Somebody asked me a question a few weeks back that stuck with me. "If I build my site on Cantrip and later decide I hate it, can I actually get my stuff back out?" Good question. Most people never ask it until they're already stuck.
Here's the uncomfortable truth about most website builders: once your content lives on their servers, it mostly stays there. Wix doesn't let you export a site at all. You can pull blog posts through an RSS feed or products as a CSV, but the pages, the layout, the thing you actually built, none of that leaves with you. Squarespace is a little better: you can export blog posts and basic pages as XML, but not products, not styling, not most page types. Either way, if you switch later, you're rebuilding from a blank screen, not moving house.
That's not an accident. A platform that's hard to leave doesn't have to work as hard to keep you.
Cantrip does this differently on purpose. Every website has a full backup and export option sitting in Website Settings, under Backup and Export. Download a complete ZIP of your entire site, pages and posts included, along with the media you uploaded. Or pull a JSON export of the raw data if you want something more portable. On bigger sites it runs as a background job, so you're not sitting there watching a spinner.
You can go the other direction too. Made a mess of your own site, or want to roll back to how it looked last month? Restore straight from a backup ZIP, no support ticket required. We'll warn you it overwrites your current data first, obviously, but the button's right there.
Now the honest limit, because I'm not going to pretend this makes Cantrip a universal export machine. What you get is your content and media, structured and portable. What you don't get is a ready-made copy of the actual rendered page, CSS included, ready to drop onto someone else's host. Cantrip's themes aren't files sitting in a folder somewhere. They're generated from your content on the fly. A backup gets your words and photos out intact. Rebuilding the exact look somewhere else still takes work, same as it would moving off any platform that isn't handing you raw template files.
Still, that's a real difference from a builder that just shrugs when you ask where your content lives. Your text and photos are yours. You can hold a copy of them whenever you want, restore from them whenever you want, and you're never negotiating with support to get a file you already paid to create.