You can migrate Wix to WordPress without losing rankings, and the technical work is not the hard part. One spreadsheet decides the outcome. Map every existing URL to its replacement, and do it before anyone designs anything. Skip it and you lose the traffic you spent years earning. Build it and the move is routine.
Plan three to five weeks to migrate Wix to WordPress on a typical small business site. Most of that time goes on content, not code.
What actually transfers, and what does not
Set expectations before you migrate Wix to WordPress, because the gap between what owners assume and what actually exports causes most of the surprise.
| Asset | Transfers? | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Written content | Yes | Copy and paste, or export where the platform allows it |
| Images | Yes, with effort | Downloadable individually or by crawling the site |
| Blog posts | Usually | Wix offers a blog export; Squarespace exports to a WordPress file |
| Products | Partly | CSV export exists but variants and images often need rework |
| Your design | No | Templates are proprietary. The new site is rebuilt, not moved. |
| App configurations | No | Bookings, forms and popups are all reconfigured from scratch |
| Reviews on the platform | No | Native review widgets do not export anywhere |
Read the last three rows again. Anyone promising to move your site wholesale is describing something the platforms do not permit. A migration is a rebuild that preserves your content and your URLs — which is fine, and worth saying plainly before you start.
Step 1: list every URL you currently have
Do this before anything else. Not once the design lands, and certainly not in launch week.
Pull your existing pages from your sitemap, usually at /sitemap.xml. Cross-check against Search Console, which shows the pages Google actually indexed — including ones you forgot exist. Old blog posts and abandoned landing pages frequently carry more traffic than the homepage, and they are exactly what people delete by accident.
Put them in a spreadsheet with two columns: old URL, new URL. Leave the second column empty for now. That file is the single most valuable artifact of the whole project.
Step 2: find out which pages actually earn
Do this before deciding the new structure, not after.
Sort your pages by traffic and by enquiries. Most small business sites find that four or five pages produce nearly everything, and that the pages the owner cares about are not always among them. A three-year-old blog post answering one specific question routinely outperforms the services page.
Preserve those pages carefully. Merge, rewrite or drop everything else, provided each one still redirects somewhere sensible. Consolidating twenty thin pages into six substantial ones during a migration is usually a gain rather than a loss, and it is far easier to do now than later.
Step 3: build on a staging domain
Build the new site somewhere nobody can find it while your existing one keeps trading.
Rewrite content and replace images at this stage. Do not simply paste across what you had, because builder-era copy usually bends around template constraints you no longer have. It is also the cheapest moment you will ever have to fix weak service pages.
Keep the staging site out of the index. A password, or a noindex header, or both. A staging copy that gets crawled creates duplicate content problems that outlast the project.
Fill in the second column of your spreadsheet as you build each page. By the end of this step it should have no gaps.
Step 4: the redirect map
Everything above exists to make this step possible. Migrations succeed or fail right here.
Every old URL needs a 301 redirect pointing at its closest equivalent. This is the core of any plan to migrate Wix to WordPress. Not the homepage — the closest equivalent. Redirecting everything to the homepage is technically a redirect and practically the same as deleting the page, because the signal does not carry.
| Old page | Redirect to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| An equivalent page exists | That page | Signals transfer almost entirely |
| Content merged into a larger page | The merged page | Works well, and often ranks better |
| Content genuinely retired | The nearest category or parent page | Preserves some value |
| Page had no traffic and no links | Nearest parent, or leave as 410 | Not worth agonising over |
| Anything at all | Not the homepage by default | Google treats bulk homepage redirects as soft 404s |
One Wix-specific trap. Older Wix sites used hash-fragment URLs containing #!, which normal server-side redirects cannot handle. If your site has these, flag it early — the fix is different and it needs handling before launch rather than after.
Step 5: launch on a Tuesday morning
Not Friday. That sounds like superstition and it is not.
Launch day is a DNS change plus switching on the redirects. Most of the time nothing goes wrong. When something does — a form not delivering, a redirect loop, an image path broken — you want a full working week ahead of you and people available to fix it, rather than a silent weekend while your contact form quietly fails.
