Most dealers who dislike their website do nothing about it, and the reason is always the same. Moving looks like a project. Six weeks, a few thousand pounds, a fortnight of things being broken, and somewhere in the middle the sick feeling that the phone has gone quiet because Google lost you.
So the site stays. Another year of a design you never chose, an editor you have to email someone to use, and a monthly invoice for the privilege.
The calculation has changed, and it is worth redoing. Here is what moving actually involves now, and which parts of the old worry still apply.
What you are actually moving
It helps to separate this into four piles, because they move very differently.
Your stock. This is the pile everyone worries about and the one that matters least. Your vehicles are records, and records import. On a platform where the website sits on top of a dealer management system, your cars go in once and the site builds itself around them. You are not rebuilding thirty vehicle pages by hand.
Your words. The about page you wrote when you set up. The paragraph about the pre-delivery inspection. The line about being open seven days. This is years of accumulated, tested wording, and it is the pile most rebuilds throw away by accident, because nobody thought to save it before the old site went dark.
Your addresses. Every URL on your existing site that a search engine knows about, or that somebody has bookmarked, or that you put on a business card. This is the pile that decides whether the phone keeps ringing.
Your design. The one you are leaving. Usually the reason you are moving in the first place.
The words come with you
The builder will read your current site if you let it.
Point it at the site you are migrating from and it takes in your existing pages for tone, the services you list, and the selling points you have already worked out. It is not copying the design you dislike. It is keeping the substance you spent years getting right and putting it into something you actually want to look at.
This is the step that turns a rebuild into a migration. Without it, you sit in front of a blank about page trying to remember how you described the business in 2019, and whatever you write in ten minutes will be worse than what you wrote then.
If you would rather start from a description of the business instead, that works too, and how to write the brief covers what to say. Both of those routes are bespoke design, which is a paid feature. Worth knowing at this point rather than at the end.
Protecting your rankings
This is the part worth taking seriously, and it is simpler than the worry suggests.
Search engines know your current pages by their addresses. When those addresses change and nothing tells the search engine where they went, the ranking you built goes with them. The fix is a redirect: a permanent instruction that the old address now lives at a new one.
Before you switch, do this:
- List your existing URLs. Your about page, contact page, any service or finance pages, any blog posts, and your main vehicle search page. You do not need every individual vehicle listing, because those come and go anyway.
- Decide the new address for each one. Most map straight across. Some old pages will not have an equivalent, and those should point at the nearest sensible thing rather than the homepage.
- Put the redirects in place at switchover, not a week later.
- Keep your domain. If you own the domain and it stays pointed at the new site, you keep the authority attached to it. If your current provider owns it, get it transferred before you do anything else. A website you can leave is one where you hold the domain.
Rankings usually wobble for a couple of weeks after any move and settle. Our car dealer website SEO guide covers what to check once you are live.
Get the new one built before you switch anything
The old fear, a fortnight of downtime, came from a world where the new site was built in stages while the old one rotted.
That is not the shape of it now. You can have the new site standing up, with your stock on it and every page a buyer expects, before you touch a single DNS record. Look at it, argue with it, change it. Nothing goes live until you say so, and an earlier version can be restored in a click if you take a wrong turn.
So the switchover itself is short. You point the domain, you put the redirects in, and the new site is the live one. The old provider's notice period runs out in its own time.
What to check before you point the domain
A short list, in the order that matters.
- Every vehicle appears, with its photos, price, mileage and specification, and the sold ones are not in there.
- The enquiry forms reach you. Submit one yourself. Then check it landed against the vehicle, not just in an inbox.
- Finance and part exchange work if you offer them, and the finance application is something a buyer can get through in stages rather than one long wall of questions.
- Your opening hours, address and phone number are right on the contact page and in the footer.
- It behaves on a phone, because most of your traffic is somebody standing in a car park.
- Your redirect list is ready to go, not a job for next week.
What it costs to find out
There are two costs here and it helps to separate them.
Seeing the platform costs nothing. The free plan lists up to five vehicles on your own domain with no card, on any of the eighteen core themes, which is enough to put your own stock into a real site and judge it on your own cars rather than on a demo.
The migration proper is a paid plan. Reading your existing site for tone and selling points, and designing a theme around your business rather than adapting one, is bespoke design, and that starts at £49 a month along with marketplace feeds, payments and finance.
So the sensible order is free first. Put five cars in, pick a core theme, and see whether the stock management and the enquiry handling suit how you actually work. That is the part you live with daily. If it does, the bespoke build is the step that makes the site yours, and it is a small line next to what you are already paying a provider you want to leave.
Start with the AI theme builder, or read about what it does end to end first.
