Design·7 min read
What the Squarespace, Wix, Format and Readymag help centres say about your site and your domain the day you cancel, a ten-minute moving drill, and the eight questions to ask before you pay for a portfolio of your own.
A portfolio is yours if, the day you stop paying, it's still on your domain, with your projects, and you can take it somewhere else. Anything else is renting, even if you designed it yourself.
If you're a photographer, illustrator, designer or musician, your portfolio most likely lives on Squarespace, Wix, Format or Readymag. You can set one up in an afternoon, the templates look good, and every month there's a charge on your card you've stopped noticing.
Search for "best portfolio platform" and the comparisons talk about templates, price and ease of use. Almost none of them talk about the ending. Creative Bloq's July 2026 roundup covers it in one line: switching builders later means rebuilding from scratch.
That's the part nobody tells you when you choose, so we went and checked. On 16 October 2026 we opened the help centres of all four platforms to see what happens to your site and your domain the day you stop paying. These terms change, so if you're reading this later, follow the links.
Squarespace. When a paid site expires, anyone visiting through any of your domains sees a "Website Expired" message (Squarespace help). A domain bought through them doesn't expire just because you cancel the site: you can keep it or transfer it, but they ask you to decide before you cancel (domains when you cancel). And the export is a file for importing into WordPress that leaves out, among other things, portfolio pages, video blocks, style settings and custom CSS (exporting your site).
Wix. When you cancel a Premium plan, the site stays online but goes back to the free Wix address (yourname.wixsite.com) with Wix ads on it. Your content isn't deleted, and the domain is a separate service you cancel separately (cancelling a Premium plan). What you can't do is take the site with you: according to Wix, its architecture doesn't support hosting it anywhere else (exporting or embedding your site).
Format. The site stays up until the end of the paid period, and then the content is archived for 12 months in case you reactivate. If your domain is with Format, it's cancelled along with the subscription unless you ask to transfer it, and that isn't automatic (cancelling your subscription). There's no full export: you can download your images, but page text has to be copied by hand and uploaded videos can't be downloaded (exporting your content).
Readymag. Published projects stay online and nothing gets deleted, but on the free plan custom domains stop working: the site only shows on a readymag.website address, and anyone coming through your domain sees "Website is offline" (cancelling a subscription). There is code export, but only on the Business (Advanced) and Extra plans, and exported projects can't be edited: to change anything, you go back to Readymag and export again (code export).
In short: none of them wipes your work the next day. But on none of the four does your portfolio stay as it was, on your domain, once you stop paying. And on all of them you leave with less than you have.
Our view: you can live without the third. Not without the first.
Do it today with your current site, even if you're not planning to leave:
That gives you two numbers:
An example with made-up numbers, just to show the sum: 30 projects at an hour and a half each is 45 hours of moving. If your hour is worth €30, leaving costs you €1,350 in time. And that cost grows with every project you upload, so it pays to run the numbers before the site has a hundred.
If you pay for several subscriptions at once, Who owns your online business? adds them up and shows you how much goes out each year.
Staying on a platform can be the right call. Staying without a safety net isn't:
To be fair about it: if you're starting out, if you have a few projects and change the site once a year, or if you need private galleries where clients pick photos and a way to sell prints, a platform gives you that ready-made. That's exactly what Creative Bloq highlights about Format in its roundup. Paying a fee for something you actually use makes sense.
A site of your own starts to pay off when the portfolio is your main calling card, when you upload work often, or when the fee has been leaving your account for years without anything changing.
This applies to us and to anyone else who quotes you. Next to each question, the answer you want to hear.
So you have something to compare against, these are the two options on our portfolios page, prices excluding VAT:
Both come with a panel where you add and order your projects, and neither has a minimum term. Delivery takes one to three weeks, depending on the size of the portfolio and whether the design already exists.
Run the drill on your current site and put the eight questions to whoever quotes you, us included. If it still adds up after that, get in touch with a link to your portfolio and we'll take a look.
From the blog
Design·6 min read
Four times this series arrived at the same word: judgment. In a world where execution is cheap and abundant, what's scarce is the judgment to decide what's worth doing. But that judgment isn't free —and where it comes from is the most uncomfortable question of all.
Design·6 min read
Everyone tells you not to be afraid of AI. But the fear is sensing something real: yes, something is dying. The point is that it isn't you. It's the comfort of mastery —and the price of redirecting yourself is becoming a beginner again.
Design·5 min read
For years, what a designer delivered was something you looked at: a piece, an image, a finished object. The deepest shift of this era is that the deliverable can now run on its own. From designing what is seen to designing what happens.
Fast Web Academy
What we test in the lab and what works for clients. No spam.
