Cutting the Cord: Wix to Vercel in One Morning

I built this site with AI in one sitting. But it was still hosted on Wix, because the domain was tangled up in their ecosystem. Today I cut the cord.

The migration itself wasn't technically hard — the Next.js site was already built, already deployed to a Vercel preview URL. The hard part was the DNS archaeology. My domain was registered through Loopia (a Swedish registrar), but the nameservers had been pointed to Wix at some point. So Wix was serving DNS, Loopia had a dormant zone, and neither system told you the full picture.

Here's what I actually had to do:

• Update A records in Wix DNS to point to Vercel (76.76.21.21) as an immediate fix
• Configure the domain in Loopia to point to Vercel as well
• Fix a nameserver ownership issue with Loopia (their system thought I wasn't the domain owner)
• Switch nameservers from Wix back to Loopia once they fixed the ownership
• Cancel Wix auto-renewal without losing the remaining subscription period

The nameserver ownership issue was the surprise. Loopia's panel threw an error — "Du kan inte byta namnservrar för domännamn du ej står som innehavare av" — which translates to "you can't change nameservers for a domain you don't own." Except I did own it. A quick email to their registry team fixed it, but it's the kind of thing that would stop a less stubborn person.

What enterprise IT teaches you about migrations: always have both sides pointing to the right place before you flip the switch. I updated DNS in Wix AND Loopia before changing nameservers, so there was zero downtime regardless of which DNS was authoritative at any given moment during propagation.

Things I added during the migration:

• Security headers (Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy) — these are the kind of headers that enterprise sites have and personal sites usually don't
• Open Graph image for social sharing — so LinkedIn previews actually show something
• Fixed a GA4 environment variable mismatch that meant analytics weren't tracking

The whole thing took one morning. The site now runs on Vercel with Loopia DNS, Google Workspace email untouched, security headers in place, and no dependency on Wix whatsoever. Auto-renewal is off. The subscription runs until October, but it's just burning down — nothing points there anymore.

Lesson: platforms make it easy to start and hard to leave. That's by design. Owning your stack — even for a personal site — means you control when and how you move. The DNS layer is where platform lock-in actually lives, and it's the layer most people don't think about until they try to leave.