If you are trying to migrate your website from the GoDaddy website builder to WordPress, you’ve probably already figured out that there is no easy/automated way to do it.

You’ll have to manually recreate every page of your website using the WordPress editor. The good news is, once you do that, you’ll have total control over your site and its content management system (WordPress), and you can then easily move it to another host whenever needed.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the process:

1. Create a backup

The first thing you’ll have to do is create a full backup of your site’s content. You can either save each page of your site individually or use a website copier software to download a copy of your whole website to your computer.

Another thing you’ll need to save is a list of the URLs of your site’s pages, because you will likely have to redirect those to new URLs after the transition.

2. Install WordPress

Now you can go ahead and install WordPress at your new hosting provider, unless you want to stay with GoDaddy and use their WordPress hosting (I recommend moving elsewhere).

3. Customize the site and add the content

Once you’ve installed WordPress, log in to the admin dashboard, customize settings, theme, plugins, etc. And when all looks good, you can start adding the content you copied from your site earlier.

In WordPress, you can add content either as posts or pages. Use posts if you want the content to be archived and organized in blog-style, or alternatively, you can create separate pages.

4. Set up URL structure and redirects

One of the settings you can change in WordPress is the URL structure of your posts. This will probably be different from the URL structure your site had at GoDaddy.

You can find and edit your site’s URL structure settings by going to Settings > Permalinks from the WordPress dashboard sidebar. I usually prefer to use the “Post name” option because it’s clean and SEO-friendly, but feel free to explore other options.

You don’t want to lose traffic and search engine rankings associated with your old URLs, so you should use a redirection plugin to create a 301 redirect for each old URL to the corresponding new URL.

I like the 301 Redirects plugin by WebFactory (free version), but there are other plugins you can use as well.

Important: Make sure you save a copy of all your site’s content (text and images) as well as URLs before you cancel your GoDaddy website builder service. Once canceled, you won’t be able to get your site’s data back.