Creating a website online takes an hour. Leaving it can take weeks. Before choosing a tool, one question is worth more than all the demos: on the day you leave, what goes with you?
What does “lock-in” mean with a website builder?
You signed up for a website builder. Without realizing it, you also signed up for hosting, a domain name, and an account—all with the same provider. As long as you stay, it’s convenient. But the day you want to leave, you discover that you can’t take your site with you.
That’s what lock-in is: leaving costs more than staying, not because the tool is good, but because you can’t get anything out of it. No one hid this from you. It’s written in the documentation, on the page that no one reads before paying.
And that cost grows along with the site. Three pages can be redesigned in a weekend. Thirty pages—including forms, galleries, and product listings—require a quote.
It’s not a question of price or payment method. A one-time license purchase can lock you in, while a subscription can set you free. The only question that matters: what do I keep if I stop using it?
How can you tell if your website belongs to you? The ZIP test
It only takes ten minutes during the trial period, before you pull out your credit card. Look for the export button. Download the file. Unzip it on your computer. Double-click the homepage, usually named index.html. Turn off your Wi-Fi if you want to be absolutely sure.
Does your website appear, complete with its images, menus, and layout? It’s yours. These files can be hosted by any provider, today or six years from now. Do you get a blank page, an unreadable file, or a message explaining that the export doesn’t exist? You know what you’re buying: a right to display.
This test says nothing about the quality of the tool or the ease of editing. It tells you one thing—the only thing that matters when you leave: do your pages exist anywhere other than on their platform?
How did Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress fare in the test?
Wix states in its documentation that a site created with its editor cannot be exported to another host. You’ll retrieve tables, contacts, or a product catalog—but not the site itself. The test is over before it even begins.
Squarespace provides an XML file in WordPress format: your blog posts and the text from your standard pages. Its documentation excludes product pages, event pages, style settings, and custom CSS, and images appear as links to its servers. Double-click on them: you’ll see marked-up text, not your site.
With WordPress, there are two scenarios. On WordPress.com, the hosted version, the export is the same XML file, without the theme or plugins. On a self-hosted WordPress installation, you own everything—files and database—but nothing opens offline: you need a server, the same theme, and the same plugins. This can be handled by a professional.
Tools that generate static pages—that is, files that are complete at the time of publication—pass the test without even taking it. Once the site is published, it’s already a ZIP file.
Why can’t your site be taken off the platform?
Because, on their end, your site isn’t a file. It’s a screen that their system generates for each visitor based on what you’ve entered. As long as you’re a customer, the screen displays. The day you leave, there’s nothing to take with you, because there never was a file to begin with.
Think of your bank’s customer portal. You can download your statements there. You can’t take the bank’s website with you, and no one finds that surprising. Exporting from these platforms works the same way: you retrieve your statements, not the website.
A website made up of files is the opposite. Like a Word document or a photo, it can be copied to a USB drive, sent via email, opened on any computer, and hosted by any provider. This is what tools do that generate the pages once and for all when you publish, instead of rebuilding the page for every visitor. An online tool can work this way just fine. When it doesn’t, it’s a choice.
Then there’s what changes every day: the store, orders, the blog, appointments. No ZIP file can take that with you on the go—not for anyone—any more than you can take your bank with you. What needs to be exported are your records: products, orders, articles, contacts—in files you can open. Your web pages on one side, your data on the other. A tool that doesn’t provide either is holding you back.
What happens when you take over a website six years later?
Spring 2020. A neighborhood association needs a website to announce its activities. A member who’s tech-savvy creates it over a weekend on an online platform. He sets up the account with his personal email address, registers the domain name through the platform, and the association reimburses him every year.
September 2026. The member has moved and is no longer responding. The website still displays the 2023 schedule, and the new president would like to update the registration page before the start of the school year. No one has the password. No one has access to the account’s email inbox. The domain is linked to that same account. The association is still paying, but it owns nothing it can actually access. It can write to customer support and try to prove that it is the rightful owner. The procedure exists, but its outcome and timeline depend on the platform. In the meantime, the website tells a story of the past.
Let’s replay the scenario with two precautions taken in 2020. The domain name was registered in the association’s name with a registrar, not through the platform’s tool. And the member ran the ZIP test, then stored the archive in the association’s shared folder, next to the bylaws. The new president opens the ZIP file, verifies that it displays properly, uploads it to a web host for a few euros a month, and points the domain to it. The website is back online, and the association can take its time choosing the tool it will use to develop it further.
Let’s be honest about what this version requires. The export must have been done—and redone after every major change—just like a backup. The ZIP file is a snapshot of the site, not the content management system: to modify the pages, you must regain access to the tool or start over from these files using a different one. The contact form will only work if the tool provided its script and if the host accepts it. Testing the ZIP file doesn’t eliminate these responsibilities. It makes it possible to organize them, which isn’t the case when nothing comes of it.
Three Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Website Builder
Three questions to ask during the trial period, before entering a credit card number:
- Can I download my pages today, regardless of my plan, and open them on my computer?
- Do my products, orders, articles, and contacts export to files that I can open?
- Are the domain name and account registered in my organization’s name, and who will be able to access them if the person who created the site is no longer there?
Tools that generate static pages answer “yes” to the first question by design. This is the case with WebAcappella, which is installed on your computer and publishes files to the hosting provider of your choice. There’s nothing stopping an online tool from doing the same. The right question isn’t “installed or online.” It’s “what do I keep if I leave?”