Wix
Your next redesign is a rebuild either way
Wix does not let you change your template. Not after publishing, not before you have added anything, not ever1. The documented route to a new look is to start a new site and carry things across by hand.
So the rebuild is not a risk you are weighing. It is already on your calendar. The only open question is where it lands.
A door that opens once
The template you chose is the template you have
Most people pick a Wix template in an afternoon, early, before they know what the business will look like in three years. Very few of them know it is the last time they will make that choice.
“While it’s not possible to switch to a different template for a site you already created, you can create as many sites as you want in your account. This means you can start over with a new template at any point.”
Wix Help Center1
“Start over” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Here is what it means in practice, in Wix’s own step order1.
Choose a new template, on a new site
Copy elements and pages across from the old one
Re-import your media from Site Files
Transfer whichever features are allowed to transfer
Move the plan and the domain, then set up 301 redirects
Note the last step. Wix tells you to set up 301 redirects from the old site to the new one, because a redesign here changes URLs the way a platform move does. There is a second lock in the same article, worth knowing before anyone advises you: a site cannot move between the Wix Editor and the Studio Editor either.
Counted from Wix’s own article
Two things follow you. Twelve do not.
This is the part that turns a redesign into a project. Four of the twelve are not features, they are assets1.
The four in red are a shop, a booking calendar, a contact database and everyone who holds a login to your site. A business with all four is not redesigning a website when it changes template; it is reassembling its operations. Product lists and CMS collections do export as CSV and can be re-imported, so this is recoverable work rather than destroyed data — but recoverable work is still work, and it is precisely the work a migration consists of.
Against that, the complete list of what Wix carries forward for you:
- Business email
- Wix Blog
2 of 14.
The question, restated
You are not deciding whether to rebuild
Every conversation about leaving a platform stalls on the same fear, and it is a reasonable one: rebuilding is expensive and disruptive, and the current site works. Better the template you know.
The template lock quietly removes that option. Sooner or later the design will stop fitting — the business changes, the brand changes, the site starts to look its age — and on Wix the only answer is a new site with the content carried over by hand. You will pay for a rebuild. You agreed to that when you picked the template, without being told.
So the real choice is not rebuild against no rebuild. It is one rebuild that leaves you renting the shape of your site, against one rebuild that ends with you owning it.
Put plainly: if you are going to do this work anyway, do it once, somewhere the next redesign is a change of stylesheet rather than a change of address.
Before you believe the other pages
Wix is not slow and it is not bad for SEO
Both were true a decade ago. Neither survives a look at the field data, and a page that repeated them would deserve to be ignored5.
81%
Pass all three Core Web Vitals
98%
Good layout stability
96
Median Lighthouse SEO score
93
Median accessibility score
That SEO median leads every other builder measured for this site, and it is not close:
- Wix
- 96
- Weebly
- 92
Wix also runs 4.2% of all websites and 6.2% of those with a known content management system6, which makes it the largest builder in the world by a comfortable margin. No thinning-ecosystem argument applies. If something breaks at nine on a Friday, somebody has written about it.
And one point of real credit. Wix’s article on hosting elsewhere explains the SaaS trade-off, lists the genuine upsides, and states outright that the content you build on Wix belongs to you2. Having read what some competitors put in their agreements, that plain sentence is worth more than it looks.
Nothing stops you leaving. Wix is clear that a Wix site has to run on Wix servers because it is built with Wix’s proprietary technology2, which is a statement about architecture rather than permission. There is no clause to argue with, just a site that cannot be lifted.
What comes out cleanly: CMS collections as CSV, and product lists for re-import. What does not: blog posts, which Wix files as an open feature request rather than a capability3, so posts are recovered from the live site along with the pages. Every indexed address is matched to its replacement before anything is switched over.
The design is rebuilt, and you were going to pay for that on your next Wix redesign regardless. The difference is what you hold at the end: a Next.js site on Vercel, running from a repository in your name, hosted and kept secure here. Change the look next time and the content does not move at all.
