A client of mine — a small wellness clinic — wanted to move off the software she has been paying about $45 a month for. Better booking, automatic text reminders, proper campaigns. All sensible.
Then she mentioned one detail almost in passing: her website was built inside that same software. Cancel the subscription, and there is no website. Not a broken site. No site at all.
So the first job was not building anything. It was to save the website before anyone cancelled anything — and that turned out to be a bigger job than it sounded.
What a subscription actually holds
Most small business owners think of a subscription as one thing: the tool they log into. It is rarely one thing.
For this clinic, that single monthly bill was potentially holding:
- The website — every page, every photo, every blog post
- The email addresses on her own domain
- The customer records — contacts, notes, history
- The booking history — every past and future appointment
Cancel, and all four can leave together. The price she was paying is almost exactly the per-user price of a bundle that includes business email. If that is the plan she is on, her mailboxes die with the website — and the new platform does not provide email at all.
Before you cancel anything, write down every single thing that lives inside it. Not what you use it for. What is stored in it.
The order that protects you
We settled on a hard sequence, and it is worth stealing:
Archive first
Take a complete copy of everything, while the account is still open and everything still works. Nothing gets cancelled until this is done and checked.
Build second
Set up the new system in parallel, using the archived material. This takes weeks, not hours.
Verify third
Click through the new thing like a customer. Book something. Send something. Find something.
Cancel last
And keep both subscriptions overlapping for a month. Forty-five dollars is cheap insurance against a dead website.
The temptation is always to cancel first so you stop paying twice. That saves you one month and risks everything you built.
Why the site's own file list was not enough
Here is the part I did not expect.
Most websites publish a file listing all their pages — it is how search engines find everything. It is the obvious place to start when you want to copy a site.
Hers listed 19 pages. We used it as a starting point, then followed every link on every page we found. The crawl found 16 more pages the list had never been updated to include — blog pages, tag pages, older posts.
That file had a date on it: generated over a year earlier. Nobody had touched it since.
If we had trusted it, we would have quietly lost a third of her website and not noticed until months later, when someone searched for something and landed nowhere. Final count: 27 pages, 27 images, 9 blog posts, all captured, all confirmed working.
Never trust an index of your own stuff. Go and count.
What good archiving actually looks like
Copying the pages is the easy half. The part that saves you later is the paperwork:
- A list of every old web address, with a blank column beside it for the new one. Every old link needs somewhere to land, or you lose the search traffic you spent years earning.
- The text of every page, separately from the design — so it can be rebuilt anywhere.
- Every image, with a note of which page each one sits on.
- The blog posts in their raw form — as it happened, the cleanest copy of all nine posts came out of the site's news feed, not the pages themselves.
We also found a broken link while we were in there: one blog post had no proper web address at all. Nobody had noticed. Better to find that during an archive than during a migration.
One more thing worth knowing
The archive is now sitting in a folder on one machine — outside the automatic backup we run for everything else.
I flagged it immediately, because it is faintly ridiculous: insurance that is not itself backed up is not insurance. If you take a copy of your website to protect yourself, put that copy somewhere that gets backed up too.
The takeaway is short enough to remember at the moment you need it: before you cancel any subscription, take a full copy of everything inside it, check the copy actually works, and only then stop paying.
If you are about to switch something and you are not sure what lives inside it, that list is the first thing worth writing down.