Can You Export Your Website If You Leave a Website Builder
It's a reasonable thing to want to know before you build anything: if you outgrow a tool, or just want to switch, can you take your website with you, or are you starting over. The honest, current answer across most of the website builder industry, not just Nova, is that real export, clean code you could host anywhere else, is the exception rather than the norm. Platforms like Wix and Framer generally don't offer full HTML export at all, and even builders that export something usually hand you content without the design, meaning you'd still be rebuilding the visual layout on whatever you moved to.
That's worth understanding before it becomes a decision point, because it changes what question you should actually be asking. "Can I export the code" matters most if you're planning to hand a site off to a developer for custom work later. For most small business, portfolio, and personal sites, the more useful question is "how painful would it be to rebuild this somewhere else if I had to," and the answer to that is usually less dramatic than "export or nothing" makes it sound, especially with a description-based tool.
With Nova specifically, there's no confirmed code export feature, and if that's a hard requirement for you, it's worth checking Nova's current capabilities directly rather than assuming either way. What is true structurally is that a Nova site starts from a written description of your business, not a canvas you spent hours arranging by hand, which means if you ever did need to rebuild it elsewhere, you're starting from a description you already have, your services, your story, your photos, rather than from nothing. Nova's guide to redesigning an old website covers a related situation, rebuilding fresh rather than migrating, and the same logic applies to a hypothetical future move away from any builder, not just an old outdated site.
FAQ
A few code-focused tools offer HTML or code export, but most mainstream builders, including some of the largest names in the industry, don't support full export, or only export content without the design. It's worth checking a specific platform's current policy rather than assuming.
That's not a confirmed feature. If code portability is a requirement for you, check Nova's current capabilities directly before building around an assumption either way.
No, you're not locked into the content, just the specific platform's canvas or generated output. You can always describe the same business fresh to a different tool, it's more of a rebuild than a migration, which is true across most of this industry, not specific to any one builder.
See what a described, not designed, starting point looks like. Describe your site to Nova and preview it before you publish anything.