The full sequence is on the migration page. If the site has to do real work rather than present it, that is development, quoted separately.
For reference while you compare: Wix’s published tiers run Light $17, Core $29, Business $39, Business Elite $159 a month4.
Push back on this
Including the parts where Wix wins
Yes, and it is worth reading Wix's own wording rather than mine: it is not possible to switch to a different template for a site you already created, and the suggested route is to create a new site and start again. That holds whether or not the site has been published and whether or not you have added any content. There is an open feature request you can vote for. Separately, sites cannot move between the Wix Editor and the Studio Editor either, which is the same lock in a second place.
By Wix's count, two things carry over to a new site: business email and your Wix Blog. Twelve do not, and the four that matter are Wix Stores, Wix Bookings, your Contacts and your Site members. A shop, a booking calendar, a customer database and everyone with a login. You can export a product list and re-import it, and CMS collections come out as CSV, so it is recoverable work rather than lost data — but it is work, and it is the same work as moving to any other platform.
Not any more, and I would rather lose the argument than repeat something untrue. Wix's median Lighthouse SEO score is 96, the highest of the four builders measured for this site and four points clear of the rest of them, and 81% of Wix origins pass Core Web Vitals in the field with 98% achieving good layout stability. The reputation dates from a genuinely bad era a decade ago. If someone is selling you a migration on the grounds that Wix cannot rank, ask them when they last checked.
Because performance was never the constraint. The constraint is that the site can only ever be the template you picked on the day you started, that changing it means rebuilding, and that the rebuild happens inside a system your site cannot leave — Wix's own documentation explains that a Wix site must run on Wix's servers, because it is built with Wix's proprietary technology. If you are happy with the design and expect to stay happy with it, none of this bites. The day you are not is the day it does.
Partly, and Wix is honest about the limits. CMS collections export as CSV and product lists export for re-import, which is real and useful. Blog posts do not: exporting them to other platforms is filed as an open feature request, not a feature. The pages themselves are recovered by crawling the live site. Worth saying clearly that Wix states your content belongs to you, which is a better position than some platforms take, and the constraint here is mechanical rather than contractual.
Business is $39 a month, so $468 a year, and Business Elite is $159 a month or $1,908 a year. A custom build is a one-off in the $2,500 to $15,000 range with hosting after it, or $5,000 to $15,000 on Shopify if Wix Stores is the part of your site that makes money, so on pure subscription arithmetic Wix usually wins and will keep winning. That is the honest comparison and it is not the reason to move. The reason is that the Wix money buys a site you rent the shape of, and eventually pay a rebuild for anyway. Decide on that, not on the monthly.
Sources
Four of the six are Wix’s own help centre. The two that are not are the ones that make Wix look good, which felt like the right way round.
- 1
Switching Your Site Template — Wix. That templates cannot be switched, the five-step alternative, and what does and does not carry over. Checked 21 September 2026.
- 2
Exporting or Embedding Your Wix Site Elsewhere — Wix. Wix's own account of the SaaS trade-off, and that your content belongs to you. Checked 21 September 2026.
- 3
Wix Blog Request: Exporting Blog Posts to Other Platforms — Wix. Filed as an open feature request rather than a capability. Checked 21 September 2026.
- 4
Wix plans and pricing — Wix. The published monthly tiers. Read from the live page, 21 September 2026.
- 5
Core Web Vitals Technology Report — HTTP Archive. Field performance and Lighthouse medians from real Chrome users. August 2026 data, read 21 September 2026.
- 6
Usage statistics and market share of content management systems — W3Techs. Platform share of all websites, surveyed daily and vendor-independent. 21 September 2026.
Current to September 2026. Wix keeps an open feature request for template switching, so this page’s central claim is one the company could retire at any time. If it does, the argument here weakens considerably and I would rather update the page than pretend otherwise.
When is the redesign you keep postponing?
That date is the only one that matters, because it is already a rebuild. Tell me roughly when, and what the site has to do — shop, bookings, members — and you will get a straight comparison between doing it on Wix again and doing it once.