Migrating from Wix to WordPress: a Step-by-Step Plan That Doesn’t Lose Your Rankings

Moving a site from Wix to WordPress is mostly tedious, not hard. The technical move takes a day on a small site. The cleanup — redirects, image alt-text, broken Velo widgets, missing schema, the contact form that used Wix Ascend — takes a week. We have done this enough times to have a checklist; here it is, with the parts most “how to migrate” posts skip.

A quick scope note: this article covers a content-heavy Wix site (blog, brochure, small e-commerce up to ~200 products). Wix Studio sites with heavy Velo code, multi-store Wix marketplaces, or Wix Bookings are different jobs. If you have any of those, skip ahead to our migration service — bracket two or three covers your case.

Why people move off Wix in the first place

We almost never get a migration request because Wix “doesn’t work”. It usually works fine. The reasons are:

• SEO ceiling. Wix improved a lot after 2020, but you still cannot edit your robots.txt freely, server-side redirect at scale is awkward, and you cannot install RankMath or Yoast with the schema controls you actually need.
• Vendor lock-in pricing. Wix Business Unlimited is $36/month before apps. Add a serious form builder, a backup app, an SEO app — you are at $80-110/month and you still rent the platform. A WordPress site at the same feature level runs $30-50/month on Cloudways or Kinsta with Wordfence, RankMath, and WP Migrate licenses owned outright.
• Customisation walls. The moment you need a non-trivial integration — HubSpot deal stages mapped to a custom post type, ActiveCampaign tags from a quiz, a B2B portal with role-based pricing — Wix tells you “use Velo” and Velo is its own walled garden.
• Resale and handover. Try selling a Wix site. Buyers ask for hosting access and you have nothing meaningful to hand over. WordPress sites change hands cleanly.

If none of those apply to you, do not migrate. Wix is a perfectly reasonable platform for a five-page brochure. Read our piece on when WordPress beats Wix and when it doesn’t before you commit.

What you can and cannot bring across

Before any timeline, you need to know what survives the move and what gets rebuilt. Here is the honest breakdown.

Things that move cleanly

• Blog posts (title, content, featured image, publish date, categories)
• Static page content (text and inline images)
• Product catalogue, if simple (SKU, price, description, gallery, basic variants)
• Customer list for email marketing (CSV export)
• Order history as a CSV record, not a working WooCommerce orders table

Things that need a rebuild

• Design. Wix is a visual builder with absolute positioning. WordPress themes use grid and flex layouts. There is no “import my Wix design”. You either rebuild in a block theme (Astra, Kadence, GeneratePress) or you ship a redesign and use the migration as the trigger.
• Forms. Wix Forms data does not export to anything useful. Pick a WordPress form (Fluent Forms, Gravity Forms, WS Form) and rebuild each form by hand. There usually are not many.
• Velo code. Anything you wrote in Velo — custom database collections, dynamic pages driven by code — is non-portable. The data exports as JSON or CSV; the behaviour is rebuilt as a custom post type plus ACF, or a small WP plugin.
• Wix Bookings. Move to Amelia, FluentBooking, or BookingPress. Customers stay; appointments do not.
• Wix Ascend automations. Rebuild in FluentCRM or Mailchimp, depending on volume.
• Mobile-specific layouts. Wix lets you author a separate mobile design. WordPress block themes use responsive CSS. Plan for QA on phone before launch.

Things that always break and nobody warns you

• Wix image URLs use the wixstatic.com CDN with their own transformation parameters. After migration, every image referenced inline (not just featured image) needs to be re-uploaded to the WordPress media library or the page renders with hotlinked Wix URLs that Wix may eventually block.
• Wix dynamic pages (those that pull from a database collection) use URLs like /team/[Team Member]. The new URLs will be /team/{slug}/. Every internal link, every external backlink, every social-share is a 404 unless redirected one-for-one.
• Anchor links to Wix sections (#SectionID) usually do not survive — Wix auto-generates section IDs and your editor changes them when you rebuild.
• Wix’s auto-generated XML sitemap drops the moment you flip DNS. Generate the WordPress sitemap (RankMath default) and submit it to Search Console the same day.

