How do I get my website files from my designer? And what to do when there are none
On 9 September I ran 236 real UK trade websites, pulled off my own cold-call lead sheets, through a check that reads what each one is actually built on. Of the 198 that answered properly, 51 sit on a hosted builder that publishes no way to take the site away at all. Another six sit on one that exports a partial copy of the words.
That is the part nobody says out loud when a tradesman asks his old designer for the files and gets a fortnight of silence. On more than a quarter of these sites, the silence is not obstruction. There is genuinely nothing to send, and the person who built it may not know how to say so without looking daft.
So the useful question is not how to prise a folder out of a reluctant designer. It is what exists in your case, what of it is legally yours, and which two items are worth chasing hard while the rest quietly does not matter.
Ask in writing for four things, not "the files": a copy of the site, your original photographs at full resolution, your text and enquiry records, and the logins. Set a date. In a check of 236 UK trade sites, 51 of the 198 readable ones ran on a builder with no export at any price, so on a site in four the answer is a rebuild, not a recovery.
"The files" is four different things, and only two of them matter
Almost every stalled handover starts with a request for "my website files", which sounds like one item and is really four, held by different people, with different answers.
Split it before you send anything. A designer who cannot give you one of the four can usually give you the other three straight away, and the vague version of the question makes that impossible to answer.
- The build. The code, the templates, the stylesheet. On a hand-coded site, a folder you can host anywhere. On a hosted builder it does not exist in a portable form, whoever asks.
- Your media. Photographs of your own work, your logo, any drawings. Yours, made by you or paid for by you, and the only genuinely irreplaceable item on the list.
- Your content and records. The text, and anything the site collected: enquiry forms, quote requests, a mailing list. This one has a legal answer, set out further down.
- The keys. Hosting, the content management login, the registrar account. Not files at all, but usually what people mean when the site is live and they cannot touch it.
The ordered version of the wider move, all eight assets and the sequence that stops you getting stranded, is in how to move your website to a new designer. This page is the awkward middle of it: the request, and what happens when it is impossible.
On a quarter of UK trade sites, there is nothing to hand over
Of 198 readable UK trade websites checked on 9 September 2026, 51 ran on Wix, Duda, GoDaddy, Weebly or a Yell build, none of which publishes any route to take the site itself elsewhere. That is 26%, or roughly one site in four.
The method was deliberately dull. I took every business website recorded on my cold-call lead sheets, 236 domains belonging to plumbers, electricians, carpenters, builders, roofers, gardeners and decorators across England and Wales, requested each homepage once, and read the page and its headers for the fingerprint each platform leaves. Nineteen domains no longer resolved, sixteen sat behind a bot check I did not try to defeat, three returned an empty page. That leaves 198 I could read with confidence.
| Platform | Sites | What you can actually get |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 84 | Everything. A content export, plus the theme, uploads and database from the host |
| Custom or hand-coded | 55 | Everything. It is a folder of files on a server |
| Wix | 25 | No site export. Copy the text and images out by hand |
| Duda | 15 | No site export. Usually resold through an agency, so the account is not even yours |
| GoDaddy builder | 7 | No site export. The build is tied to the plan |
| Squarespace | 6 | A partial XML export of some pages and one blog. No styling, no store |
| Weebly, Yell and similar | 4 | No site export. Same position as Wix |
| Mobirise | 2 | Files exist, on whichever laptop the builder software is installed on |
This is one sample from my own lists rather than a national survey, and the trades and regions in it are the ones I happen to have called. The split is still stable enough to act on: check what your site is built on before you spend three weeks chasing a folder nobody ever created.
How to tell in ten seconds
Open your site, right click, choose "view page source", and search that page for wix, squarespace, wsimg, cdn-website or wp-content. The first four mean a hosted builder and a rebuild. The last means WordPress, and everything is recoverable. Nothing found usually means a hand-coded site, the other good outcome.
What Wix, Squarespace and WordPress actually publish about this
Wix is explicit that the site cannot leave: "since Wix is a SaaS solution, your site must run on Wix's servers." That sentence is on their own help centre, and it is the honest answer your designer may be too embarrassed to give you.
