An Austrian business leaving Wix, Jimdo or Squarespace is looking for something different from one leaving WordPress. 40.1 percent of all websites run on WordPress (W3Techs, figure of 9 October 2026), plenty of small businesses here are in that number, and plenty of others are sitting on a builder, asking the same question: switch to what?
Two questions decide where you go. How much work do you want to do yourself afterwards, and where should your data sit? What you can take with you when you move is the point that separates the two starting points.
This post is about which alternative fits your business. The move itself is covered in leaving Squarespace, and the choice between builder, agency and subscription in this comparison.
Why do businesses want to leave Wix, Jimdo or Squarespace?
Security and updates are not the issue here, since the platform handles both. What bothers people is the price, which the provider sets at renewal, the design, which stays inside the template framework, and the realisation that the website is not theirs. This move does happen in Austria: one business has come to us wanting off a builder rather than off WordPress.
We documented what a builder price rise looks like on a real invoice here: leaving Squarespace. On a rental the provider sets the price, and you can accept it or go. How hard going is depends on what you can take with you.
Why do small businesses want to leave WordPress?
The same three reasons keep surfacing:
- The ongoing maintenance eats time.
- The plugins are a security risk.
- The site gets slower and more cluttered with every passing year.
None of these has much to do with WordPress as a publishing system. All three trace back to the plugin model WordPress is built on.
The plugin model is the real weak point. You install an extension built by a stranger, forget about it, and years later an automatic update pushes code onto your live website that nobody on your end ever read. That is exactly how the April 2026 attack worked, where more than 30 paid plugins activated a backdoor at the same time. We covered how it played out in detail here: still running WordPress? what the 30-plugin attack means.
If you are switching for one of those three reasons, pick an alternative that actually solves your particular problem. A builder takes the plugin risk off your plate and leaves the upkeep with you. A new custom project fixes the speed problem and hands the maintenance right back.
What comes with you when you leave a website builder?
Your domain and part of your content, and not much else. The website itself stays on the platform it was built on. Wix, Squarespace and Jimdo each say so in their own documentation, and it is the thing that makes a move cost more than most people expect.
| What | Wix | Squarespace | Jimdo |
|---|---|---|---|
| The website | No export. Wix says the site has to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers, because the architecture does not support external hosting | An XML export, explicitly built for importing into WordPress | No export. Jimdo says on its own help page that it offers no function for you to create a backup yourself |
| Content | Images and videos you uploaded download one at a time or in bulk from the Media Manager, and CMS collections export to CSV. Wix says blog posts cannot be exported to other platforms | Layout pages, one blog page with its posts, text and image blocks, gallery pages | Jimdo documents a CSV export for shop orders and for the contact list. For page text and images Jimdo documents no export |
| Stays behind | The design and the structure, meaning everything the editor built | Store, portfolio, index, album, calendar, cover and info pages, every blog page after the first, dropdowns, content in page-specific headers, footers and sidebars, drafts, audio, video and product blocks, custom CSS and the style settings | The design and the structure. After a paid plan ends the site stays online as a free Jimdo plan, and the terms let Jimdo delete all of its data irreversibly four weeks after the contract ends |
| Domain | Comes with you. Wix emails the EPP code to the registrant address, and ICANN locks transfers for 60 days after a registration, a transfer or a contact change | Comes with you. You unlock the domain and request the auth code, the transfer takes up to 15 days, and a free domain included in a plan loses its free status | Comes with you if you are in time. You get the auth code in the dashboard, the terms allow Jimdo a € 20 transfer fee plus VAT, and if you do not order the provider change at least a week before the contract ends, the registry deletes the domain |
In practice a move off a builder is a rebuild with the content carried over. That sounds worse than it is, because the content is the work that is already done. It also means the question of where you go next is worth answering once. Move from Wix to Squarespace and you have paid for the rebuild and landed on another website that cannot travel.
How a move like that runs, and what there is to do along the way, is in our post on leaving Squarespace.
Every row in that table rests on a page of the provider’s own, all read on 9 October 2026:
- Wix: Exporting or Embedding Your Wix Site Elsewhere, Downloading Files from the Media Manager, Exporting Content from Your Collection, Exporting Blog Posts to Other Platforms, Transferring Your Wix Domain Away from Wix
- Squarespace: Exporting your site, Transferring a domain away from Squarespace
- Jimdo: how to back up your website, how to export orders, how to manage a contact list, how to transfer your domain to another provider, terms and conditions (clauses 15.5 and 16, supplementary terms B 4.1 and 6.3). Jimdo publishes these in German only.
What are the alternatives in 2026?
Broadly there are four: a builder like Wix or Squarespace, a platform based in the EU such as Jimdo, a custom-built website on a lean, plugin-free stack, or a managed website subscription. Which one fits depends on how much you want to do yourself and how much you care about data protection and load time.
Jimdo appears on both sides of this post, because it is both things at once: a builder with the same limits as Wix and Squarespace, and the only one of the three with its registered seat in the EU. If data protection is your reason for moving, you land on a provider under EU law. If design or ownership is your reason, Jimdo gives you the same limits you already have.