The migration in six phases

This is the order we use on a Cloudways or Kinsta destination. Adjust hosting steps for your provider.

Phase 1 — Audit and inventory (day 1)

You cannot move what you have not counted. Pull a full URL inventory from Wix:

1. Export the Wix sitemap (/sitemap.xml) and parse it. Screaming Frog free version does up to 500 URLs.
2. Pull Google Search Console “All known URLs” — Wix often has indexed URLs not in the sitemap (old preview links, sub-pages).
3. Export Wix Stores products as CSV.
4. Export blog posts. Wix exports blog content as XML through their import/export tool; if it fails on a specific post, you copy that one by hand. Plan one hour of manual recovery on a 100-post blog.
5. List every form on the site with the destination email and whether it pushes to Ascend or HubSpot.
6. Screenshot every page that uses a Velo widget. Those are your rebuild list.

By end of day 1 you should have: a spreadsheet of every URL on the site, a list of forms with destinations, a list of integrations (analytics, pixels, chat widgets, third-party embeds), and a list of Velo-dependent pages.

Phase 2 — Stand up the destination (day 2)

Pick the WordPress host. Our defaults for this size of project:

• Up to 30,000 visits/month: Cloudways on Vultr High Frequency, $14-22/month, plus a $5 Cloudflare-equivalent. We bundle Wordfence (free), RankMath (paid $79/year for the schema controls), and WP Rocket ($59/year first year).
• 30,000-150,000 visits/month: Kinsta Pro plan, $60/month, includes their CDN. Same plugin stack.
• Higher traffic or revenue-critical: WP Engine Premium or Pantheon Performance.

Theme choice matters more than hosting at this stage. Pick a block theme that actually has documentation. Kadence Pro, GeneratePress Premium, and Astra Pro are the three we use. Avoid bundled multi-purpose themes (Avada, BeTheme, The7) on a migration; they slow down the rebuild and lock you into their builder.

Install a staging subdomain (staging.yoursite.com) and password-protect it. All work happens here, not on the live domain.

Phase 3 — Content import (days 3-4)

Blog posts go in first. We use the official WordPress Importer plugin against the Wix XML export, then run a cleanup script we keep in our toolbox that:

• Downloads every wixstatic.com image and re-uploads to the WordPress media library
• Rewrites the inline img src attributes to local URLs
• Strips Wix’s wrapping div classes that mess with theme styling
• Normalises heading levels (Wix often nests H2 inside H4 wrappers; we promote to clean H2/H3 hierarchy)

Pages get rebuilt manually. There is no automated path that produces a result you would publish. Use the audit screenshots and recreate each page in Gutenberg or the block builder of your choice. A 15-page brochure site is two days of focused work for one designer.

Products: WooCommerce has a CSV importer that takes the Wix export with column mapping. Categories and inventory levels come through; product images need re-uploading (same wixstatic problem).

Phase 4 — The redirect map (day 5)

This is the step that determines whether you keep your rankings. Skip it and you will lose 60-80% of organic traffic for three to six months.

Build a CSV with two columns: old_url and new_url. Every URL from your Phase 1 inventory needs a row. Most pages will be a clean one-for-one. Some change structure (Wix dynamic pages especially) and you need to map the new slug. A few will retire — point those to the closest topical page, not the homepage.

Then implement the redirects:

• Redirection plugin (free) handles up to a few thousand rules without performance loss
• RankMath’s redirection module if you already paid for RankMath Pro
• Nginx config for sites over 5,000 redirects (we add them directly at the server level on Cloudways)

Pull the live site through Screaming Frog after redirects are loaded but before DNS cuts over. Every old URL should return a single 301 to its new equivalent. No chains, no 404s.

Phase 5 — Forms, integrations, tracking (day 6)

Rebuild each form. For most sites this is three to seven forms. Use the same field names so anything downstream (HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Pipedrive) keeps mapping cleanly.

Re-install tracking. The migration is a chance to clean up — most Wix sites we audit have three or four leftover scripts from old vendors. Now you can choose: GA4 only, GA4 plus Meta Pixel, plus a heatmap (Microsoft Clarity free, or Hotjar paid).

