Archive a Wix website

February 6, 2025 6:04 PM

I have a Wix site with a lot of images and a little bit of text. It was made by a graphic designer who I believe customized an existing template with some new code. I'd like to close down the site. Can I download it in a way that preserves the code in case I want to put it up again later? Please explain like I'm 5!
posted by vanilla.extract to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Unfortunately, no, not really. Wix is proprietary software, so they don't want you to be able to easily export their code and use it elsewhere for other purposes.

Open source platforms, like WordPress, do usually include ways to do this easily, though you're not really provided with a "site" that you can view like any other website. It just spits out all of the relevant files – code, images, etc. – into folders, and then it's up to you to put it all back together again.
posted by anotheraccount at 7:14 PM on February 6 [1 favorite]

Have you checked if it has been archived by the Internet Archive? (Go to archive.org and put your site's URL in the Wayback Machine field.) If so, then at least you have that as a backup.
posted by snarfois at 3:43 AM on February 7

You can (probably) create a snapshot of the website by crawling it recursively with a tool like wget or curl. The result will be a static set of HTML pages, which you would (probably) be able to put up again later -- but it's going to be a static site, made up of the generated "product" of the source code. You won't have any of the source code. How much of a problem it will be to reconstruct a new "source" out of that depends on how large and complex the site is, what you want to migrate it to in the future, and how invested you are in preserving the current look and feel.

If your website is a straightforward collection of text and images, it should be relatively (!) simple to take that set of HTML pages and either maintain it as-is (doable; there are GUI editors for this; this is not my personal preference, but YMMV) or use a tool like pandoc to translate it to a more human-friendly input format like markdown to make a new "source" to feed into a static generator (some of these have GUIs; scroll down to the CMS section).

I highly recommend the static generator route to anyone who wants a minimal website that they have control over and that is easy to maintain. Unlike a dynamic CMS ("content management system") that you have to host on a remote server, or have hosted for you, and which generates the HTML pages on the fly as your site is browsed (WordPress is an example of this), a static generator is a program that you run on your local computer, which pregenerates the whole site and gives you a bunch of HTML pages (if you ran WordPress on your local computer and exported the whole site from it, that would be a round-about way of achieving this, but there are tools more specifically tailored for this approach). The only thing that the remote server has to do is serve the HTML. This makes it a much more flexible approach (more inexpensive hosting options, because you have simpler requirements; you can try out different generators; you can move hosts easily), is simpler to maintain (no code running on the remote server), and is more secure (no CMS on a public server = no CMS to break into).
posted by confluency at 3:48 AM on February 7 [1 favorite]

To pull a copy of the site that is clean is a bit of a pain. I think maybe the "explain it like I'm 5" version would be really quite long. But you can run a command like this on the command line/terminal and it'll download a copy of a site. This will almost certainly not work correctly the first time. There are likely to be some or many gotchas.

wget --recursive --no-clobber --page-requisites --adjust-extension --span-hosts --convert-links --restrict-file-names=windows --domains asdf.com --no-parent asdf.com

You can test your local copy of the site by disconnecting from the wifi/ethernet and opening the "index.html" file that the command downloaded.

You could use one of the WordPress tools that will import a Wix site. And then once it's imported, you can export the WordPress format (which is supported by a whole bunch of other CMSs) but that'll just capture the content and not the look.

In any case like snarfois make sure you have it on archive.org.
posted by gregr at 5:54 AM on February 7 [1 favorite]

If the website was small, and if I had no website-building skills to draw up on at all, I would take a screenshot of each of the web pages so that I had a record of the layouts and design. Download all the individual image files so I had source images to work with. Make a hand-drawn map of how the pages are connected.

This would give me enough info to hand to a website creator/designer in the future to roughly recreate the site on whatever platform I want to use. If the site is small enough, I suspect it'd be faster to recreate it than trying to extract and transfer the code.

Also I'd look into whether Wix has an option where you "un-publish" a site, switch to a free or cheaper account tier to keep the site archived on Wix, then choose to reactive on Wix later if you want.
posted by hovey at 6:05 AM on February 7 [2 favorites]

You can save individual pages (html and images) using Chrome. If the website is small, it shouldn't take too long to get them all. Instructions
posted by Don_K at 6:51 AM on February 7

I'd look into whether Wix has an option where you "un-publish" a site, switch to a free or cheaper account tier to keep the site archived on Wix, then choose to reactive on Wix later if you want.

This is what I was going to suggest as well. If that isn't possible, you may be able to export it to wordpress.com and keep a copy for later. This is what I would do:

1. Transfer the Wix site to wordpress.com using the free plan.
2. If the new wordpress.com site looks good and kept all your text and media correctly, upgrade to the Pro plan for one month for $18 (if you need to, as I think the free plan doesn't allow you to install plugins).
3. (optional) Install a Wordpress plugin like Simply Static and export your site as a static site that you can browse on your local computer (for archiving the site as it is right now, you can't build back on this later unless you know html coding)
4. (optional) Export the site using Wordpress' built in tools, which will give you an XML file with all the site information (but no media), and then make sure to download the media files separately. This isn't a complete backup, but you can reconstitute the site from this if you need to in the future.
5. Install a backup plugin like All-in-One WP Migration and export the entire website (includes media and everything else) to a .wpress file. This will be a complete backup that you can restore into a new wordpress install in the future, should you decide that you want to reactivate the site.

Good luck!
posted by gemmy at 9:10 AM on February 7 [1 favorite]

Have you checked if it has been archived by the Internet Archive?

I'm pretty sure Wix sites are broken and do not display correctly on IA, due to Wix's proprietary garbage on the backend.

OP might be able to DL any basic HTML/CSS/javascript/etc. files, and images, but they'll not get a working site to host elsewhere, I'm afraid. They'll need to have the site rewritten to approximate the look and feel of the Wix site.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:59 AM on February 7