A pastor called last spring, proud of the new website his volunteer team had just launched. Cleaner design. Faster. Finally off the platform that had frustrated them for years. Three weeks later he called again, confused this time. First-time visitors had quietly stopped showing up. Nobody on staff could say why.

That's what happens when you move your church website off Wix or Squarespace without a plan for the old URLs.

We pulled up Google Search Console and saw it in about ninety seconds. Every page on the new site had a new address. Not one of them redirected to where the old page used to live. Not a punishment from Google—a forwarding address nobody filed.

We've watched this happen more times than we'd like. For most churches, SEO is an afterthought, and plenty of staff couldn't tell you what the letters stand for. They get excited about the fresh look and the promises that come with a redesign, they launch, and the traffic drops, because nobody counted the investment already sitting in the old site. Some catch it in a week and recover in a few. Others don't reach out for years, and by then the ground is gone.

It's rarely the move itself. It's what happens to the old URLs when nobody's watching. And the best fix isn't recovery. It's building on the foundation you already have, even when the design on top of it has been lackluster.

Wix and Squarespace get plenty right. They get a church online fast, and a volunteer can run either one without a developer on speed dial. If your team is small and the site works fine, that's worth saying plainly before we go any further.

But sometimes a church outgrows the platform it started on. A staff that wants to edit sermons and events without fighting a template. A design that no longer says who you are. A site that's simply hit its ceiling.

SO. If you're moving, the move itself isn't what costs you rankings. What you do with the URLs is.

Can We Move Our Church Website Off Wix or Squarespace Without Losing Our Google Rankings?

Yes, you can move your church website off Wix or Squarespace without losing your Google rankings, and it comes down to three things: you map every old URL to a new one with a 301 redirect, you keep your domain the same, and you handle Search Console and your Google Business Profile before launch day, not after. Skip any one of those and you're not migrating a website. You're starting over and hoping Google notices you again.

The rest of this is how to actually do it.

First, Should You Move at All?

Before you map a single URL, ask the harder question. Does your church actually need to move, or does it need to fix what's broken on the platform you already have?

A lot of what feels like a platform problem is really a content or structure problem wearing a bigger costume. Confusing navigation. Service times buried three clicks deep. A homepage that looks fine but tells a first-time visitor nothing they actually need. None of that requires a migration. It requires attention.

Stay put if:

Your team can still make the edits you need, even if it's a little clunky
The site loads reasonably fast and looks fine on a phone
What's actually broken is content, navigation, or local SEO, not the platform itself
Nobody on staff has the bandwidth to manage a migration right now

Which of those sounds like your church right now?

We've written the fuller version of this decision in church website redesign vs optimization, and if the honest answer is fix-not-rebuild, that's exactly what our church website optimization service is built for: no migration, no risk to the rankings you already have. If what's really driving this is a bigger redesign rather than a straight platform swap, read whether a website redesign will hurt your SEO first. The risks overlap more than most churches expect. And if you haven't settled on a platform yet, our Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress for churches guide is the place to start; everything below assumes you've already made that call and you're ready to move.

One more honest case. We spoke with an organization that had thousands of indexed URLs and real traffic coming from them. A modern platform would have been nice. A move of that size could have set their investment back badly, so the migration took a back seat to the goals that were actually driving revenue. It wasn't off the table. It just had to wait its turn behind time, budget, and what mattered most to them that year.

If you're still here, you've probably outgrown the platform for a real reason. Let's talk about how to leave it well.

The 8-Step Church Website Migration Checklist

This is the order that protects your rankings. Skipping ahead to design before step 3 is how churches lose ground they'd already earned.

1. Inventory Every URL

Pull your Search Console pages report, your sitemap, and run an actual crawl of your live site. We use a crawler we built for NewCulture, but Screaming Frog or Ahrefs will do the same audit, and you can even build a simple one yourself with Claude or ChatGPT. Between the three sources, you'll have a complete list of every URL Google knows about, including old pages you forgot existed.

2. Note What's Actually Earning Impressions and Clicks

Not every page matters equally. Search Console will show you which pages are actually getting found and clicked. Those pages get first-class new homes on the new site. A forgotten event page from three years ago doesn't need the same care as your Plan Your Visit page.

3. Map Every Old URL to a New One

One to one. Our preference is to build the redirect map alongside the site itself, right when you're doing information architecture and deciding what the sections of the new site will be. Done that way, you're intentional about where every old page lands in the new structure, and by launch day you already know every existing URL has a home. This single document is the difference between a migration and a disappearance.

4. Export What Exports, Rebuild What Doesn't

Wix doesn't offer a full-site export, so you'll rebuild pages by hand on the new platform, though you can export blog posts. Squarespace exports pages and blog posts as a WordPress-format XML file, but product pages, some blocks, and styling don't come across. Check your platform's current export options before you build a timeline around an assumption. Either way, you'll almost always recreate sermons, events, giving, and forms by hand on whatever you move to.

