Wix to WordPress Migration: How to Move Your Site

Why People Move From Wix to WordPress

A Wix to WordPress migration usually starts with a feeling that the site has outgrown its home. Wix is a genuinely good builder for getting a simple site online quickly, and there is no shame in having started there. But as a business grows, the same things that made it easy at the start begin to feel like walls, and the reasons people give for switching tend to fall into four groups.

Ownership and freedom

This is the big one. On Wix you are renting space on a closed platform. You do not fully own the underlying site, you cannot easily take it with you, and you are tied to that one company for as long as the site exists. With WordPress you own your site outright. You can host it wherever you like, move it whenever you like, and no single company holds the keys. For a business that plans to be around for years, that independence matters.

Flexibility

WordPress can be almost anything, because of its enormous library of themes and plugins that add features from stores to bookings to memberships to advanced forms. On a builder you are limited to what the platform offers and the apps it allows. On WordPress, if you can imagine a feature, there is usually a way to add it, and if there is not, a developer can build it. Sites tend to switch precisely when they want to do something the builder will not let them.

SEO and performance

WordPress gives you deeper control over the technical details that influence search rankings and speed, from how URLs are structured to how the site is optimised behind the scenes. Many people move because they feel their search growth has stalled and they want the finer control that WordPress and its SEO plugins provide. Our guide to WordPress SEO covers just how much that control can do once you have it.

The cost of scaling

Builders can look cheap at the smallest level, but as you add features, storage, and capability, the costs climb and the ceilings appear. WordPress itself is open and free to use, and while you pay for hosting and any premium add-ons, the platform tends to scale in capability without hitting the same walls. Businesses that expect to grow often find WordPress the more sensible long term home.

Wix and WordPress Compared

Before you move, it helps to be clear about what you are trading. Wix and WordPress are built on different philosophies. Wix is a closed, all in one service that trades control for convenience. WordPress is an open platform that trades a little convenience for control and ownership. Neither is simply better in the abstract, but for a growing business the balance usually tips toward WordPress, and seeing the differences side by side makes the reasons concrete.

The pattern is consistent. Wix wins on getting started fast and holding your hand. WordPress wins on everything that matters more as a site becomes central to a business: ownership, flexibility, control, and the freedom to move. If those are the things you now care about, the move is worth making.

What Transfers and What Does Not

This is the single most important thing to understand before you begin, because it sets the right expectation and saves a lot of confusion. A Wix to WordPress move is not a copy and paste of the whole site. The two platforms build and store sites in completely different ways, and Wix does not hand over its design in a shape WordPress can simply import. So some things come across and some things are rebuilt.

What transfers is your content: the words, the images, and your blog posts, which can be exported and brought into WordPress. Your domain name transfers too, so you keep the same web address. What does not transfer is the design and layout, the Wix specific features and apps, and the underlying structure of the site, all of which are recreated in WordPress using a theme and plugins that do the same jobs.

The useful way to picture it is moving house. You pack up and bring all your belongings, your furniture and your possessions, but you do not lift the old building across. You move into a new house and arrange your things inside it. Done well, the new house is bigger, better built, and more truly yours. The rebuild step is not a chore forced on you by the move. It is a genuine opportunity to end up with a faster, cleaner, better organised site instead of a carbon copy of the one you were trying to move on from.

It is worth being realistic about one more thing that does not transfer: your familiarity. You know your way around the Wix editor, and WordPress will feel unfamiliar for a little while. That is normal and short lived. Once the new site is set up with a page builder, the day to day tasks you care about, adding a post, editing text, swapping an image, become routine again quickly. The unfamiliarity is a few days of learning, not a permanent cost, and it buys you a platform that will not fence you in later. Many people who dreaded that part tell us afterward that it was far smaller than they feared.

Before You Start: Plan the Move

A little planning up front makes the whole migration smoother, whether you do it yourself or hire help. The goal of this stage is to know your current site well enough that nothing is forgotten and to decide what the new site should be, rather than blindly recreating the old one.

Start by taking stock of your existing Wix site. List every page, note your blog posts, record your important images and any downloadable files, and write down every feature the site uses, such as a contact form, a booking tool, a gallery, or a store. This inventory is your map. It tells you what has to be moved and what has to be rebuilt, and it is the first thing a professional would ask you for anyway.

Next, note the web address of every page, because you will need these later to set up the redirects that protect your search rankings. This is the step people skip and regret. A simple list of your current page addresses, saved before you change anything, is worth its weight later. Finally, decide on the shape of the new site: will you keep the same structure, or is this a chance to tidy it up? A quick plan now prevents a scramble later. If you want to see how a WordPress site comes together from scratch, our guide on how to make a WordPress website is a good companion to this one.

Step 1: Export Your Content

With a plan in hand, the first hands on step is getting your content out of Wix. What you can export depends on the type of content. Blog posts are the most portable, because Wix can produce an export of your blog that WordPress is able to import, bringing your posts across with much of their text and structure intact. That covers a big part of a content heavy site in one step.

