If you want to go from a GoDaddy Website Builder to WordPress, the first thing to understand is what makes it different from most migrations: there’s no export button. GoDaddy’s Website Builder — the drag-and-drop product also sold as Websites + Marketing, not a WordPress site hosted at GoDaddy — is a closed system that, as of September 2026, offers no tool to export your site into WordPress. No content file, no template, nothing that another platform can import. That single fact is the whole story of this migration, and it’s why “how hard is it” has a different answer here than for almost any other move.
Don’t let that scare you off. Plenty of these moves happen, and the result — a real WordPress site you fully own and can take anywhere — is exactly why people make it. But it’s worth knowing going in that this is a manual reconstruction, so you can plan for it or hand it to someone who does it routinely.
Why “no export tool” means real work
With most platforms you get at least a partial export — a content file WordPress can read. With GoDaddy’s builder you don’t, so the content has to be moved by hand. In practice that means the text, images, and structure of your site are recreated in WordPress rather than transferred. There’s no shortcut file that does it for you, and any service claiming a magic one-click GoDaddy-builder-to-WordPress button is overpromising.
The design doesn’t come across either, and it can’t — GoDaddy’s builder templates are proprietary to their system. So the look is rebuilt on the WordPress side. For most people that’s fine or even welcome, since outgrowing the builder’s limited design is often why they’re leaving. But it’s rebuilding, not copying.
How the move actually goes, step by step
1. Inventory your current site
Start by listing every page on your GoDaddy site and what’s on it: the text, the images, any forms, your contact details, and your business hours or location info. This inventory is your migration map. Because nothing exports automatically, this list is what makes sure a page doesn’t get quietly left behind.
2. Save your content out of the builder
Copy your text into documents and download your images at full resolution from the builder. Photos in particular need to be saved off and re-uploaded to WordPress — you don’t want your new site depending on your old GoDaddy account to display its own images. This is tedious but straightforward: it’s the “get your stuff out” step that the missing export tool would otherwise have done.
3. Rebuild in WordPress
With a WordPress site set up, recreate each page: paste in your text, upload and place your images, and build the layout with a theme or page builder. This is also the moment to improve on what the builder couldn’t do — better structure, a proper blog, a real store in WooCommerce if you sell things, faster and cleaner pages.
4. Handle your domain and your SEO
Your domain is often registered with GoDaddy, and it can stay there — you point it at the new WordPress host without moving the registration if you don’t want to. What you must not skip is redirects. When your page addresses change, every link Google has indexed needs a 301 redirect (a permanent forwarding address for a page) to its new WordPress URL, or the rankings attached to those pages disappear. Map your important old URLs to their new homes and put the redirects live at cutover. This is the same SEO-preserving discipline that matters in any walled-garden move, like migrating from Wix.
5. Cut over with zero downtime
Build and check the full WordPress site privately first, on a temporary URL, and only point your domain at it once it’s verified and the redirects are ready. Your GoDaddy site stays live the whole time you’re building, so there’s no window where you’re offline. The full sequence is in how to switch hosts without downtime and how a zero-downtime migration works.
Made painless with managed onboarding
Here’s the honest pitch for handing this one off. Because there’s no export tool, a GoDaddy Website Builder move is almost entirely manual — the inventory, saving out every page and image, rebuilding in WordPress, mapping the redirects. It’s not hard so much as it’s a lot of careful, repetitive work, and it’s exactly the kind of project that sits half-done for months when someone tries to fit it around running their business.
When you join, our team does that reconstruction for you, free. We inventory the existing site, rebuild it properly in WordPress, bring across your text and images, set up your store in WooCommerce if you have one, put the 301 redirects in place so your SEO survives, and run the cutover with zero downtime — your GoDaddy site stays up until the WordPress one is verified and ready. And onboarding doesn’t stop at “the site’s moved.” You land on a genuinely managed platform: a flat $29.99-a-month for managed WordPress (a shared store plan starts at $39.99). A layered firewall and breached-password defense keep attackers out, updates are applied and verified, your site is backed up off-site 3 times a day and served fast worldwide — plus support any hour. And the reconstruction isn’t meant to hand you a more capable site that you now have to maintain yourself — we keep maintaining it. The updates, security, and backups WordPress needs are ongoing work most hosts leave to the owner; here they stay ours, so you come out with more capability and less upkeep, not a second job. You trade a closed builder for a site you own outright and never have to escape again.
Take a look at our plans and tell us what your GoDaddy site includes. We’ll give you an honest read on the move and take the manual parts off your hands — that’s what “free migration” means here.
Prefer not to do any of this yourself? We move your site for you – free, with zero downtime. See how our migration works, or start my move.