Yes, if the site is small and simple and someone will look after it afterwards. Copying the pages is the quick part. The problems tend to show up later, in what the copy leaves out and in the changes you make months from now.
What people have actually reported
These are individual accounts from the last few months, not a study, but they point the same way.
- It can be fast and cheap. One Squarespace owner moved a comedy club’s site with an AI tool in about a day, and now pays only for the domain.
- Keeping it consistent is harder. A web lead at a mid-sized firm converted a whole Webflow site in about a day, then moved back. New pages kept coming out slightly off-brand, and sections that should have matched didn’t.
- The handover can be the sticking point. A consultant took a client off WordPress after three hacks in eight months. The rebuild worked. The owner, used to typing posts into a dashboard, then had no easy way to publish.
We sell this service, so weigh our view accordingly. But the first account is real: for the right site, doing it yourself is a good option.
Is your site a good fit?
| Your site | Doing it yourself |
|---|---|
| A few pages that rarely change | Good fit |
| You’re happy to edit code, or ask AI to | Good fit |
| Contact forms | Needs a form service |
| A blog someone non-technical updates | Needs a publishing setup |
| Booking tools | Usually embed fine |
| Stores, logins or member areas | Not a copying job |
Do you have a store, logins or member areas?
Yes: stay put or get a quote. These hold data a copy can't bring.
NoAre you comfortable changing DNS and setting up hosting?
No: a mistake here takes down your site and email. Get help.
YesWill someone be around to fix it in six months?
No: pay for looked-after hosting, or stay on a builder.
Yes- Do it yourself, and use the checklist below.
What an AI copy tends to miss
Check each of these before you cancel your old plan.
- Images still on the old host. A copy can look perfect while loading its pictures from your old platform. Everything breaks when you cancel. Search the new code for the old platform’s address.
- Forms that go nowhere. A copied form looks right but has nothing behind it. Send a real test entry and confirm it reaches your inbox.
- Page addresses. Each old address needs to work or permanently redirect. Google says to redirect each old URL to its closest match, not to your homepage, and to keep redirects for at least a year.
- Titles and descriptions. These are what shows in Google, and they aren’t visible on the page, so nobody notices when they vanish.
- The phone version. Menus are the usual casualty. Open every page on a real phone.
- Fonts and small details. Fonts may not carry over, and some are licensed to the platform you are leaving.
- Your domain and email. Getting these wrong causes the outages people remember. Our domain guide shows the safe order.
Even a clean move can wobble. Google says to expect temporary changes in ranking during a move, and that it can take a few weeks or more to settle.
The part that comes after
The first version is rarely where this goes wrong. It goes wrong on the tenth change, when a new page doesn’t quite match the others, or the person who set it up has moved on.
If you do it yourself, give the AI a short written set of rules and a small library of reusable sections from the start, and ask it to reuse those instead of inventing new ones. Keep the code somewhere you own.
If you’d rather not
We do the same job at a fixed price, and we compare old and new page by page before anything goes live. You still get plain files that you own, and Claude Code or Cursor can work on them later if you want to take over.
Either way, the audit below is free. It shows what’s on your site and what needs a closer look, which is useful even if you plan to do the work yourself.