Moving your club off the platform you are on now

The switching cost is not the subscription. It is the retyping.

Most committees decide fairly quickly that a different platform would suit them better. Then nothing happens, sometimes for years, and the reason is almost never price. It is that somebody has to move ten years of a website, a roster that lives in a database nobody has looked at since the last registrar resigned, and a domain name that half the committee assumes takes care of itself — and that somebody is a volunteer with a job.

So the useful question is not “is the new thing better?” It is what does the move actually consist of, and which parts can be taken off the volunteer? There are five parts, and they are not equally hard.

• The words and the pictures

  Pages, the about section, the committee list, sponsor logos and a documents shelf of PDFs. This is the bulk of the typing, and the part a volunteer dreads.

• The news archive

  Years of match reports and announcements, each with a publication date that matters. Flattened into one page they stop being findable and stop being history.

• The member roster

  Names, contacts, membership types and who is financial. It never comes off a website — it comes out of an export file, and the quality of that file decides the week.

• The web address

  A decade of search results and every link anyone ever emailed point at your domain. It is the single most valuable thing you own online and the easiest to lose by accident.

• The money

  Subscriptions, direct debits and stored cards. This is the one nobody warns you about, and the one with a hard limit nobody can engineer around.

What ClubHelix moves for you

The list below reads our release switches directly rather than restating them in prose, so it is right at the moment you are looking at it — including anything switched on since this paragraph was written.

• Build alongside your current siteAvailable now

  Your new site lives at its own ClubHelix address until you point your domain at it, so nothing goes public before you say so.

• Website import from your current siteAvailable now

  Give us the address of your current website and we build draft pages from what it publishes — words, structure, images, contact details and colours — for a volunteer to review.

• Imported news archiveAvailable now

  Your old news posts arrive as real posts carrying their real publication dates, not as one flattened page.

• Redirects from your old web addressesAvailable now

  Every address on the old site mapped to where it now lives, so search results and links in old emails keep working.

The full switching and import story · every capability, plan by plan

What never moves, whoever you switch to

Every migration feature list is also a list of things somebody decided not to mention. Here is ours, up front, because a club that finds this out in week three feels misled — and rightly.

• Anything behind a login

  No automated reader produces a member list, and none should. The roster travels as an export file or it does not travel at all — so the first thing to check about any platform is whether you can get a complete export OUT of it.

• Stored cards and direct debits

  A platform change is a merchant-account change. Payment authorities belong to the old provider and cannot be reassigned to anyone — this is a legal and card-industry boundary, not a missing feature. Every recurring payer re-authorises, wherever you go.

• Whether the content is still true

  An automated copy carries a committee list last updated in 2019 across perfectly. A move is the one moment a club actually reads its own website, so budget for reading rather than only for typing.

• The old site’s template

  Your words and your photographs are yours. The layout they sit in belongs to whoever built it, so pages get rebuilt in the new platform’s own design rather than cloned.

The order that keeps you out of trouble

1. Get the export before you cancel anything. An export you cannot download after the account closes is not an export.
2. Confirm who controls the domain. Not who set it up — who can log in to the registrar today.
3. Write down every address on the old site. This becomes the redirect map, and it is the step clubs skip.
4. Build the new site alongside the old one. Nothing is public until you decide it is.
5. Point the domain, then redirect. In that order, and keep the redirects running for at least a year.
6. Run the re-authorisation campaign. Before the renewal date, not after somebody notices the money stopped.
7. Cancel the old hosting last of all. And keep an archive of it, because you will be asked for something from 2018.

The same list as a print-and-tick checklist

The whole thing, written out

Eight guides covering the move end to end. They are free, they name no products, and they are just as useful if you decide to go somewhere else.

• How to move your club website to a new platform

  What actually transfers when a club changes website platform, what has to be rebuilt by hand, what can never move at all — and the order of operations that keeps your domain, your members and your search rankings intact.

• Club website migration checklist

  A print-and-tick checklist for moving a club website to a new platform — what to export before you commit, what to test before you switch, what to redirect, and the order that keeps your domain, your email and your members intact.

• Moving club member data between systems

  How to get your member roster out of one system and into another without losing records or breaking privacy duties — what a complete export looks like, how to clean it, how to reconcile the import, and what can never be transferred at all.

• Keeping your Google rankings when you change club website

  Changing website platform is the most common way a club accidentally disappears from search. Here is how redirects, canonical addresses, sitemaps and Search Console actually work, and the order to do them in so your rankings survive the move.

• Switching club software without losing your members

  Stored card details and direct debit authorities never move between systems — every payer has to authorise again. Here is why that is true on any platform, and how to run the re-authorisation campaign so the switch costs you money you were owed rather than members you had.

• How long does it take to switch club software?

  There is no honest average, because the work is not the same job twice. What decides your timeline is how much content you have, whether a usable export exists, and how often your committee can actually sit down — and only one of those is about software.

• What happens to your old club website

  Your domain, your hosting and your content are three separate things, and clubs lose the first one by cancelling in the wrong order. What to archive before you go, the safe order of cancellation, and how long to keep the redirects running afterwards.

• Is your club website being scraped?

  Automated copying of public club pages is ordinary, constant and mostly unstoppable — you cannot block bulk copying without also blocking search engines. So the realistic goal is not prevention. It is publishing less about people, and knowing when harvesting has happened.

Common questions about switching

Can a new platform import our old website automatically?

It can read what your site publishes publicly — page text, headings, images and news — and turn that into draft pages. It cannot reach anything behind a login, it cannot reproduce a bespoke layout exactly, and it cannot tell you whether the content is still true. Treat any automated copy as a first draft a volunteer reads page by page. On ClubHelix you give us the address, read what comes back, and publish the pages you are happy with — the roster still comes across from a CSV, because no reader of a public website can produce one.

Will we lose our Google rankings?

Only if the old addresses stop resolving. Rankings attach to individual URLs, not to a brand, so the work is keeping the domain and mapping every old address to its new home with a permanent redirect. Do that and a small club site usually settles within a month or two. Skip it and you start again from nothing.

Do our members have to pay again?

They have to authorise again, which is not the same thing. Stored cards and direct debits are held by the old platform’s payment provider and cannot be transferred to anyone. Plan a re-authorisation campaign into the switch, aimed at the renewal date people already expect, and you keep the members and the money.

How long does switching club software take?

There is no honest average, because it is not the same job twice. What decides it is how much content you have, whether a usable export exists, and how often your committee can actually sit down — and only the middle one is about software. Build the new site alongside the old one and the deadline stops being a deadline.

Can we keep our domain name?

Yes, provided your club controls the registration rather than a former webmaster or the platform you are leaving. Check that before you cancel anything. Clubs lose domain names by cancelling in the wrong order far more often than by anything technical, and a lost domain takes the club email address with it.

What if our club site is really a social media page?

Then copying it by crawling is off the table — it breaks the rules of the platform it sits on and fails behind consent walls anyway. Connecting to a page you administer is the supported route and a better one: real post dates, real events, real photos. That connection is part of the same release as the website import.

Still deciding what to move to?

Fair enough — working out what you are switching to comes before working out how. Start with what club management software actually covers and what a club should expect it to do, then come back here for the move itself. If your committee would rather hand the whole exercise over, our done-for-you service builds and brands the site and moves your content across for you.