The rest of your content, the pages, the text, and the images, generally comes across more manually. For a small site this is often just a matter of copying the text of each page and saving the images so they can be added to the new site. It sounds tedious, but for most sites it is quick, and it doubles as a chance to review and improve the content rather than move it word for word. Images should be saved at good quality so the new site looks sharp, and it is worth keeping them organised by page so the rebuild goes faster.

Keep everything you export in one tidy place, matched to your inventory from the planning stage. The cleaner and more organised this collection is, the faster and less error prone the rebuild will be. If your site is large, or you would rather not do the manual work, this is one of the points where handing the job over saves real time, since moving content efficiently and without loss is exactly the kind of thing a team that does this often has down to a routine.

Step 2: Rebuild the Site in WordPress

Now the new site takes shape. This is the heart of the move, and it is where the opportunity lives, because you are not copying the old site but building a better version of it in a platform that will not hold you back. The broad steps are to set up WordPress on good hosting, choose a design, and recreate your pages and content within it.

First you need WordPress running on a host. Choosing a good host matters, because it affects your site's speed, reliability, and security, and it is the foundation everything else sits on. Our guide to the best WordPress hosting covers what to look for. With WordPress installed, you pick a theme, which sets the overall look, and a page builder if you want the same visual, drag and drop editing you were used to on Wix, so building pages feels familiar rather than foreign.

Then you recreate your pages, laying out each one and dropping in the text and images you exported. Add plugins to recreate the features your Wix site had, a contact form, a gallery, an SEO tool, and so on, choosing well reviewed, actively maintained ones. Take the time to get the important pages right, since this is the version people will see for years. When it is done, you have a site that does everything the old one did and more, built on a platform you own. Do all of this on the new site quietly, before you point your domain at it, so the public keeps seeing your live Wix site until the new one is genuinely ready.

Step 3: Move Your Domain

Your domain name, the web address people type to reach you, is separate from the website built on it, which is what makes it possible to keep the same address after the move. This matters a great deal, because your domain is what your visitors know and what your search rankings are attached to. Changing it is not necessary and would be a setback, so the aim is always to keep the same domain and simply point it at the new WordPress site.

How you do that depends on where your domain is registered. If your domain was bought through Wix, you can usually either transfer it to a separate domain registrar or update its settings to point at your new hosting, depending on what you prefer and what the platform allows. If your domain was registered elsewhere to begin with, it is even simpler, since you just update where it points. Either way, the domain keeps working and keeps its history.

The one thing to handle with care is email and timing. If you use email addresses on your domain, those must keep working through the change, and the switch should be timed so the site never goes dark during it. This is a common place for a rushed self move to cause an email outage that nobody notices for days. Planning the domain move carefully, and knowing the small waiting period while changes take effect across the internet, keeps the transition smooth. When we handle a move, the domain and its email are part of the plan from the start, precisely because they are so easy to get wrong in a hurry.

Step 4: Set Up Redirects to Keep Your SEO

If there is one step that separates a clean migration from a costly one, it is this. Redirects are what carry your hard won search rankings from the old site to the new one, and skipping them is the most common way a Wix to WordPress move goes wrong. Give this step the attention it deserves and your rankings follow you. Ignore it and you can watch traffic drain away over the weeks after launch.

The idea is simple once you see it. Search engines and other websites remember your pages by their web addresses. When you rebuild in WordPress, some of those addresses may change, and every visitor or search engine that arrives at an old address needs to be sent smoothly to the matching new page. A redirect is exactly that instruction: it forwards an old link to its new home automatically, so nothing lands on a dead end. This is why you saved your old page addresses back in the planning stage.

To do it, map each old Wix page address to its equivalent new WordPress address, then set up a redirect for each one, which on WordPress is easily managed with a redirect plugin. Where possible, keep the new addresses close to the old ones to make the mapping clean. Alongside the redirects, keep your page titles and content intact so search engines still recognise the pages, and make sure the new site is open to search engines rather than accidentally blocked. Done together, these steps preserve your rankings through the move. This is delicate enough that many people hand exactly this part to a professional, and our dedicated WordPress migration services treat redirects and SEO preservation as a core part of every move. The official WordPress developer resources document how URLs and redirects behave under the hood.

Media, Forms, and Store Items

Beyond pages and posts, a few specific parts of a site deserve their own attention during a move, because they are the ones most likely to be forgotten or to behave differently on the new platform.

Images and media

Every image and file needs to make it across and be added to the new site's media library, then placed correctly on the pages. This is straightforward but detailed work, and it is where broken image gaps appear if something is missed. Saving your media in good quality during the export stage pays off here, since the new site should look at least as sharp as the old one.

Contact forms and features

Any form or interactive feature from the Wix site is rebuilt using a WordPress plugin that does the same job. Contact forms, booking tools, galleries, and pop ups all have well established WordPress equivalents. Recreate each one and, importantly, test it, because a contact form that looks fine but does not actually deliver its messages is a silent way to lose enquiries.

Store items

If your Wix site has a store, the products move to WooCommerce, the store system for WordPress. Product details and images can be brought across, and the store is rebuilt with your payment and shipping options set up. A store is the most involved part of any move, because it takes money and every step of the checkout has to be tested before launch. If your site includes a store, it is the strongest single reason to consider professional help, so that nothing about taking payments is left to chance.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Most Wix to WordPress moves that go wrong go wrong in the same predictable ways. Knowing them in advance is half the defence, so here are the ones we see most and how to avoid each.