5. Keep the Domain, Plan the DNS Cutover

Keep the same Search Console property and the same GA4 property. Add the new site's verification alongside what's already there, and handle both before launch day, not after. Your domain is the one thing Google has trusted the longest. Don't spend that trust on the same day you're asking it to learn a new site.

6. Launch With Redirects Live

Submit the new sitemap the same day. Request indexing on your top pages directly in Search Console instead of waiting for Google to find them on its own schedule.

7. Update Every Listing That Points to the Old Site

Your Google Business Profile website link. Denominational directories. Social bios. Anywhere your old URL lives outside your own site, it needs to point to the new one.

8. Watch Search Console for Six to Eight Weeks

Check coverage and performance weekly. Start with the overall impressions and clicks: up, flat, or down. Any of the three is a signal, and down means you open the pages report next and find which URLs lost ground. The Insights tab in Search Console will show the percentage drop on a specific page, which makes the pattern hard to miss. Fix 404s the moment they show up, not the moment someone complains. This is the step almost every church skips, and it's the one that catches what the first seven didn't.

What Doesn't Export From Wix or Squarespace?

Wix does not offer a full-site export, so you'll rebuild your pages on the new platform, though you can export blog posts separately. Squarespace exports pages and blog posts as a WordPress-format XML file, but product pages, certain blocks, and your existing styling don't come across. On both platforms, you'll recreate forms, events, and giving embeds by hand on whatever you move to. If you're not sure what your specific plan supports, check your platform's current export options before you build a timeline around an assumption.

Think about what that means in practice. The content is rarely the hard part. It's the plumbing underneath it: the form that captures a prayer request, the embed that processes an online gift. That's what takes real time to rebuild.

If your church has already been dealing with the deeper version of this problem, worth a read: why your church doesn't show up on Google covers the setup issues that show up whether or not you ever migrate.

Do We Need to Keep Our Domain?

Yes, almost always keep your domain when you move platforms. Your domain is the identity Google has been tracking the longest, and changing it stacks a second migration on top of the first. You'd be asking Google to trust a new platform and a new address at the same time, and that's exactly the kind of double change that makes rankings wobble longer than they need to.

If you genuinely need a new domain, a name change, a merger, a rebrand that makes the old address wrong, that's a real reason. Just know you're taking on two migrations, not one, and plan the redirect and communication work for both.

How Long Until Google Trusts the New Site?

Expect some wobble for a few weeks after launch, even with a clean migration. Google has to recrawl your pages, follow every redirect, and re-learn that the new site is the same church it already trusted. Positions usually settle back close to where they were once the redirects are clean and the crawl catches up. We won't promise you an exact number of days, because it depends on how often Google was already crawling your site and how many pages you're moving.

It can also go the other way. Victory Academy in Raleigh (a school, not a church, but the same discipline applies) moved off a custom-built Wix template that had the right structure in place and had never really used it. Instead of abandoning their URLs, we built the new site on top of them. Within five days of the migration, clicks from search results had tripled. A redesign you're proud of and the traffic you were hoping for, at the same time.

What we will promise: a wobble isn't a failure. It's Google doing its job. A disappearance that never recovers is what happens when step 3 got skipped.

What a Clean Migration Looks Like When We Do It

Here's what this actually looks like on our end, because it's easier to trust a process you can picture.

We map and audit every URL during information architecture, while we're deciding what the new site's sections will be, not after launch when it's too late to plan around it. We build the new site on NewCulture Studio, our own CMS, so your team can update service times, sermons, and events after launch without waiting on a developer for every small change. We wire up Search Console, GA4 key events, and your Google Business Profile before launch day, not weeks after when the gap in your data has already opened up. And we watch the first six to eight weeks the same way we just told you to: coverage, performance, 404s, fixed as they appear.

We've done this for Advance Church in Fayetteville, and for Victory Church and Emmaus Church in Raleigh. Different platforms, different histories, same discipline about the move itself.

If your church is in that season, outgrowing the platform, ready for something built around what you actually do, our church website design and development work is built with the migration handled correctly from day one, whether that's a straight move off Wix or a jump from Squarespace to a custom website built around your ministries specifically. Our Raleigh church website team is glad to walk it with you locally if that's home.

And if you're still deciding whether a move is even the right call, start with our church website and SEO audit. It'll tell you honestly whether you have a platform problem or a content problem before you commit to either.

Your Next Step

Stop.

Don't call anyone about a redesign yet.

Open Search Console today and export your pages report. That list, every URL Google already knows about, is the actual start of your migration plan. Everything else in this checklist builds on it.

Your church's rankings took years to earn. Moving platforms doesn't have to cost you a single one of them. I believe the people who've already found you online deserve to keep finding you, wherever you build next.

How to Move Your Church Website Off Wix or Squarespace Without Losing Your Google Rankings