The four differ less in how the finished site looks than in who does the work and where your data sits. With a builder you do everything yourself. With a custom build you pay a lot upfront and handle the maintenance afterwards. With a subscription you hand off both. We broke that difference down in its own comparison: website builder, agency, or subscription.
| Option | Who does the work | Where the data sits | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Builder (Wix, Squarespace) | You build, write, and maintain it | The US, plus Ireland in Wix’s case, with no choice of region | Freelancing, clubs, a very early founding phase |
| EU-based platform (Jimdo) | You build, write, and maintain it | A provider seated in Hamburg whose own privacy notice also names processors in the US | Self-building with a provider under EU law |
| Custom build | Built for you, you maintain it afterwards | Depends on your stack and host | Something custom, with in-house maintenance |
| Managed subscription | The provider builds and looks after it | In the EU | A small business with no in-house tech |
Are Wix, Squarespace, and Jimdo good alternatives?
For a simple website, yes, with two caveats. You build, write, and maintain it yourself, and you stay inside the platform’s template framework. What builders do give you is a clean answer to the plugin problem: there is no marketplace of third-party code that can hijack your website, and the platform handles security and servers. For freelancing, clubs, or a very early founding phase, that is often exactly right.
The difference between the providers that most comparisons miss is where they come from, and it is finer than it first looks. Wix.com Ltd is registered in Tel Aviv, and Israel holds an EU adequacy decision, which the European Commission reconfirmed in January 2024. Squarespace Inc is based in New York, and its data processing addendum names the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework as the basis for transfers to the US. Jimdo GmbH is based in Hamburg, and its product privacy notice says two things at once: Jimdo takes care that data is processed in the EU or the EEA, and for delivering site content it passes data to processors in the US.
That is why “German provider” falls short as a data-protection argument on its own. The registered seat tells you which law applies and who is liable. Where the data actually goes is in the provider’s privacy notice, and that is the document to read.
What does the GDPR mean for choosing a platform?
Where your website is hosted and where it sends data carries legal consequences in Austria. With US providers, whether it is permitted at all hangs on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, whose predecessor was struck down. A website that hosts in the EU and sends nothing to third parties spares you that uncertainty from day one.
The backstory explains why this is touchy. In July 2020 the EU Court of Justice declared the data-protection agreement of the time, Privacy Shield, invalid, because US authorities could reach too far into European data. Since July 2023 the successor agreement, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, has been in force. It survived its first challenge: on 3 September 2025 the General Court dismissed the annulment action in Case T-553/23. On 31 October 2025 an appeal was lodged against that judgment, and it is pending before the Court of Justice as Case C-703/25 P. Until that is decided, the legal basis for transfers to the US rests on the same kind of adequacy decision the Court struck down last time.
For day-to-day purposes this means less than the headlines suggest. The framework is in force, and using it is lawful. It means the basis is under review, and that with a US provider you are relying on how the review turns out.
The more tangible part is elsewhere. On 20 January 2022 the Munich Regional Court ruled (case 3 O 17493/20) that loading Google Fonts directly from Google’s servers is unlawful, because it passes the visitor’s IP address to Google without their consent. Many WordPress themes and plugins quietly carry exactly this kind of external embed. A website that loads fonts locally, hosts in the EU, and pulls in no foreign scripts simply does not have this problem.
For an Austrian business that means the platform choice is also a data-protection decision, and the question to put to a provider is where your data sits and who gets to see it, rather than whether they call themselves GDPR compliant.
The lowest-maintenance alternative: a managed website without plugins
If you have no time for updates and nobody in-house to handle the tech, a managed website subscription is the most direct alternative for you. You get a custom-designed website, hosted in the EU, with no plugin marketplace and no update obligation. One person looks after it, and you send a message when something needs to change.
Coming from WordPress, the model answers all three reasons above at once. There are no plugins, so a purchased plugin cannot turn into a backdoor. The maintenance runs through the provider instead of through you. And because the stack is kept lean, the site stays fast instead of piling on weight every year.
Coming from a builder, the answer looks different. You never had the plugin risk. What you get is content and code sitting on ordinary hosting that you can take elsewhere if you want to, and a design that did not start as a template. The upkeep you were doing yourself is done by someone else from then on.
What a subscription like that covers is set out in our plans section. Whether it is cheaper than a one-off project with separate maintenance depends on the time frame. We did the three-year math here: what a company website costs in Austria.
The trade-off is real. You do not own the code the way you would with your own project, and for a complex web application or a large shop the model is too tight. For the company website of a small business that should just run and stay current, it is the lowest-maintenance option.
Which alternative fits your business?
Answer two questions. How much time do you genuinely have for your website each month, and how much do you care that your data and your visitors’ data stay in the EU?
| Coming from | You want to keep building it yourself | You want to hand the work over |
|---|---|---|
| Wix or Squarespace | Jimdo, if the EU seat is your reason for moving. You have the rebuild ahead of you either way | A managed subscription, or a custom build if someone in-house takes the maintenance |
| Jimdo | Wix or Squarespace, if design and feature range matter more to you than the registered seat | A managed subscription, so upkeep and hosting stay in one place |
| WordPress | A builder. It takes the plugin risk off your plate and leaves the upkeep with you | A managed subscription, or a custom build with a separate maintenance contract |
There is no universally correct answer. For your specific business it is usually clearer than it feels. What a managed subscription covers day to day, and what it does not, is set out in the frequently asked questions.