Do you actually own your Wix or Squarespace website?
The question nobody asks until they try to leave. Here is what you really get on a builder, and what owning a site means.
- On Wix and Squarespace you rent the platform, you do not own the site: stop paying and it goes offline.
- Wix offers no full export at all, and Squarespace lets you take some text but not the design, so leaving means rebuilding from scratch.
- An owned site means the actual files and the domain are yours, so you can move host or designer any time. See owned builds from £199.
Short answer: probably not. If your site is on Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy or a similar builder, you are renting the platform, not owning the website. The words look the same, but the difference decides what happens the day you want to change host, hire a new designer, or simply stop paying. Here is what ownership really means, in plain terms.
Renting versus owning, in plain English
A builder site is a subscription. Your pages live inside the company's system as a database plus their own rendering engine, and you pay every month to keep them switched on. An owned site is a set of files, written in standard code, that sit on hosting you control, tied to a domain in your name. One you operate for as long as you pay; the other is an asset you hold.
The test: can you take it with you?
The simplest way to tell what you own is to ask what you could walk away with. On a builder, the honest answer is very little.
| Platform | What you can take with you |
|---|---|
| Wix | No full export. Text and images by hand only; the design, layout and code stay behind |
| Squarespace | A basic feed of blog posts and page text; the design does not come, and moving out is unsupported |
| Owned custom site | Everything: the files, the code, the structure and the domain |
Wix is the strictest: there is no full export at all, so the work you put in over years cannot be extracted to anywhere else. Squarespace lets you take a basic content feed but not the design, and does not support migrating a site out. Reviewers who grade the small print put Wix's terms of service at 38 out of 100 for fairness, largely because of this lock-in.
Why ownership actually matters
Three practical reasons. First, leverage: if you own the files you can move host or hire a different developer whenever you like, so no one has you over a barrel. Second, cost: an owned site is a one-off, not a fee that runs forever. Third, resilience: if the builder raises prices, changes its rules, or you simply forget to pay, an owned site does not vanish overnight. Renting is fine, right up until the day it is not.
What owning a site looks like with Jones Digital
When I build a site, it is yours: the code, the content and the domain, in your name, handed over at the end. Hosting is inexpensive and you control it, upkeep is optional from £29 a month rather than mandatory, and if you ever want to take the whole thing elsewhere, you can, with my blessing and a copy of the files. That is the difference between an asset and a subscription. A site you own from £199, built for your trade. If you are still weighing the platforms, here is Wix vs a custom website and Squarespace vs a custom website.
Common questions.
Do you own your website on Wix?
No. On Wix you rent the platform monthly, and there is no full export, so the design, layout and code cannot be moved elsewhere. If you stop paying, the site goes offline. You can save your text and images by hand, but not the site itself.
Can you export a Squarespace website?
Only partly. Squarespace lets you export a basic feed of blog posts and some page text, but the design and layout do not come with you, and migrating a full site out is not officially supported. In practice, leaving Squarespace means rebuilding the site somewhere new.
What does it mean to own your website?
It means the actual files and code that make up your site, plus the domain name, are yours and sit on hosting you control. You can move them to a new host or developer at any time. That is different from a builder, where you rent access to a site that only exists inside the company's system.