Wix describes the build as a standard HTML5 site made with Wix's technology, then adds the condition that matters: "in order for your site to work properly, it needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers." There is no download. Your domain can move and your pictures and words can be copied out by hand, and that is the whole of it. What that costs over a few years, against the alternative, is worked through in Wix against a hand-coded site for tradesmen.
Squarespace does publish an export, and it is worth knowing how partial it is. It produces an .xml file "useful for importing content to WordPress" covering layout pages, text blocks, image blocks, gallery pages and one blog page. Their own list of what does not come out includes store pages, index pages, product blocks, video blocks, drafts, style settings and custom CSS, because "many features rely on our platform's JavaScript and CSS." In trade terms: the words survive, the site does not.
WordPress sits at the other end. Its export tool writes an XML file containing your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and users. That is content, not the site: the theme, the plugins and the uploads folder come off the hosting account separately, which is why the hosting login matters as much as the export.
What you are owed, and what you are asking for as a favour
Your enquiry list is the one item with a clear legal answer in the UK, and almost nobody asks for it. The names and numbers of people who filled in your contact form are personal data, you are the controller of it, and your designer is a processor acting on your behalf.
The Information Commissioner's Office defines a processor as a body "which processes personal data on behalf of the controller", which is exactly what a web designer running your contact form is doing. UK GDPR Article 28 then sets out what the contract between you has to say, and one clause is the useful one: the processor, it requires, "at the choice of the controller, deletes or returns all the personal data to the controller after the end of the provision of services relating to processing, and deletes existing copies".
The choice is yours, not his, and it covers every enquiry sitting in a form database or a plugin's inbox that you have never seen. Make it explicitly, in writing, before the hosting is switched off: once the server is gone the argument is academic. Ask for the records as a CSV and say plainly which of the two options you are choosing.
The code and the design are the opposite case: on a freelance build the designer holds the copyright by default unless the contract says otherwise, which cuts against me as much as anyone. Treat the build as a request and the data as an instruction.
The request to send
Six lines, one email, one date. The requests that stall are the vague ones, because "can I have my website files please" gives a busy person nothing to actually do on a Tuesday evening.
- 1. A copy of the site as it stands, in whatever form exists, or confirmation in writing that the platform does not allow one.
- 2. The original photographs of my work at full resolution, as files rather than links.
- 3. All enquiry and contact form records held on my behalf, as a CSV, returned rather than deleted.
- 4. Administrator access to the site, the hosting account and the domain registrar account.
- 5. A list of anything bought in your name for my site, with renewal dates.
- 6. A date by which I can expect these, or a note of which of them do not exist.
Send it as a plain email, keep the tone flat, and put a real date on it: fourteen days reads as reasonable if it ever has to be shown to anybody else. Item 6 does the quiet work, since it lets an honest designer tell you item 1 is impossible without admitting anything awkward.
The three replies you get, and what each one means
There are only three outcomes and two of them are fine. The one that costs money is not refusal, it is silence, and the answer to silence is to stop chasing files and start protecting the domain.
Save the page addresses even when you save nothing else. If the old site has been live for years, its page addresses have earned whatever Google standing you have, and they are free to record: open the site's sitemap.xml in a browser and copy the list. A rebuild that keeps the same addresses inherits that standing. One that quietly renames every page starts from nothing, which is the most expensive mistake I see in a switch and the easiest to avoid.
What it takes to rebuild from nothing
A rebuilt trade website needs your photographs, your services, your towns and your reviews. Three of those four are already in your pocket, which is why losing the files is a smaller disaster than it feels on the day.
The honest accounting: the code from a five-year-old build is worth very little, written for phones and browsers that have moved on, and the layout is worth less than a week. The photographs are worth real money, because a trade site without proof of your own work converts badly whatever it looks like. The reviews are not on the site at all: they sit on your Google Business Profile, a separate account you can secure today.
One question is worth asking before you replace like with like. If the last site sat on a builder you could not export, you were paying for something you could not move, and much of what people take on afterwards is work they could do themselves. Where that line falls, honestly, is in can I do my own SEO or should I pay someone.
My end of it, if you want it: a free mockup of your actual business before you pay anything or cancel anything, and I word the file request with you so it goes out once. No deposit and no build fee, then £50 every four weeks covering the site, hosting, the domain, SSL, backups and unlimited small edits, and at twelve months the site and the domain are yours to keep. Where that sits against the rest of the market is in what a tradesman's website costs.