Your agency built your site on a platform that no longer exists

What a discontinued platform actually means

A platform is the software your site is built on. Think of it as the foundations and frame of the building - not the paint and signage you see from the street.

When a platform is discontinued, the company that made it stops updating it. No security patches, no support, no fixes. The site keeps working for a while, but it slowly becomes a liability - slower, less secure, and eventually broken.

Common examples include Adobe Muse (shut down in 2020), Google Web Designer for live sites, older Wix or Squarespace versions, custom builder tools agencies invented in-house, and various small-CMS products that quietly went under.

If your site was built on one of these, it has an expiry date whether anyone told you or not.

Why the agency is charging you to fix their choice

This is the part that should annoy you. The agency picked the platform. They sold you on it. They charged you to build the site on it. Now the platform is gone and they are charging you again to move off it.

The reason is simple. Migration is real work - someone has to copy the text, the images, the page structure, and rebuild it on something new. The agency is not lying about that.

What they are doing is treating it as a fresh project at full project rates, rather than a clean-up of a decision they made on your behalf. That framing is a choice.

You are being charged twice for the same website. Once when they built it, once when they move it off the thing they built it on.

What you actually own when this happens

Before you agree to anything, find out what you can take with you. You almost always own more than the agency implies.

• The text on your site. Every word. They wrote it for you, but it is yours.
• The images and photos. Anything taken of your business, your staff, your premises - yours.
• The domain name. If it is registered in your name, no one can take it. If it is registered in the agency's name, ask them to transfer it - they have to.
• Your customer enquiries and any database the site collects. That is your business data.

What you may not own is the design files or the underlying code, depending on what your contract says. But the content - which is the part that takes time to migrate - is yours.

If you can hand a new developer the text, the images, and access to the domain, you do not need the original agency to be involved at all.

What a fair migration should cost

A five-page brochure site - home, about, services, contact, one or two extras - is not a complex job to rebuild. An independent developer can do it from scratch in two to four days using your existing content.

You should expect a fixed price in the region of £600-£1,200 for a clean rebuild on a modern, stable foundation. That includes copying everything across, building it properly, and pointing the domain at the new site.

If your agency is quoting £3,000 or £5,000 to migrate the same site they originally built for less, you are being charged for the inconvenience of leaving rather than the work itself. Whether you run a salon in Cardiff or a building firm in Sheffield, the job is the same and the price should reflect that.

How to respond to the agency

Keep it polite and in writing. Email is fine. Say something like:

The platform you built our site on has been discontinued. Before we agree to a migration project, please confirm: 1) the full content of the site can be exported to us in a usable format, 2) the domain is registered in our business name and we have access to it, 3) we own the text and images on the site. Once we have that, we will decide on next steps.

Do not announce that you are leaving. Do not threaten. Just ask for the things you are entitled to. Their response tells you what kind of relationship you have been in.

If they delay, get vague, or try to bundle the export into the migration quote, that is your answer. Get a second opinion from an independent developer before signing anything.

How to avoid this happening again

The next site you have built should be on something boring and well-established. Not a clever in-house builder, not the latest trendy tool, not anything that depends on a single company staying in business.

Plain HTML, or a widely-used content system like WordPress used sensibly, will still be working in ten years. The technology matters less than the principle: your site should not be hostage to one supplier's business decisions.

I am SkipTheAgency - a solo developer building hand-coded sites for UK small businesses. I can migrate you off a dead platform onto something stable, usually for a flat fee from £600, and keep it running afterwards on the Maintained plan at £65/month. No retainer hostage situation, no proprietary builder you have never heard of.