Closing Your Business but Keeping the Website

Updated October 2026

When a restaurant, studio or shop closes, the website usually goes with it at the next renewal. That is often a loss: regulars look for the farewell note, journalists link to it, and for a designer or photographer the site is the portfolio of years of work. A website that never changes again does not need a monthly builder subscription. It needs a place to sit.

Three ways to keep it online

Option	Cost	Effort	Good for
Static export on a free host (Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages)	Free hosting, domain renewal only	An hour, once	Anyone comfortable uploading a folder
Static export with managed hosting	A few dollars a month	None after setup	Owners who want it handled
Single farewell page	Free	Minutes	When only the message matters

What to change before you freeze it

Add a short note at the top of the home page: closed since a date, thank you, where to find you now.
Remove or hide booking, ordering and gift card buttons so nobody pays for something that cannot happen.
Keep the menu, gallery and story pages. They are what people come back for.
Keep the domain renewing, or the address will be bought and reused by someone else.

Things that stop working

Online ordering, store checkout, scheduling and member logins run on Squarespace servers and end with the subscription. For a closed business that is usually what you want anyway.

The free check shows what your site will look like as a static copy. The export is $79 once, and hosting with your domain is $9 a month, or free if you host it yourself.

StaticExit is not affiliated with Squarespace, Inc.