Re-verify Search Console and Bing Webmaster. Set up a new property for the WordPress site, but keep the Wix property too — both can coexist on the same domain, and Wix will keep reporting until the DNS change.

Phase 6 — DNS cutover (day 7)

Lower the TTL on your DNS record to 300 seconds two days before launch. On launch day:

1. Final sync of any blog posts published on Wix in the last week
2. Update the A record (or CNAME) to point at the new host
3. Watch DNS propagation with dig from a couple of regions
4. Re-test the redirect map immediately — fire a request against ten old URLs and confirm 301s
5. Submit the new sitemap to Search Console
6. Cancel the Wix subscription only after seven days of clean traffic on the new site, not before

If something is wrong, you have not destroyed the old site. The Wix instance is still there until you cancel.

What it actually costs

Honest pricing. These are the brackets we publish on our migration service page.

• $800-1,800. Same-platform-style move (small Wix brochure to WordPress, no design refresh, <30 pages, <5 forms, no e-commerce). Database, files, redirects, DNS cutover. We use this bracket about 30% of the time.
• $2,000-5,000. Where most projects land. Wix to WooCommerce with a design pass, up to 200 products, custom forms rebuilt, full redirect map, schema, analytics. Two to three weeks elapsed.
• $4,500-12,000. Larger or more complex jobs. Multi-language Wix, Wix Bookings move, custom Velo code rebuilt as a small plugin, B2B portal with role-based pricing. Three to six weeks.

What is not in those numbers: new copywriting (we do it in a separate SEO engagement), new photography, paid plugins you keep ($150-400 of one-off licence costs), and ongoing hosting after launch ($14-60/month depending on traffic).

If a vendor quotes you $250 for a Wix to WordPress migration, ask them what they are leaving out. The image re-upload alone, done properly on a 100-post blog, is four hours of work.

The SEO question — will I lose rankings

The short answer: not if you do the redirect map. Yes if you skip it.

The pattern we see in Search Console after a careful migration:

• Week 1-2: 15-25% drop in clicks. Google re-crawls, applies the redirects, swaps the old URLs for the new. This is normal.
• Week 3-6: Recovery to baseline. Rankings come back position-for-position for most queries. A few brand-adjacent queries that ranked partly on Wix’s domain-level authority can drop by one to three positions, then stabilise.
• Month 2-4: If you added schema and improved page speed (you should have), you gain ground. Most of our migrations net a 10-25% organic lift inside six months, mostly from Core Web Vitals improvements.

Wix has a built-in narrative that “WordPress is harder for SEO”. It is not. WordPress with RankMath set up properly gives you finer schema control than Wix’s SEO settings will ever allow. The difficulty is implementation, and that is what a clean redirect map and a fast theme solve.

What to do before you call us

If you are considering this for your own site, do these three things first:

1. Pull the Wix sitemap and count the URLs. That gives you the rough complexity bracket.
2. Open Search Console, sort pages by clicks. Note your top 20. Those are the ones that absolutely cannot break — redirect them first, test them first.
3. Check whether you have Wix Bookings, Wix Stores, or Velo code. Any of those changes the bracket and the timeline.

Then read our piece on choosing WordPress for a corporate site if marketing-led pages are most of what you are moving. Or look at our Aria Fashion case study — that one was Wix to WooCommerce, 240 products, full redirect map, finished in 14 days.

If you want a fixed quote on your site specifically, send us the Wix URL and we will reply within a working day with the bracket, a date, and the deliverable list.

Wix is not the only platform clients leave for WordPress. We see the same pattern with hosted visual builders, which we break down in WordPress vs Webflow.

Not sure WordPress is the right destination yet? Compare it against the field in our guide to the best Wix alternatives in 2026 before you commit.

Moving between hosts rather than off Wix? Our guide on how to migrate WordPress without downtime covers the DNS and search-replace details.

Setting up the destination site first? Our guide on how to install WordPress covers one-click, manual, and local installs.

Moving onto a platform you own is the same instinct behind not building your whole audience on someone else’s site. We make that case in WordPress vs Medium.