When You've Outgrown Them: Exit Routes From the Side-Door Builders

The side-door builders are honest tools up to a point, and this page is about the point. Each product below has a documented moment where it stops being enough; staying past that moment costs more — in fees, in workarounds, in rebuild risk — than moving does. What follows are the graduation routes we would actually take, and the checklist to run before any migration. The full rankings live in the big-tech website builders comparison; this page assumes you have read yours and hit the wall.

Google Sites: leave when the site needs to do anything

Google Sites ends where interactivity begins. The moment you need forms that route somewhere useful, real SEO controls, a blog, or any commerce at all, you have left the product's documented surface — there is no cart to unlock and no CSS to write your way out with. And because a Google Site cannot be exported, every month you stay grows the eventual rebuild.

The standard route is a conventional builder: Wix if you want maximum widget coverage and an app market to lean on, Squarespace if the site is content-led and you would rather have opinionated templates than options. Either way you are rebuilding by hand, so the correct time is before the site gets large, not after. Our Google Sites vs Wix comparison walks the same decision at page length.

Square Online: go deeper, or go sideways

Square Online's wall is the fee schedule. The free store's 3.3% + 30¢ online rate is a 0.4-point surcharge over what paid plans pay, so there is a sales volume at which Square Plus — $49 per month per location — starts paying for itself; run your monthly online revenue against those 0.4 points and the answer falls out.

If commerce is the business, the honest route is deeper into Square: paid plans drop the online rate to 2.9% + 30¢ and unlock the custom domain the free tier withholds. If the store was incidental — you wanted a site and the checkout came along — go sideways to Wix, which does commerce adequately and everything else better. What the free plan actually withholds is itemized in is Square Online actually free.

Canva Websites: when one-pagers stop cutting it

Canva's ceiling announces itself at the publish step — free accounts design twenty sections and publish ten — but the real one arrives later, when you need a second page that behaves like a page, a blog, a working form, or search visibility beyond luck. A Canva site is a design with a URL, and no amount of upgrading changes its species. The natural next step is Squarespace: a similar design sensibility attached to an actual website architecture, with navigation, blogging, SEO controls and commerce. Canva itself stays worth keeping for what it is actually for — Canva Pro is a design subscription, not a web strategy. The full dossier is in the Canva Websites review.

Adobe Express: there is nothing to outgrow

No graduation moment to document here, because there was never a website: an Adobe Express page lives at an express.adobe.com URL with no custom domain, no export, and a bug board of pages that vanish. If the page matters, reproduce its content anywhere else — a cheap conventional host is an upgrade on every axis. Hostinger's entry plans cost less per month than most stock-photo subscriptions and come with the boring, load-bearing features Adobe never added: your domain, your files, your redirects. The Adobe Express review explains why we say "reproduce" rather than "migrate".

Power Pages: you were never the audience

Power Pages users do not outgrow the product; they discover the pricing page. At $75 per month per 500 anonymous visitors, per website, a public page is billed for succeeding — which makes sense for a permit portal and none at all for a business site. If you arrived via the ecosystem assumption ("we are a Microsoft shop, surely we use the Microsoft one"), the correction is cheap and immediate: an ordinary site on Hostinger costs less per month than Power Pages charges for its first 500 strangers, with no meter attached. Who the product is actually for is covered in Power Pages, explained.

Before you migrate: three checks

Whichever door you take, run these before touching DNS.

• Domain ownership. Confirm who the registrant actually is. A domain bought through Canva auto-renews on Canva's schedule; a yourname.square.site or my.canva.site subdomain cannot come with you at all; an express.adobe.com URL was never yours. If the address printed on your cards is not a domain you control, the migration includes an address change, and the sooner it happens the less it costs.
• Content export. Assume none. Google Sites and Adobe Express have no export path — copy text and download images by hand before you start, not after. Square lets you export the product catalog; Canva keeps your designs, which stay reusable even though the published site is not portable.
• Redirects. From subdomains you do not control you generally cannot redirect at all — the business.site shutdown turned every printed QR code and backlink into a dead end, which is the entire case for owning your domain before you need it. Inventory everywhere the old URL lives — profiles, directories, print — and update them all the day you switch.

None of this argues against starting through the side door; free tiers are how you learn what you actually need. It argues for leaving through the front one, on your own schedule, with your address in hand.