Site builders are good software that a lot of businesses eventually outgrow. The moment usually arrives as a request the platform cannot handle: a members area, a booking flow tied to your CRM, a second language done properly. Then the question becomes whether moving is worth the disruption, and what it will actually cost in money, weeks and search traffic. Here is what the process involves, what genuinely survives the move, and the cases where the sensible answer is to stay exactly where you are.
To migrate Wix to WordPress you export content, rebuild the design and templates, then map every old URL to a new one with permanent 301 redirects. Text, images and products transfer with effort. Design, forms and integrations do not. Budget four to eight weeks for a typical marketing site.
Why do businesses outgrow site builders?
Wix and Squarespace are genuinely good at what they were built for. A small team gets a decent looking site live in a weekend without hiring anyone. For a large number of businesses that is the correct answer permanently, and we say so regularly.
The pressure shows up later, and it tends to arrive as a specific request the platform cannot satisfy. A membership area with tiered access. A product configurator. A booking system that has to talk to the CRM you already pay for. Content in two languages with proper hreflang handling. A blog with 400 posts where the editorial team needs custom fields and a real workflow. At that point you are not fighting a preference, you are fighting a ceiling.
The second driver is cost that stops making sense. Builder pricing is fine at $30 a month. Once you have stacked four paid apps on top of it to approximate features that come standard elsewhere, the arithmetic changes.
The third is nobody talks about until it bites: portability. Your content, your templates and your customisations live inside a system you cannot export in full. That is a fine trade while things are going well and a painful one when they are not.
What actually transfers, and what does not?
This is where migration projects go wrong, because people assume "we'll move the site" means the site arrives intact on the other side. It does not. You are rebuilding the presentation layer and porting the content underneath it.
| Asset | Transfers? | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| Page and blog text | Mostly | Exports cleanly, though inline formatting and embeds usually need a manual pass |
| Images and media | Yes, with effort | Files come across but filenames and alt text often do not. Budget time to re-attach alt text |
| URL structure | Rarely as is | Builders use their own path conventions. Assume you are remapping and redirecting |
| Design and templates | No | Proprietary. The visual design is rebuilt, which is usually the point of moving |
| Forms and submissions | Forms no, past entries sometimes | Rebuild forms. Export historic entries to CSV before you cancel the plan |
| Products and variants | Usually | CSV export and import works, but images, options and metafields need checking row by row |
| Customer accounts | Partially | Profiles can move. Passwords cannot, so customers reset on first login |
| Order history | Often not | Frequently kept as an archive rather than migrated. Decide early, it affects reporting |
| Apps and integrations | No | Reconnected individually on the new platform |
| SEO metadata | Yes, if you plan for it | Titles and descriptions can be mapped in bulk. They are also frequently forgotten |
Read that table as a scope document. Every "no" and every "partially" is work somebody has to do, and the estimates that go badly wrong are the ones that only counted the pages.
Before quoting anything, we export a full URL list from the existing site and sort it by traffic and by conversions. Most builder sites have a long tail of pages nobody has visited in a year. Deciding what not to move is usually the single biggest lever on cost.
How do you protect rankings when you move?
Migrations lose traffic when old URLs return errors and search engines quietly drop the pages. They hold traffic when every old URL points somewhere sensible from the first minute the new site is live. The difference is a redirect map, and it is not optional.
A redirect map is a spreadsheet with two columns: the old URL and the new one. Build it from three sources combined, because none of them is complete on its own. Your sitemap gives you what the platform thinks exists. Your analytics gives you what people actually visit. Your search console gives you what ranks, including pages you forgot about.
Rules that matter. Use permanent 301 redirects, not temporary ones. Redirect to the closest equivalent page rather than dumping everything on the homepage, which search engines treat as a soft error. Avoid chains where one redirect points to another that points to a third. And check that your new site is not accidentally redirecting HTTPS to HTTP or www to non www in a loop, which is a surprisingly common launch day failure.
Expect some movement in rankings for two to six weeks after launch regardless of how careful you are. That is normal recrawling, not a disaster, and the correct response is to wait rather than to start changing things. What is not normal is a sustained drop after two months, which usually points to a broken redirect or a page that lost most of its content in the move.
What does the migration process look like step by step?
- Audit the current site. Export every URL, note traffic and conversions per page, and list every integration, form and third party script currently in use.
- Decide what moves. Cut the pages that earn nothing, consolidate near duplicates, and agree the new site structure before anyone opens a design tool.
- Export your content. Text, images, products, form entries and customer data, all pulled out while you still have an active subscription.
- Build the new site on a staging domain that search engines cannot index. Set up the CMS, templates and content model here.
- Migrate content and check it. Formatting, embeds, image alt text, internal links that still point at old URLs.
- Write the redirect map. Every old URL to a new destination, reviewed line by line rather than generated and trusted.
- Port SEO metadata. Titles, descriptions, canonical tags, structured data, and the robots and sitemap files.
- Rebuild forms and reconnect integrations. Test every submission end to end, including where the notification email lands.
- Test properly. Mobile, real devices, checkout if you have one, and Core Web Vitals against Google's published thresholds of LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS under 0.1.