Before you point the domain, run through five checks. Every redirect resolves. Contact forms deliver to a monitored inbox. Analytics and Search Console sit on the new site. The staging copy is blocked or gone. And the SSL certificate covers both the www and non-www versions.
Then submit the new sitemap in Search Console the same day. It costs a minute and shortens the recovery window noticeably.
Step 6: watch for six weeks
A migration does not finish at launch. It finishes when the numbers settle.
Check Search Console weekly for crawl errors and for pages reporting as not found. Every 404 that appears means a redirect you missed, and each one takes five minutes to fix if you catch it early. Watch your top five pages specifically rather than total traffic, because totals hide the thing you actually care about.
What happens to your rankings
Expect a dip when you migrate Wix to WordPress. Plan for it rather than panicking about it.
| Period | What normally happens |
|---|---|
| Week 1–2 | Rankings wobble as Google re-crawls and follows the redirects |
| Week 3–4 | Most positions return to roughly where they were |
| Week 5–8 | Speed improvements begin showing; some pages rank higher than before |
| Month 3+ | Settled. Anything still down is a redirect that was missed. |
If traffic falls sharply and does not recover within a month, the cause is almost always the redirect map rather than the new design. Check for pages returning 404 before assuming anything else, because that is the fault in the overwhelming majority of cases we are asked to diagnose.
A worked example
Numbers make this concrete. Here is the shape of a typical job to migrate Wix to WordPress.
A service business on Wix with 22 pages. The URL audit found 31 indexed pages, because nine old blog posts had been forgotten and two landing pages from a past campaign were still live. Four of those forgotten pages carried a fifth of all organic traffic between them.
Had the project skipped the audit and rebuilt only the 22 known pages, those nine would have 404’d on launch day. That is the single most common way a migration goes wrong, and it happens to organised people who simply worked from the wrong list.
| Stage | Days | Who does it |
|---|---|---|
| URL audit and traffic review | 1 | Whoever builds it |
| Structure decisions | 2 | Both of you |
| Content rewrite and images | 8–12 | Mostly you |
| Build on staging | 8–10 | The builder |
| Redirect map and testing | 2 | The builder |
| Launch and monitoring | 1, then 6 weeks light | The builder |
Notice which row is longest. Content sits with you, and it is where nearly every overrun starts. Booking a fortnight for it in advance is the single best thing a client can do to keep a migration on schedule.
The consolidation gain is worth noting too. That business went from 31 pages to 18 stronger ones, with everything redirected. Fewer, better pages beat more, thinner ones — and a migration is the cheapest moment you will ever have to make that trade.
What you gain, honestly assessed
Worth being specific about the upside, because “you own it” is true and vague.
Speed. Builder platforms ship code you never asked for, and every app you installed layers more on. A hand-built page carrying the same content routinely weighs a fraction of the template version. On a phone on patchy mobile data, that difference is the whole conversion story.
Control of the technical layer. Title tags, structured data, redirects, headers — all things builder platforms restrict to varying degrees. If local search matters to you, this is usually the reason to move rather than the money.
No transaction percentage. Platforms taking a cut of every sale on top of your payment processor is the line that grows as you grow. Removing it is the clearest financial gain available.
Portability. Once you migrate Wix to WordPress, the files sit on hosting you chose in a format any developer can pick up. Leaving your next agency becomes a file transfer rather than a rebuild, which is worth more than it sounds.
What you do not gain is instant rankings. The new site is faster and better structured, and that helps over months. Anybody promising a jump in week one is describing something that does not happen.
What a migration quote should contain
Quotes to migrate Wix to WordPress vary wildly, and the variation usually comes down to whether the redirect map is in scope or quietly excluded.
| Line | Must be there? | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|
| URL audit and redirect map | Yes | If unmentioned, assume excluded. Ask directly. |
| Content migration | Yes | Clarify whether they move it or you paste it |
| Design and build | Yes | Remember your old design does not transfer |
| Form and checkout rebuild | Yes, if you have them | App configurations are recreated from scratch |
| Post-launch monitoring | Ideally | Four to six weeks of 404 checking |
| Domain transfer support | Cheap to include | Can take a week, so start early |
Ask one question of every quote: “Will you produce a redirect map before launch, and can I see it?” Anyone who has done this work will have planned it already. Anyone who asks what you mean has told you something useful for free.