• Skipping the redirects. The most damaging mistake by far. Without redirects, your ranking pages become dead ends and traffic fades. Always map old addresses to new ones and set up the redirects before and at launch.
• Leaving the new site blocked from search engines. WordPress has a setting that asks search engines not to index a site, useful while you build in private but disastrous if you forget to turn it off at launch. The site goes live looking perfect and quietly stays invisible. Check this at go live.
• Switching the domain too early. If you point your domain at the new site before it is finished, visitors hit a half built page. Build and test everything first, then switch.
• Forgetting email. Domain changes can knock out email on your domain if not planned. Confirm your email keeps working through and after the move.
• Missing content or images. Working without an inventory means pages and images get left behind. The planning stage list prevents this.
• Not testing forms and checkout. A form or checkout that looks right but does not work loses enquiries or sales silently. Test every interactive element before launch.

None of these are hard to avoid once you know they exist. They catch people out because a migration has a lot of moving parts and it is easy to focus on the visible ones and miss the quiet ones. A careful checklist, or a team that works from one every week, is what keeps them from happening. If you have already hit one of these, our migration services can rescue and finish a move that went sideways.

Doing It Yourself vs Hiring Help

So should you move your Wix site yourself or hire someone? Both are valid, and the right answer depends on your site and your comfort with the work. Being honest about that saves you frustration either way.

Doing it yourself makes sense if your site is small and simple, a handful of pages and a blog, and you enjoy hands on work and have the time. The steps in this guide are all achievable by a determined non specialist, and there is real satisfaction in learning your new platform from the inside. Our general guide to migrating a WordPress website and our Blogger to WordPress migration walkthrough go deeper on the mechanics if you want to try.

Hiring help makes sense if your site is larger, if it has a store, if your search rankings are important to your business, or if you simply do not have the time or the appetite for the fiddly parts. A migration is a job where the mistakes are quiet and the cost of getting the redirects or the store wrong is high. Handing it over buys you a clean move, protected rankings, a site rebuilt properly rather than hastily, and your own time back. Because we are developers, we can also handle the awkward cases, custom features, unusual content, and a store's checkout, that stop a self move in its tracks. The review costs nothing, so even if you lean toward doing it yourself, a quick conversation tells you what you would be taking on.

How Long It Takes and What It Costs

Two practical questions come up every time: how long will this take, and what will it cost? Both depend on the size and complexity of your site, but the ranges are predictable enough to plan around.

On timing, a small site of a few pages and a blog can be moved in a matter of days, most of which is the rebuild and testing rather than the export. A larger site with many pages takes longer, and a store takes longest of all, often a couple of weeks, because there is more content to move and far more to test before it can safely go live. Much of the time in any migration is testing, and that is time well spent, since it is what stops problems reaching your visitors.

On cost, the honest answer is that it depends on the site, and the only accurate figure is a quote for your exact one. A small brochure site is a light job; a large site or a store is more involved. What drives the cost is the amount of content, the number of features to rebuild, and whether there is a store or custom work. Rather than guess, we look at your actual site and give you a fixed quote before anything starts, and the review is free with no obligation. In our experience the cost of a professional move is modest next to the cost of a botched one, whether that shows up as lost rankings, a broken store, or the days you would spend fixing it yourself. You can compare our pricing approach or see the range of WordPress services we offer.

One point worth making about both time and cost: the size that matters is not how big the site feels to you, but how many distinct pieces have to be moved and tested. A site with fifty near identical product pages is often quicker than a small site with a dozen custom layouts, a booking system, and a store, because the second one has more unique parts to rebuild and check. When we quote, we look at that real complexity rather than a page count, which is why an accurate figure comes from looking at your actual site rather than a rough guess. If you send over your site address and a note about any special features, we can usually give you a clear sense of both the timeline and the cost quickly.

Getting Started

Moving from Wix to WordPress is one of the better decisions a growing site can make, because it trades a comfortable ceiling for real ownership, flexibility, and room to grow. The move takes some care, especially around content, the domain, and the redirects that protect your rankings, but none of it is beyond reach, and the result is a site that is truly yours and can become whatever your business needs.

If you want to do it yourself, use this guide as your plan: take stock of your site, export your content, rebuild it properly in WordPress on good hosting, move your domain, and above all set up your redirects so your search rankings come with you. Take your time on the testing, since that is what keeps the launch clean. And if at any point it feels like more than you want to take on, that is a perfectly good reason to hand it over.

We move sites from Wix to WordPress regularly, and we know exactly where the traps are, from the quiet redirect mistakes to the store checkout details that cannot be left to chance. We rebuild your site cleaner and faster than it was, move your content, protect your rankings, and switch it over without downtime, so from the outside the move looks like nothing happened except that your site got better and became your own. You can get a free quote and we will tell you honestly what your move involves, or book a quick call to talk it through first. The review costs nothing, there is no pressure, and it is the first step to owning your site.