Cancelling a website subscription: what to save first

Before you cancel a website subscription, secure five things in this order: your domain name, any email on the same bill, your text and photos, the messages your contact form collected, and a list of your page addresses. Cancelling the site plan rarely deletes your domain on its own, but on most builders the domain and email are separate items on the same account, and it is easy to switch off the wrong one. Do the saving first and press cancel last.

Know what is actually on the bill

A "website subscription" is often three or four things sold together. Sign in to the account and open its billing or subscriptions page before you do anything else. Look for separate lines for:

The site plan itself, the part that keeps your pages online.
The domain, your yourbusiness.com address. On Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy this is usually its own yearly item.
Email, often Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 sold through the builder, or the builder's own mailbox product.
Extras such as a booking tool, an online store, a premium app or a marketing add-on.

Write each line down with its renewal date. That list is your map for the rest of this job.

If you pay a designer or agency each month rather than a builder, the bill may hide all of this under one fee. Ask them in writing which accounts the fee covers and whose name each one is in. Leaving a website agency's monthly plan covers that conversation and the contract points to check.

1. The domain comes first

Your domain is the most valuable piece, because your customers, your printed materials and your email all use it. Losing it is far worse than losing a design.

Check who owns it. Look it up at lookup.icann.org to see which company it is registered with and when it expires.
If it is registered through the builder, decide now whether to keep it there or move it out. On Wix, for example, cancelling the site plan disconnects your domain from the site, but the domain stays yours until its own subscription ends. Our guide on moving your domain off Wix shows how the move works.
Turn auto-renew on for the domain even while you cancel everything else, so it cannot lapse by accident in the middle of the change.

2. Email on the same bill

If your business email runs through the builder or the designer's account, cancelling carelessly can stop your mail. Customers' messages would bounce or vanish without anyone noticing for days.

Find out which company actually holds your mailboxes, and keep paying it until your email has a new home. If the domain moves, the email settings move with it, and they need to be copied exactly. Keeping your email working during a website change explains the settings to copy before anything moves.

3. Your text and photos

The words and pictures on your site are yours, and they took real effort. Most builders do not let you export the whole site, so save the content by hand.

Text. Open each page and copy the words into a document, one heading per page. Include your about page, service descriptions, prices if you show them, and any testimonials.
Photos. Save the originals if you still have them. If not, open each image on the site and save it to a folder. On Squarespace the asset library holds uploaded images; on Wix, the media manager. Name the folder clearly.
Blog posts. Squarespace can export some content, including one blog, as a file another platform can import. WordPress can export posts and pages from its Tools menu. Wix has no full export, so copy the posts you want to keep.
Your logo. Get the best-quality version you can find, ideally from whoever designed it.

Website backups: who has a copy of your site goes further into getting a full copy where the platform allows it.

4. Form messages and customer lists

Contact forms keep a record of every message they received. Builders usually store these in the dashboard as well as emailing them to you, and the stored list often holds names and numbers you never saved anywhere else.

Look in the dashboard for a forms, submissions, inbox or contacts section and download what you can, usually as a spreadsheet. Do the same for newsletter subscribers, bookings, and orders if you sold anything. Once the plan ends, this data may become hard or impossible to reach.

5. A list of your page addresses

Every page of your site has its own address, such as yourbusiness.com/services or yourbusiness.com/contact. Google has learned these addresses, and other websites may link to them.

Click through your site and copy each address into a list. When your new site goes up, the old addresses should lead to the matching new pages, so visitors and Google do not land on errors. Old page addresses: why forwarding them matters explains how that forwarding works.

The order to cancel in

Once everything above is saved, cancel in this sequence:

Get the new site ready first, if you are moving to one, and check it on your phone.
Move or re-point the domain so it shows the new site, and confirm email still arrives.
Wait a few days and watch for anything that stops working.
Cancel the site plan, and only the site plan. Read the confirmation screen word by word, because some screens offer to cancel the domain and email in the same click.
Cancel the extras you no longer use.
Keep the confirmation emails in a folder in case of billing disputes later.

Check the timing too. Some builders refund a plan cancelled within its first couple of weeks; after that the plan usually runs to the end of the period you paid for and simply does not renew. Domains often follow different refund rules from site plans.

If you are closing the site altogether

If you are retiring the business or the website for good, the same saving applies, with one extra decision: keep the domain or let it go. Letting it expire means someone else can buy it later and put anything on it, including content that uses your old name. Many owners keep paying for the domain for a few years after closing, just to protect their name.

What to do this week

Open the billing page and list every item with its renewal date.
Look up your domain and turn its auto-renew on.
Confirm where your email is hosted and send a test message.
Copy your text, save your photos and logo, and download form messages.
Write down every page address on the site.
Cancel nothing until the new home for each piece is working.

If you are cancelling because the old site no longer fits your business, you can see your site rebuilt first and keep your saved text and photos working for you.