Before You Cancel: What to Retrieve From Your Old Platform

Most migration advice ends at launch. The genuinely irreversible mistakes happen after it, in the week somebody decides to stop paying for the old platform.

Some of what you lose disappears immediately. Worse, some of it breaks weeks later, which means it breaks after you have stopped watching. This is the list to work through before you close anything, and it applies whichever platform you are leaving.

The rule that prevents most of this#

Keep the old subscription running for two weeks after the new site is live and verified.

One month of a plan you were leaving anyway is the cheapest insurance in this entire process. It is your rollback if something is wrong, and it is what keeps the delayed failures from happening while you are no longer paying attention.

The five things that are gone permanently#

Form submission history. Every enquiry sitting in your platform's form panel. This is not in the site export on Wix or Squarespace. Download it as CSV, or copy it out by hand if there is no export. People forget this because they think of forms as functionality rather than as data.

Analytics history inside the platform. Visitor numbers, popular pages, referral sources going back years. If you rely on it for anything, screenshot or export the views that matter. Your Google Analytics or Search Console data is unaffected, since those live in your own accounts.

Data locked in third-party apps. Reviews, loyalty points, booking history, gift card balances. For each app, find out whether it has an export before you commit to a launch date. Some do not, and the honest answer is then rebuild, abandon, or stay.

Customer passwords. These never transfer, on any platform, because they are stored hashed. Customers re-register. Say so in your launch email and it is a non-event rather than a support queue.

Anything that only exists in the editor. Custom CSS, code injections, app settings, redirect rules you already had. Screenshot them. Reconstructing settings from memory is slower than photographing them.

The one that breaks weeks later#

This deserves its own section because it is the most expensive and the least obvious.

Imports usually copy image links, not image files.

Your new site pulls each picture from the old host as the page loads. Everything looks perfect. Then the subscription lapses and every image on the site dies at once, with no local copy to restore from.

Check it properly: open a few pages, view the page source, and look at the image src values. If they still point at squarespace.com, wixstatic.com, shopify.com or similar, those images are not yours yet.

The same applies to PDFs, menus, downloadable price lists, embedded audio and video, and occasionally fonts. Anything the old platform is still serving is on loan.

The retrieval order#

Work through these before the account closes, in this order.

1. Crawl and save every URL. Your redirect map depends on it, and afterwards the list cannot be reconstructed. This is step zero of any migration and the one people skip.
2. Export the site. Whatever the platform gives you, even if it is partial.
3. Export commerce data separately. Products, customers and orders are usually a different export from the site content. Order history is worth keeping as a CSV even if you do not import it, for accounting and support.
4. Download form submissions.
5. Screenshot settings and custom code.
6. Confirm the domain is safe. If the domain was registered through the platform, move the registration out or confirm it is separately billed and you hold the transfer authorisation code. This is the only item with no technical fix if it goes wrong.
7. Check where email is pointing. If your mail runs through the site host rather than a separate provider, that needs planning of its own. How a site moves without downtime covers why MX records are usually untouched and the one case where they are not.
8. Verify images are yours, using the source check above.

Only then cancel, and only after the new site has been live and verified for two weeks.

Platform-specific notes#

Wix. There is no full-site export, so the rebuild is unavoidable and the retrieval list matters more, not less. Comments and Wix Chat history cannot be exported at all. What Wix will and will not give you covers it in detail.

Squarespace. The WordPress XML export leaves behind product pages, gallery and index sections, custom CSS and form submissions. Products export separately as CSV. The image trap is particularly common here because the XML references the Squarespace CDN. The step-by-step guide has the sequence.

Shopify. Better than most: products, customers and orders all export as CSV from the admin without a plugin. App data is still the weak point, and images are still links.

Why two weeks#

Because the failures are staggered. Redirect problems show up in days, in Search Console's indexing report. Image link failures show up the moment billing stops. Something in between usually shows up when a customer emails about a form that went nowhere.

Two weeks of overlap covers all three, and the alternative is discovering the fourth one with no way back. Search Console after a migration covers what to watch during that window, and for the wider schedule the migration timeline shows where this sits.