Somebody usually emails asking the same question: they've got a website already, maybe on WordPress, maybe Wix, maybe something a nephew built in 2019, and they want to switch to Cantrip without losing everything they've built. Fair question. Here's what really happens to your old site's content when you do that.
Cantrip does have a genuine import feature. In the portal it shows up as "Restore from Backup" if you're refreshing a website you already run on Cantrip, or "Import from ZIP" if you're starting a brand new one from a backup file. Both live under Website Settings, and both take a zip. Upload one, and Cantrip rebuilds your pages, posts, and menu items straight from what's inside.
Here's the part that trips people up. That zip has to already be shaped like a Cantrip export. The importer looks for a specific file inside it, a website.json plus a matching folder of page and post files and a media folder next to it. Miss that structure and the whole upload gets rejected before it touches your site. A WordPress export file doesn't have any of that. Neither does a Wix export, or a folder of raw HTML someone hands you on a thumb drive. The importer isn't reading your old website. It's reading a Cantrip website that got zipped up.
So what does moving off WordPress look like, if there's no button for it? Not automatic. Someone, a person or an AI assistant working through Cantrip's own tools, goes through your live site page by page and rebuilds it: a banner here, a photo grid there, your contact form wired up properly instead of copied over as a screenshot. Images get downloaded and re-uploaded, not linked back to your old host. What comes out gets packaged into that same Cantrip-shaped zip and run through the importer above. Call it what it is: a rebuild, not an import. That's fine by us. Most old sites are dragging along years of plugin cruft nobody needs on the new one.
Once the new site looks right, pointing your domain at it is the easy part. One DNS record, no code, we've covered that here before. The part almost nobody thinks about ahead of time is what happens to your old URLs.
WordPress loves stuffing dates into its URLs. A post that lived at yoursite.com/2023/03/spring-sale isn't going to land at that same address on Cantrip. Cantrip builds its own slugs, and there's no feature that maps your old paths onto the new ones. Cantrip does have a domain-level redirect: point two domains at the same site, mark one canonical, and the other forwards over automatically. That covers a whole domain switching over, not a page remembering its old address. Click a five-year-old link to your old blog post, or let Google serve up that URL from its index, and you land on Cantrip's plain 404 page. Nothing catches you on the way down.
There's one thing worth doing about that before launch, not after. For anything that actually matters, a page ranking well in Google, a link printed on a business card, set the new page's slug to match the tail end of the old URL as closely as Cantrip's structure allows. It won't be identical. Cantrip doesn't do date-based URLs and never will. But a close match beats a cold 404 for anyone who still has the old link saved.