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There are a few ways to do this, but most Dealers have their next vendor before they cancel their current site, so they can reference the live site.

That said, if you need one I used to use ScrapBook for Firefox - it downloads all assets and front-end required to have a full offsite version of every page. It's messy, but aside from functionality you'll have everything. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbook/

New website vendors essentially have 2 SEO-friendly options:

1. Match all the previous URLs with pages of the same content. Content can certainly change (Google encourages fresh content), but the important aspect is that the main content remains similar. SEO guys can chime in on the expert angle of this, but my understanding is that as long as the "authority" of the page remains similar / same you should not lose any traction.
   
   
2. Create 301 redirects for each of the previous URLs to make sure they match the new ones. This tends to be a one time opportunity, so going live without it is very risky if the page URLs have changed. Either way, sitemap helps Google navigate this and they're not as simple as we make them seem - when they re-scan the site they're going to make small adjustments but I rarely see then make a major adjustment in one go unless pages start having 404 Not Found errors.

Blogs still have value in SEO and it's often debated whether it makes sense to build it as an offsite authority or as an onsite content builder.

I won't pretend to be an expert on this one, but my personal opinion/experience is that onsite/same domain offers more SEO benefits. With either option the entire site can be exported to an XML file and re-imported to a new site. The only issue is losing assets if the old site goes offline, since the XML importer tries to download them from the old site.

Either way, I don't think DealerFire uses Wordpress so your options were very limited. Using Wordpress moving forward will solve this for you, but unfortunately won't solve the problem overnight. If you can find an archive of your old site online you can try and rebuild the pages to gain the authority back (if they worked before, they should work again).