-business site, depending on size and whether you choose a ready or custom design.
Will my site be down during the move? No. Your existing site stays live until the new one is ready and tested, and the switch-over is quick and planned.
Will my new site be easy to update myself? Yes - everyday changes like prices, hours and photos take under a minute and can be done from your phone.
Can I move away later? Yes - one-click export and self-hosting mean you are never locked in.
Get a free migration audit
Tell us the address of the site you have now, and we will show you exactly what a move would involve: what we can bring across, what we would preserve, how long it would take, and what it would cost. No obligation, no pressure, and a straight answer even if the honest advice is to stay where you are.