- Launch, then verify within the hour. Spot check redirects, submit the new sitemap, and confirm analytics and conversion tracking are firing.
- Monitor for 90 days. Watch crawl errors, rankings and form volume weekly. Keep the old subscription active for at least a month in case you need to retrieve something.
What does it actually cost and how long does it take?
A straightforward marketing site of 10 to 25 pages, moved to WordPress with a well built theme and a proper redirect map, usually runs four to eight weeks and lands somewhere in the $8,000 to $25,000 range in the US market. That includes design work, because if you are rebuilding the front end anyway you may as well fix what was not working.
A content heavy site with hundreds of posts, custom post types and an editorial workflow moves the range up, mostly because content migration and quality checking is slow and unglamorous. An ecommerce move with products, customers and order history is a different project again, and the platform choice matters more than the migration mechanics.
The costs that surprise people are rarely the build. They are the content cleanup nobody scoped, the integrations that turned out to be load bearing, and the three weeks of stakeholder review in the middle. Ask any agency quoting you whether the redirect map and post launch monitoring are included. If they are not, the number you were given is not the number you will pay. Our own website design and development estimates separate those lines deliberately, so nobody discovers them late.
We keep the old site live and paid for a full month after launch. It costs perhaps $40 and it means that when someone asks where a 2023 case study went, we can go and look instead of guessing.
When is staying on Wix or Squarespace the better call?
Often. Migration is a real project with real cost, and the honest answer for a lot of businesses is that the builder is not the constraint on their growth.
Stay put if your site is essentially a well presented brochure and it converts acceptably. Stay put if nobody on your team can maintain a self hosted site and you have no budget for a maintenance retainer, because an unpatched WordPress install is worse than any builder. Stay put if the real problem is that your traffic is low or your messaging is weak, since neither of those is fixed by changing platforms. And stay put if the request driving the move is a single feature that a well chosen embed or third party tool could handle.
Move when the platform has become the thing blocking a business capability you can name and quantify, when you need control over performance and structure that the builder will not give you, or when you want to own your site outright rather than rent it.
If the underlying complaint is that the site does not generate enough enquiries, look at the funnel before you look at the platform. Conversion optimization work on an existing builder site is faster and cheaper than a migration, and it tells you whether the traffic problem is actually a demand problem, which is a question for performance marketing rather than a developer.
What changes after you move?
You gain control and you take on responsibility. Those arrive together and the second one catches people out.
On WordPress or a similar system, nobody patches your software for you. Nobody guarantees uptime unless you pay a host that does. Nobody stops a plugin update breaking a template on a Friday afternoon. Budget for maintenance from day one, in the range of $100 to $400 a month for a typical business site, and treat it as part of the total cost rather than an upsell you can decline.
What you get in return is a site that can grow in whatever direction the business goes, content you own in a format you can move again, and the ability to hire any competent developer rather than only those who know one proprietary system. For a business planning to be around in ten years, that portability is worth more than it looks on the day you sign off the migration.
Frequently asked questions
Can I migrate from Wix to WordPress automatically?
Partly. Several plugins and services can pull blog posts and page text into WordPress, and on a site with hundreds of posts that saves genuine time. What no tool moves is your design, your forms, your integrations or your URL structure, and most handle images and SEO metadata poorly. Use them for the content pull, then plan the rest as real work.
Will my Google rankings drop if I migrate?
Some movement in the first two to six weeks is normal while search engines recrawl everything, and the right response is patience rather than panic edits. Lasting loss after that points to a specific fault: a broken redirect, missing page titles, or content that shrank in the move. The single thing that protects you is a complete redirect map, built from your sitemap, analytics and search console together.
How long does a Wix to WordPress migration take?
For a marketing site of 10 to 25 pages, four to eight weeks is realistic, covering design, content migration, redirect mapping and testing. Sites with hundreds of posts take longer, because checking migrated content line by line is slow work that cannot be rushed. In our experience the schedule slips on stakeholder review rather than on the technical build, so agree who signs off what before you start.
What does a migration from a site builder cost?
For a 10 to 25 page marketing site rebuilt on WordPress, $8,000 to $25,000 is a fair US range including design work. Content heavy sites and stores go higher. The number to interrogate is what the quote excludes: redirect mapping, content cleanup and 90 days of post launch monitoring are all real work, and a quote without them is not cheaper, just less complete.
Do my images and alt text come across in a migration?
The image files usually make it. Filenames, alt text and captions often do not, because builders store them in their own structures rather than in the file metadata. Alt text matters for accessibility and for image search, so plan a review pass afterwards instead of assuming it came across. On a library of several hundred images, set aside a full day for it.
Should I keep my old site running after the migration?
Keep it for at least a month, and pay the subscription rather than downgrading. The value is not that you would switch back, it is that when someone asks where a particular page or form entry went, you can open the old site and look. Exports are almost never as complete as they appear, and that discovery usually arrives a fortnight after launch.
The takeaway
Migration is a content and redirect project wearing a design project's clothes. The build is the visible part, but rankings survive or die on the redirect map, and budgets survive or die on how honestly you scoped the content cleanup. Decide what not to move before you decide where to move it, and be willing to conclude that your builder is fine and the real problem sits elsewhere.