From January, leaving your website builder is free. Your website stays behind.

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From 12 January 2027 the EU Data Act bars cloud providers from charging you to switch. But the data it lets you take excludes the provider's own code and templates. Your words and records can leave. The design, the layout and often the shop cannot. Before you build, or renew, find out what actually leaves with you.

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Six years ago the founder of a small design consultancy built the firm's website on a hosted builder: no developer, no server, live in a weekend. It has since grown to 140 pages, a shop selling printed guides, and the portfolio clients call about.

This year the firm wants to move. The export button produces a file. The file holds one blog and a handful of pages. The shop, the portfolio and the design are not in it.

Nothing went wrong here. That is how the product works. The question is whether anyone asked before the six years started.

Most small business websites are rented, and that is often fine

A hosted builder is a rental: a subscription for the software, servers, templates and updates.

It is a large share of the web. W3Techs finds Shopify on 5.4% of all websites, Wix on 4.2%, Squarespace on 2.4% and Webflow on 0.8%. Together, about one site in eight.

And the rental is usually well maintained. On the HTTP Archive's Core Web Vitals data for August 2026, 81.2% of Wix origins and 76.5% of Shopify origins passed Google's speed and stability thresholds on mobile, against 48.7% for WordPress. On average, a builder runs a site better than a neglected self hosted one.

This is not an argument against builders. It is about what the lease says on moving out.

What each builder says you can take with you

Elevates read the export documentation of four of the largest hosted builders on 19 September 2026, in their own help centres. Each one lets something leave. None lets everything leave.

Wix is the plainest about it. Its help centre says a site "needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers", and explains why: the architecture "uses Wix's proprietary technology and relies on Wix's services to operate". The content, it adds, belongs to you. The site, as a working thing, cannot leave.

Squarespace exports to a file built for WordPress. Its export guide says "not everything will export, as many features rely on our platform's JavaScript and CSS". Basic pages and one blog leave. Store pages, portfolio pages, index pages, a second blog, style settings and custom CSS do not.

Webflow goes furthest: it exports real HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But its help page says code export "is only available on Workspace plans", not Site plans, and that the CMS, e-commerce, user accounts and localised content are not included. On an exported site, collection lists "show the empty state".

Shopify exports products as a spreadsheet. Its product export guide says the images "aren't included in the CSV file". The catalogue leaves as rows of text. The photographs have to be moved separately.

The EU Data Act makes switching free from 12 January 2027

Europe has noticed. The Data Act, Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, has applied since 12 September 2025. Its chapter on switching covers "data processing services", and its recitals name the three delivery models that phrase includes, Software as a Service among them. A hosted website builder is very likely one.

The central rule is Article 29. Between 11 January 2024 and 12 January 2027, a provider may charge only reduced switching fees, capped at its actual costs. From 12 January 2027, Article 29(1) says providers "shall not impose any switching charges on the customer for the switching process". Contracts must also allow a customer to ask to switch on no more than two months' notice, with at least 30 days to retrieve the data.

That is a real gain. Nobody can hold your data to ransom with an exit fee.

Free to leave is not the same as able to leave

Here is the catch, and it is written into the law itself.

What the Data Act lets you take is "exportable data", defined in Article 2(38). It covers the input and output data generated by your use of the service, "excluding any assets or data protected by intellectual property rights, or constituting a trade secret, of providers". In other words: your words, your images, your product records and your customer data can leave. The provider's templates, code, layout engine and store system are the provider's property, and they stay.

That is exactly the line the four help centres draw. The law has not closed the gap. It has described it.

So from January you will be able to walk out of a builder without paying a fee. What you walk out with is a box of content. The website, meaning the thing that made the content into pages people could use and buy from, is part of the building.

Three things decide how hard a move will be

Not every rented site is equally stuck. Three questions sort them, and each can be answered in an hour.

How much of the site is content, and how much is function? A site that is mostly pages of text and pictures moves well: the words and images leave, and a new design can be laid over them. A site whose value is in what it does, a shop, a booking calendar, a members' area, a configurator, moves badly, because what it does is the builder's code. Count the pages that only inform against the pages where a customer acts. The second number is your exposure.

