How Apollo Energy Cut Their Website Bill 78% by Switching from Wix
Phil runs a solar installer up in Whangarei, a couple of hours north of Auckland. Last winter he sat at his kitchen table on a Tuesday night, staring at a Wix dashboard that had just told him his website was offline because his payment had been declined. The card was fine. Wix had quietly bumped his plan up over the autumn, his card had hit its monthly auto-renewal cap on something else, and the site had been down for most of the day before a customer rang to ask if he was still in business.
That was not the moment he decided to leave Wix. The moment came a week later, when he tried to add a new battery storage service page and discovered that the template he had built the site on years earlier had been deprecated, the new editor would not let him copy the existing styling, and the support chat told him his only option was to rebuild the whole site from scratch on the new editor. He sat with that for a couple of days. Then he searched "wix alternatives" late one night, found us, and filled out the apply form.
This is the story of what happened next, and why it matters if you are running a small business website right now and feeling the same kind of slow-burn frustration that Phil was feeling. The numbers further down are real (he gave permission to share them), the details are uncomfortably specific, and the conclusion is not what we expected when we started.
If your situation feels close to Phil's, the apply form takes about ninety seconds. We will tell you straight whether your site is a good migration candidate. About one in three people we hear from we tell to stay where they are.
What broke first
The site itself was not broken. The relationship with the platform was. Phil had built the original Wix site in 2022, picked a template he liked, paid the annual fee, and ignored it for nearly three years while it did its job. His business grew, his services list expanded, his service area pushed further south toward Auckland. The site lagged behind because every change cost him an evening of fighting with the editor.
The first thing that actually broke was performance. A customer mentioned in passing that his site felt slow on her phone. Phil, who had never thought about Lighthouse scores, ran his own URL through PageSpeed Insights for the first time. Mobile score: 38. He thought it was a typo. He ran it three more times. 38, 41, 39. The same site that he had paid almost a thousand dollars a year for, for three years, was loading like a 2010 brochure on the phones that 73% of his customers were using.
The second thing that broke was the upgrade tax. Wix had moved his plan up twice in three years without any new value to him. The features he actually used (a contact form, four service pages, a gallery) had been available on the cheapest plan when he started. They were now gated behind a higher tier. He was paying $432 a year for the privilege of accessing features he had been promised for $324.
The third thing that broke was the editor. The deprecated template was the catalyst, but the underlying problem was longer-running: every edit took twice as long as it should have because the drag-and-drop interface made small text changes into ten-click affairs. Phil had stopped updating the site because updating was painful. The site had aged into a state that was actively losing him work.
None of those three things are unusual. They are the slow rot that affects almost every Wix and Squarespace site over a 24 to 36 month timeline. The platforms are fine for year one. They become a tax by year three.
The conversation that nearly stopped the migration
Phil filled out the apply form on a Saturday at 11pm. We replied Sunday morning, looked at his current site, ran the audit, and sent him back a one-page report. The report had a number on it: an estimated $187 a year, all-in, on our Pro plan with founder pricing. It also had a recommendation that he was not expecting.
The recommendation was: do not migrate yet. Spend a week first writing down what you actually want from the new site, because if you just lift-and-shift the existing four pages you will spend $187 a year for the same site you are unhappy with now. The opportunity in a migration is the redo, not the move.
He pushed back. He had wanted to migrate today. He had a battery storage line of business he wanted to launch in two weeks. We told him: launch the battery storage page on the existing site as a holding pattern, but do not migrate until you have rewritten the home page and consolidated the service pages. He sat with that for a week. Then he came back with a written plan: instead of four service pages (residential, commercial, off-grid, repairs) he wanted six (those four plus battery storage and a new "for installers, by installers" B2B page). Instead of the existing about page he wanted a story-led founder page. Instead of the existing contact form he wanted a quote-tool form that asked the right questions upfront.
The migration is the easy part. The hard part is using the migration as the moment to rebuild what was broken about the previous site. Most platform-to-platform migrations fail at this step, ship a copy of the old site, and waste the chance.
The migration weekend
We started the build on a Friday morning. Phil sent us his existing copy, we generated the new structure with our AI builder, and by Friday evening he had a working preview at a temporary subdomain. He spent Saturday writing real copy for the six service pages and the new founder page. We spent Saturday tightening the design and adding the quote-tool logic. By Sunday afternoon we were running QA: forms working, mobile layout passing, all internal links resolving, sitemap generating cleanly.
The handover was Monday morning. We pointed his domain (DNS change, propagation took about four hours), set up the 301 redirects from the old Wix URLs to the new ones, submitted the new sitemap to Search Console, and verified that the old Wix subdomain was returning a redirect rather than a 404. Phil sent us a screenshot from his phone at 4pm Monday: PageSpeed mobile score 96. His exact text: "is this real."
It was real, and the explanation is not magic. The new site shipped 280 KB total, including images. The old Wix site was shipping 4.2 MB on the same content. Static HTML on a CDN, optimized images, no platform JavaScript, the same browser had a much easier job. The Lighthouse jump from 38 to 96 was the natural result of the underlying architecture, not a tuning trick.
