Taking your site with you

Your website is yours: its words, its photos and its code. You can download all of it any time, not only if you leave, and downloading changes nothing about your site or your plan.

What you get

One download has everything:

• Your website's code. A standard project (it's built with Astro) that any web developer can work on and put on any web host.
• Your words and photos, in plain files that open without us.
• Your form messages, as a spreadsheet for Excel or Google Sheets.
• A WordPress file that brings your pages, news, events, jobs, projects, products, team, photos and menu into WordPress in one step.
• A list of your web addresses, so links people saved keep working after a move.

A short README file in the download explains each part.

Download your site

1. Sign in, open My sites, and click Download your site under your site. Only the account owner sees this, because the download includes every form message.
2. Click Make my download. It takes a minute or two. You can leave the page: we email you when it's ready.
3. Click Download everything for the zip file, or WordPress file only if that's all you need.

You can download it for 7 days. After that, make a new one, which always has your latest changes.

Move to WordPress

You need a WordPress site first, from any WordPress host. Then:

1. In WordPress, open Tools › Import. Under WordPress, click Install Now, then Run Importer.
2. Choose the WordPress file from your download (it ends in .xml) and click Upload file and import.
3. Pick yourself as the author of the imported pages, and tick Download and import file attachments. This copies your photos.
4. When it says "All done", open Settings › Reading, choose A static page, and pick Home as your homepage.
5. Open Settings › Permalinks and choose Post name, so addresses look like your old ones.
6. Pick a theme in Appearance › Themes. Your design doesn't come across, since WordPress themes work differently, but every page keeps its words and photos in order.
7. Your menu comes across as Main menu. In a block theme, open the Navigation block in the header and choose it from Import Classic Menus. In an older theme, open Appearance › Menus.

Import while your site is still online: WordPress copies the photos from it. If the importer says a photo failed, run the import again with the same file: it skips everything already there and tries the missing photos again. If your site has already gone offline, write to us and we'll help.

Pages keep their addresses. News, events, jobs and projects become posts in their own categories, so their addresses change from /events/plant-sale to /plant-sale. To keep old links working, install the Redirection plugin, open Tools › Redirection › Import/Export, and import redirects.csv from the wordpress folder of your download.

Some things need a WordPress plugin:

• Forms. Your contact details stay on the page. Add a form plugin, like WPForms or Contact Form 7, and put the form back.
• Newsletter signup. Use your email service's own WordPress plugin.
• Online store. Products come across as posts with their prices. To sell online, add WooCommerce.
• Search titles and descriptions come across for the Yoast SEO plugin.

The Spanish version of your site isn't included in the WordPress file. Its translations are in the code, in content/translations/.

Put your code on another host

The site folder in your download is your website's code. A web developer can build it in a few minutes: install Node.js, then run npm install and npm run build. The finished website is in the dist folder, ready for any web host. Cloudflare Pages, Netlify and GitHub Pages host sites like this for free.

What stops working without us

Your site's pages keep working wherever you put them. These parts need SiteBrite, so they stop:

• the editor, and the inbox for your forms (the forms send messages through us)
• automatic translation (translations made so far stay in your code)
• the online store's checkout
• AI changes and support

Your domain

Your domain stays in your name. To point it at your new host, change the same www record you set up in Connect your domain to the one your new host gives you, and leave the other records alone so your email keeps working. If we moved your domain's settings to Cloudflare with you, email us and we'll hand them back first.

If you cancel

Make your download first. Canceling a site keeps it online until the end of the time you've paid for, so there's time to move it. See Plans, billing and credits.