Moving an Existing Site Into Hostinger's Builder: The Honest Method

If you want to move a website into Hostinger Website Builder, the first thing to accept is that you are not migrating — you are rebuilding. There is no importer that takes a site from Wix, Squarespace, WordPress or anywhere else and reconstructs it inside the builder. The pages go up one at a time, by hand, in the editor. Every honest description of this process starts there, and any tool promising otherwise is describing something different from what actually happens.

This is not unique to Hostinger. Proprietary builders do not accept each other's output, because there is no shared format to accept. The distinction worth drawing is between moving to Hostinger hosting, which is a genuine migration with documented tooling, and moving into Hostinger's builder, which is a rebuild. A WordPress site can be transferred to Hostinger's servers wholesale and carry on being a WordPress site. It cannot be transferred into the builder at all.

Inventory before you touch anything

The rebuild is tedious but safe. What causes real damage is losing things you did not realise you had. Before you start, write down:

• Every URL on the current site. All of them, including the ones you forgot — old landing pages, PDFs, images people link to directly.
• Which of those URLs get traffic. Your analytics and search console will tell you in ten minutes, and this list is what you must not break.
• Every page title and meta description you wrote, in a spreadsheet. These are cheap to copy now and irritating to rewrite later.
• Where your forms currently deliver, and what historical submissions you need to keep. Export them before anything is switched off.
• Every integration doing invisible work — booking widgets, chat, analytics, pixels, review feeds. Each one needs a plan or a deliberate decision to drop it.

The URL problem, which is the real one

Here is where a rebuild can quietly cost you money. If your old site had a page at one address and the new one puts the same content somewhere else, anybody arriving from a search result or an old link lands on nothing. The standard remedy is a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one, and independent testing documents that this builder has no built-in redirect management. The SEO panel and its gaps covers this in more detail.

The practical workaround is to avoid needing redirects at all. Recreate your URL structure exactly — if a page was at /services/boiler-repair, build it at /services/boiler-repair. The builder lets you edit page slugs, so this is achievable with care, and matching the old structure is far easier than remediating a broken one afterwards. Do this for the traffic-earning pages at minimum. For pages nobody visits, use the move as an opportunity to tidy up.

Build first, switch second

Do not point your domain at the new site until the new site is finished. Build the whole thing on the temporary address Hostinger gives you, check every page, click every link, submit every form, then move the domain. The old site stays live and earning throughout, and the switch becomes a single deliberate moment rather than a week of visitors finding half-built pages.

Keep the old site accessible for a while after the switch, too, if the platform allows it. Something always turns out to have been missed — a page nobody remembered, a phone number that only appeared in a footer, an image you cannot find the original of. Having the previous version to refer to for a month is worth considerably more than the month of overlapping subscription cost, and cancelling a day early is a false economy you only discover later.

The template decision is permanent

One constraint specific to this builder makes preparation matter more than usual. Independent testing documents that you cannot change template mid-build without losing the content already placed. In a rebuild you are entering weeks of content by hand, so choosing a template that turns out to be structurally wrong in week three is an expensive discovery. Pick against your page list rather than against the photography, and if in doubt, build one representative page on a candidate template before committing the rest.

How long a rebuild really takes

People consistently underestimate this, and the underestimate is what turns an orderly move into a rushed one. A page is not just its text. It is the text, the images at the right sizes, the headings in the right order, the internal links pointing at the right places, the call to action, the title and description, and the check that it looks correct on a phone. Half an hour a page is realistic for a simple page, and more for anything with a form or a gallery.

So a ten-page site is a solid day, not an evening. A thirty-page site is a week you have not scheduled. The practical advice is to use the rebuild as an edit: most sites of any age carry pages nobody reads and copy nobody has revisited since launch. Check your analytics, retire what has no audience, and rebuild the pages that earn something. A smaller, better site is a faster move and a better outcome than a faithful reproduction of accumulated clutter.

Content first, styling second. Get every page in with its words and images and correct slug before you spend an hour on spacing, because a half-styled complete site can go live and a beautifully styled half-finished one cannot.

Is the move worth making?

If you are moving to cut costs, price the destination properly before spending a weekend rebuilding. Premium is $2.99 a month introductory and $10.99 on renewal; Unlimited, which you need in order to sell anything, is $3.99 and $16.99. Compare the renewal figure against what you pay now, not the introductory one, or you may find the saving evaporates in year two having already spent the rebuild effort. The Hostinger Website Builder review sets out what the product does and does not do for that money.

And know the exit before you commit to the entrance. Moving in is a rebuild; moving out later is also a rebuild, since the export carries content but not design. A site that moves platforms every two years spends more on rebuilding than it ever saves on hosting.