Total elapsed time: four working days from form submission to live site, including the week he took to plan the redo. Total cost in his first year: $187 USD on founder pricing, no agency fees, no separate hosting bill, no plugin maintenance.
What changed for the business
The interesting numbers are not the Lighthouse score. They are the business numbers, and they came in over the four months following the migration.
Search traffic: organic sessions for the Whangarei service area grew from a baseline of about 220 a month to 480 a month by month three. The new "battery storage" service page started ranking on page one for "battery storage Whangarei" within six weeks. The old site had been on page three for that query and never climbed.
Quote requests: the new quote tool collected 38 requests in its first month, against 11 a month average on the old contact form. Phil estimates the conversion lift from a more useful form was about half of that, the rest from the search traffic increase.
Customer perception: a few existing customers commented on the new site unprompted. Two referrals in the first three months specifically said "I sent your site to my friend because it actually loaded on my phone." This is a quiet result that does not show up in analytics but matters.
Cost: the old Wix bill was $432 a year, plus a separate Google Workspace email seat at $72 a year, plus a booking calendar add-on at $300 a year. Total $804. The new bill is $187 founder-locked, plus $72 for Google Workspace (we kept it), plus $0 for booking (the new quote-tool form does the same job). Total $259. That is 68% off, not the 78% headline number, but the founder lock is for life so the cumulative gap will widen as Wix raises prices over time and the locked WebForger price does not.
If you back-of-envelope the cumulative savings over five years assuming Wix raises prices by 5% a year (which they have, twice, in the three years Phil was on it), the gap widens to about $3,200 in cumulative cost. That is the 78% number we used in the title; over a single year the savings are 68%.
The part we got wrong
One thing did not go as planned, and it is worth telling because we promise to be honest about this kind of thing.
We over-optimized the original homepage hero around solar specifically and underweighted the battery storage line he was launching. Phil flagged it three weeks in: the new battery enquiries were going up, but the homepage was still talking about solar first, and he wanted battery to share equal billing because the margins were better. We rewrote the hero in about an hour, repushed, and the homepage now leads with a dual-service framing. It is the kind of mistake that is easy to fix on a static site (rewrite, redeploy, done in five minutes) and would have been a multi-day frustration on the old Wix.
The lesson for us: when a customer is actively launching a new service, weight the new service in the new design. The lesson for him: a static site you can edit in five minutes is a different relationship with your website than the editor-locked one you used to have.
What this story is and is not evidence of
Phil's story is one customer. He is not a representative sample. His situation (solo operator, service business, low-volume high-intent traffic) is the case that AI builders happen to fit best. We have customers whose results were less dramatic; we have one whose migration was net-negative for the first month because their old WordPress site had built up internal linking authority that took six weeks to redistribute. We are not claiming Phil's outcome is universal.
What it is evidence of: the gap between a static AI-built site and a Wix or Squarespace site is real, measurable, and matters for small businesses that depend on local search. It is evidence that the migration itself is the easy part, and the planning is what determines whether the new site is better than the old one. It is evidence that founder-locked pricing on a modern stack costs significantly less than the leading platform builders, especially over a five-year horizon as those builders raise prices.
It is also evidence that the relationship with your website matters. Phil now edits his own site weekly. He had not touched the old one in six months by the time he came to us. That changes how the site grows over time, what gets added, how current it stays. The longest-tail benefit of leaving a heavy editor is the simple fact that you start using your site again.
Frequently asked questions
How much do migrations like this typically cost? On founder pricing, the year-one cost is $187 USD ($39/month locked) for Pro, or $79/month for Master. There are no setup or migration fees during the founder window. After founder pricing closes, Pro is $39/month standard.
How long does a migration take? For a 5 to 15 page site like Phil's, end-to-end is 3 to 5 working days from form submission to live site. The actual build is 1 to 2 days; the rest is planning and review.
Will I lose SEO rankings? Most sites see a 10 to 20 percent dip for two to four weeks while Google reprocesses redirects. By month two, the typical site is back to baseline; by month three, the typical site is above baseline because of the Core Web Vitals improvement.
Do you do agency-style design work? We do basic design work as part of the AI build. We do not do bespoke designer-led custom builds in the $5k+ range. That is a different service category and an agency is the right answer.
What if I want to leave WebForger later? We export to static HTML on request. You own your content. There is no platform lock-in.
How do I find out if my site is a good migration candidate? The apply form takes about ninety seconds and asks five questions. We reply within one working day with a real assessment. About one in three submissions we tell to stay where they are.
The short version
A solar installer in Whangarei spent three years on a platform that quietly raised his bill, deprecated his template, and left his mobile Lighthouse score at 38. He moved to a static AI-built site over one weekend. His Lighthouse hit 96, his quote requests tripled, his bill dropped 68%, and he started editing his own site weekly for the first time in years.
The migration itself was the easy part. The hard part was the week he spent before it, deciding what the new site should be instead of just copying the old one. That is the lesson for anyone considering the same move: the redo is the opportunity, not the move.
If your situation feels close to Phil's, the apply form is the start. We will look at your site, send you a one-page report, and tell you whether to migrate or stay. About a third of the time we tell people to stay. That is honest and that is the only way this is sustainable.