solo, mozilla's ai site builder, deletes everything on 30 nov 2026. its shutdown faq is blunt about it: "There will be no way to recover your site, account, or data after that date."
the export steps are in my earlier post, so i won't repeat them. this one is the question people ask after they have the zip: ok, where does it go?
solo's faq suggests wix, squarespace, wordpress or ai builders. i'll compare three that fit most small solo sites: wordpress.com, carrd, and a free static host.
first, what you're actually carrying
per solo, the zip has "an HTML export of your website and a CSV file with links to your image assets," plus form and newsletter submissions. the photos aren't in it. they come from the csv links, which die with solo on 30 nov, whichever destination you pick. so grab the images first, decide later. and the submissions are customer emails, they stay on your own machine.
the real difference between the three: does it take your html as is, or do you rebuild?
wordpress.com: rebuild, but you get an editor
there's no solo importer. wordpress.com's import from other platforms guide is a copy-paste job: add your images to the media library, then copy "the main text of a single page" into a new page, since copying the whole page "may make some unwanted HTML." menus get rebuilt separately.
so your text and image files carry over. the solo look doesn't, you pick a theme. forms don't either.
cost, from the pricing page today: the free plan is a yoursite.wordpress.com subdomain with 1 gb of storage, and visitors see ads. connecting a domain you already own is a paid feature, Personal and up (connect a domain). Personal is us$4/month billed yearly, or us$9 month to month. annual plans include a free domain for the first year, monthly ones don't.
fits you if: you'll keep editing, want a blog, or someone non-technical updates it. effort: an afternoon for a few pages, more if you're picky about design.
carrd: rebuild, small and cheap
carrd builds "one-page sites," so it suits solo sites that were really one long page: a landing page, a portfolio, a link-in-bio thing. no html import here either, you rebuild with text elements and upload your images. even carrd's own downloads "cannot be uploaded back to the Carrd platform."
cost is where carrd is nice. the free plan lets you "build up to three sites per account" on a .carrd.co address (carrd.co). your own domain needs Pro Standard, $19/year (plans, custom domain). Pro Lite at $9/year has no custom domain. a contact form also needs Pro Standard (contact form).
fits you if: it's one page and you want an editor without all of wordpress. effort: the quickest rebuild, if it really is one page. five separate pages gets clunky.
a static host: keep the html, lose the editor
the only option that uses your export as is. once the html points at your local images instead of solo's links, you upload the folder and it looks basically the same.
cloudflare pages direct upload takes a folder or a zip by drag and drop, up to 1,000 files and 25 MiB per file. cloudflare says all plans come with "unlimited sites, seats, requests, and bandwidth" (pages). one gotcha: a direct upload project can't be switched to git later.
netlify drop is the same idea. log in first, or the site sits behind a temporary password until you claim it. the free plan is $0 with a 300 credit limit per month, and custom domains are included (pricing). a production deploy costs 15 credits and bandwidth is 20 credits per gb, and if you hit the limit your projects pause until the next cycle. plenty for a small brochure site, but cloudflare is safer if you're worried about a traffic spike.
what doesn't carry: anything that needed solo running, like the contact form (use an email link or a form service). and no editor, so new opening hours means editing html.
fits you if: the site is done and you just want it up, free, looking the same. effort: under an hour once the images are sorted.
i wrote a longer walkthrough with the netlify and cloudflare steps and a what-carries-over table here, and it links the wordpress and carrd versions too. it's built around the zip from our free tool, so heads up, that tool fetches your images through our server.
the domain move
if you bought the domain through solo domains (not ionos), it moves to name.com first: fill in your name.com contacts, then email solo your account code (steps in the faq linked up top). ionos or anywhere else, just log in there.
then each option wants something different:
- wordpress.com: a paid plan, then their connect-a-domain flow.
- carrd: Pro Standard, then the A record for @ and CNAME for www it shows you. can take up to an hour.
- cloudflare pages: a bare domain like example.com must be a zone in your cloudflare account (nameservers pointed at cloudflare). a subdomain just needs a CNAME, but add it in pages first or you get a 522 (custom domains).
- netlify: add it in netlify first, then a CNAME for subdomains and an ALIAS, ANAME or A record for the bare domain (external dns).
and leave the mx records alone if you get email on that domain.
so which
one page, want an editor: carrd. many pages, want to keep editing or blogging: wordpress, and treat it as a rebuild. it's finished and you just want it alive: static host, free.
none of it matters if the images are gone though. get them out of the csv links this week. the destination can wait, the export can't.
Written with AI assistance and checked against Solo's shutdown FAQ and the WordPress.com, Carrd, Cloudflare Pages and Netlify pricing and docs, all read on 23 Oct 2026.
Top comments (2)
Good breakdown. One question I'd add before picking: who edits the site after the move? If the owner changes something every week, the editing screen matters more than hosting cost. If nobody touches it, a static host is hard to beat.
yeah that's honestly the right first question. if someone edits it every week, the editor is the whole point and carrd or wordpress earns its keep. if it's a set and forget brochure site, static is hard to beat. one thing i'd add: if a non technical person will be doing the edits, have them try the editor for ten minutes before you move anything. that tells you more than any pricing page.