What is connected to it? Payment providers, newsletter tools, accounting, stock, a CRM. On a builder, many of these are the builder's own apps or its app marketplace. Each one has to be found again, reconnected and tested on the new site, and some will not exist there at all. List every integration and who set it up. If nobody knows, that is the first finding.

How much of your business arrives through old addresses? Search results, partner links, printed brochures and old emails all point at specific URLs. When the site moves, each one needs a redirect to its new address, or it becomes an error page. A careless move breaks those links, and the visitors behind them. The list of URLs you export today is what protects that traffic tomorrow.

A site that scores low on all three can move in weeks. A site that scores high on all three is not really a website any more. It is software your business runs on, and it deserves to be treated as such.

The real switching cost is rebuilding what stays behind

Switching costs were never mainly the exit fee. They are the rebuild.

Everything in the stays behind column above has to be made again somewhere else: the design, the page structure, the shop, the member area, the forms that feed your inbox or your CRM. Then the less visible work: every old address has to redirect to its new one, or links from search results, partners and old emails break. Product photographs have to be matched back to products. Staff who knew one editor have to learn another.

None of this is a builder's fault. It is what renting means. You did not own the walls, so you cannot take them.

The decision that matters is not whether to rent. It is which parts of your business you are willing to rebuild from scratch if the landlord changes the terms, raises the price or is bought by someone else. For a five page site that promotes a café, the answer may be all of them, happily. For a shop with two thousand products and a checkout tied to a stock system, it should be almost none.

What you can check before you build, or before you renew

The first pass costs nothing, and it is worth doing whether or not you ever move.

• Run the export now, while nothing is urgent. Open the file. Write down what is in it and what is missing. That is your real position.
• Own the domain yourself. Register it in the company's name, with a registrar separate from the builder, on an email address the company controls. The domain is the one thing every visitor, email and search result depends on.
• Keep originals of everything you upload: photographs, documents, product images. Store them somewhere that is not the website.
• List your addresses. Export or crawl the list of page URLs once a year. It is what redirects are built from when the day comes.
• Know who holds the account. The builder account should belong to the company, with at least two people able to log in, not to a freelancer or a founder's personal email.
• Read the plan, not the pitch. On Webflow, code export depends on the plan. On every builder, check what your plan allows before you rely on it.

For many small sites, this is enough. The site is cheap to rebuild, the content is safe, the domain is yours, and renting is the right answer.

Where the checklist stops

The checklist protects your content. It cannot make a rented structure portable.

If the parts that stay behind are the parts your revenue runs through, the shop, the booking flow, the member area, the integration with your stock or accounting, then every year on the builder adds to what you would have to rebuild. The export gets relatively smaller as the business gets bigger.

There is also a point where the builder stops fitting the business. A process the template cannot express, a language version the plan does not support, a data rule your clients impose. That is usually when the question of moving comes up, and it comes up under pressure.

Own the parts that are expensive to rebuild

The honest alternative is not "own everything". Custom software is licensed too: most agencies, Elevates included, keep the rights in their own engine and license it to the client. The difference is in what the licence lets you do.

Elevates' contracts grant the client a perpetual, irrevocable licence to use the site, and when Elevates stops hosting it, the files and the domain's DNS are handed over so the site runs somewhere else. The licence travels with the site. Nobody has to rebuild the walls to change landlords. That is the test worth applying to any provider, Elevates included: if the relationship ended tomorrow, would you leave with a working website, or with a folder of content?

For the design consultancy, the answer lands in one of two places. If the portfolio and shop can be rebuilt on the same builder's successor, or on another builder, in a few weeks, then stay rented, run the export once a year, and own the domain. That costs nothing, and it is the outcome to hope for. If the shop and the portfolio have become the business, then the next build should be one where the working site, not only the content, can leave with you.

The question to ask this week

Open your website builder, run the export, and open the file.

Compare what is in it with what your customers actually use. The difference is what you are renting. If that difference is small, you are fine. If it is most of the business, it deserves a decision before a price rise or a change of owner makes it for you.