Our guide to website design packages covers the wider question of what a proposal should itemise, and the same nine-point test applies here.
Five mistakes that cost people rankings
All five come up repeatedly when people migrate Wix to WordPress, and all five are avoidable in an afternoon.
Redirecting everything to the homepage. Fast, tempting, and close to useless. Google reads bulk homepage redirects as soft 404s and passes almost nothing through.
Cancelling the old platform on launch day. Keep the subscription running for a month. You will want to check what a page used to say, and once the account closes that reference disappears.
Forgetting the www variant. Both versions need to resolve and one should redirect to the other. This breaks more launches than any technical fault.
Leaving the staging site indexable. A crawled staging copy competes with the real site and can outrank it. Block it before you build, not after.
Not telling Search Console. Submit the new sitemap on launch day. It is free, takes a minute, and materially shortens how long recovery takes when you migrate Wix to WordPress.
Should you migrate at all?
Not everybody should migrate Wix to WordPress, and we would rather say so.
Stay where you are if your site is a few pages of information, nobody searches for what you do, and your monthly platform bill is genuinely small. The move costs real time and returns little in that situation.
Move if money passes through the site, because platform transaction percentages compound as you grow. Move if local search matters and you keep hitting settings you cannot change. And move once your monthly total has drifted past the point where three years of it exceeds a one-off build — our breakdown of website builder costs runs that arithmetic properly.
If you are still weighing the decision rather than the mechanics, website builder vs web designer covers the trade-offs on both sides.
Squarespace, Shopify and the others
The process to migrate Wix to WordPress works the same way for other platforms. Only the export tooling differs.
| Platform | Export quality | The specific catch |
|---|---|---|
| Wix | Limited | Blog exports; pages largely need manual recreation |
| Squarespace | Better | Exports a WordPress file, but only one blog and no product variants |
| Shopify | Good for products | Product CSV is solid; app-driven content is not |
| GoDaddy builder | Poor | Effectively a manual rebuild |
Whichever platform you leave, the redirect map matters more than the export. A perfect content export with no redirects loses more than a manual rebuild with a complete map, and that ordering surprises people every time.
Will I lose my Google rankings?
Not if every old URL redirects to its closest equivalent. Expect a wobble for two to four weeks while Google re-crawls, then recovery. Sites that lose rankings permanently almost always launched without a complete redirect map.
Can I keep my domain?
Yes. You own the domain regardless of where the site lives. If you registered it through the builder, transfer it out first — that alone can take a week, so start it early rather than on launch day.
Does my design come across?
No. Builder templates stay proprietary and no export includes them. The new site is rebuilt to look how you want, which is usually an improvement, but budget for it as design work rather than assuming it transfers.
How long does it take?
Three to five weeks for a typical small business site. Content approval is the usual delay, not build time. Large product catalogues and multilingual sites take longer.
Can I do it myself?
The rebuild, yes, if you are comfortable with WordPress. The redirect map is where self-migrations go wrong, because it requires knowing which pages matter and checking every one resolves. Do that part carefully or pay somebody to.
What about my platform reviews?
They do not transfer. This is a real loss and worth planning around — start collecting reviews on your Google Business Profile before you migrate, since those stay with you wherever the website lives.
The one thing to get right
If you take one thing from this: build the spreadsheet first.
Every migration horror story we have rescued traces back to the same omission. Nobody listed the old URLs, so nobody noticed that eleven pages carrying most of the traffic now return 404. By the time the drop is visible in the numbers, weeks have passed and recovery takes months.
Two columns. Old URL, new URL. No blank cells. Do that and you can migrate Wix to WordPress with very little drama, whoever ends up doing the build.
Export capabilities and platform behaviour change without notice. Verify current export options before planning a migration. This is general commercial guidance. Last reviewed August 2026.
