How to Migrate From Wix to WordPress Without Losing Traffic

There Is No Export Button

Start here, because it reframes the whole project and most guides bury it.

Wix does not have a site export. Not a partial one, not a paid one, not one hidden in a settings menu. No plugin can create one either, because there is nothing to extract. Your Wix pages are not files sitting on a server that you could move. They exist as data inside Wix's platform and are assembled on request.

What you can get out is a short list:

• Blog post text, through the RSS feed
• Store products, as a CSV
• Contacts, as a CSV
• Your media, by downloading it
• Your domain, by transferring or repointing it

What you cannot get out:

• Pages and their layouts
• The design, in any form
• Forms and their submissions
• Anything living inside a Wix app or widget
• Your title tags and meta descriptions

That last one deserves its own alarm, and we will come back to it.

So the honest framing: this is a rebuild with a content migration attached. Anyone quoting you a two day "Wix to WordPress transfer" is either doing a small site or is about to disappoint you. If you have not committed to the move yet, the tradeoffs are in Wix vs WordPress, and the full option set is in Wix alternatives.

Crawl the Site First, and Mean It

On other platforms, benchmarking before a migration is strongly recommended. On Wix it is load-bearing, because your crawl export is the only copy of your meta data that will exist.

Run Screaming Frog or Sitebulb across the whole site and capture every URL with its status code, title tag, meta description, H1, and word count. That file is what you will rebuild every page title and description from. There is no other source.

Then the rest of the baseline:

Export Search Console, sixteen months by page and by query, so you know which URLs genuinely earn traffic.

Export GA4 sessions and conversions by landing page for twelve months.

Export your backlinks, so you know which URLs other sites point at. These are non-negotiable redirect targets even when they get four visits a month.

Save the sitemap from /sitemap.xml as a file.

Screenshot your rankings, dated.

Get your form submissions out. Wix stores enquiry history and does not export it in any useful way. Pull what you need while the account is active.

The reasoning behind each of these is in our SEO migration checklist.

Move the Blog Through RSS

This is the one piece of genuine automation available, and it is partial.

Wix publishes a feed at yoursite.com/blog-feed.xml. WordPress has a built-in RSS importer under Tools that will read it and create posts.

What arrives: post text, titles, and dates.

What does not arrive:

• Images. None of them. The feed does not carry the files.
• Clean formatting. Expect broken spacing, lost styling, and occasional mangled blocks.
• Anything from a Wix app or widget. Galleries, embeds, and app-driven content simply are not there.
• Categories and tags, reliably.

So the realistic process is: import through RSS to get the text in, then work through each post by hand, re-uploading images, re-embedding them in the right places, and repairing formatting.

On a blog of twenty posts this is an afternoon. On a blog of two hundred it is the largest single task in the project, and it is worth deciding deliberately which posts are worth bringing. Your Search Console export answers that question. Posts with no traffic, no links, and no strategic purpose can be retired with a redirect to the relevant category rather than migrated.

Rebuild the Pages

There is no shortcut here. Every page gets rebuilt in WordPress.

That sounds worse than it usually is, because most Wix sites that migrate are being redesigned anyway. The thing to guard against is content loss during the rebuild. A page that ranks does so partly because of how thoroughly it answers something, and rebuilds are where thoroughness quietly gets edited down to something tidier.

Use your crawl export as the checklist. For every page that earns traffic:

• The body copy is the same length or longer, never shorter
• The H1 matches, and there is exactly one
• The title tag and meta description are restored from your crawl export, since Wix gave you no other copy
• Internal links are rebuilt and point at new URLs directly rather than through redirects
• Images carry their alt text across

That third point is the one that catches people. Without a deliberate step to restore them, WordPress will generate titles and descriptions from theme defaults, and you will have changed the meta data on every page of the site in the same week you changed everything else. If traffic then moves, you will not know why.

Products, Media, and Forms

Products. Wix Stores exports products as a CSV. Map it into WooCommerce's product importer column by column, aligning SKU, price, variants, categories, images, and inventory. Variants are the tedious part because the two systems model them differently. Reconcile the product count afterward rather than assuming it worked.

Media. Download your Wix media library and upload it to WordPress. Keep filenames where you can, because image search traffic is real and it disappears silently. Then confirm nothing on the new site is still loading from a Wix asset domain. Anything that is will break when the subscription lapses.

Forms. Wix form blocks do not transfer. Rebuild each one in a WordPress form plugin, wire notifications to an inbox a human actually reads, and submit a real test enquiry end to end before launch.

Build the URL Map

One spreadsheet, one row per old URL, one column for its destination.

Build the source list from the union of your crawl, your Search Console export, and your backlink export. Each finds URLs the others miss.

Wix URL patterns to watch for:

• Blog posts sit under a /post/ prefix, so a post is typically at /post/article-name rather than anywhere a WordPress permalink structure would put it. This is the single biggest block of redirects on most Wix migrations.
• Store products sit under the store path, commonly /product-page/product-name
• Pages inside a folder inherit the folder slug
• Wix serves URLs without a trailing slash and WordPress commonly adds one, which you want to handle deliberately rather than by accident

One thing that trips people up conceptually: you do not build these redirects in Wix. Once DNS points at your new host, WordPress serves every request to your domain, including requests for URLs that no longer exist. The redirect rules therefore live on the WordPress side, which is good news, because that is the side with proper redirect handling.

Then the four rules. Keep URLs identical wherever the new build allows it. Map one to one to the closest equivalent page, never in bulk to the homepage, because a redirect to an unrelated page reads as a soft 404 and drops the original from the index. Resolve chains. Use 301, and leave the rules in place permanently.

Test Before You Launch

Build on staging, protected with HTTP authentication rather than a noindex tag. Authentication cannot be forgotten, because if it is still on at launch nobody can reach the site and you find out in a minute. A forgotten noindex tag is invisible and removes the site from search over about two weeks.

Before you flip anything:

• Run every old URL through the redirect rules and confirm each returns a 301 to the intended destination in one hop. All of them, not a sample.
• Confirm every page has the title and meta description from your crawl export
• Confirm no page carries an unintended noindex tag
• Confirm robots.txt is the production version
• Confirm the sitemap contains only canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs
• Confirm no asset is still loading from Wix
• Submit a real enquiry through every form
• Complete a real test transaction if you have a store
• Compare word counts against your original crawl
• Check every template on a phone

Launch, In Order

1. Confirm you have your exports, your media, and your crawl file backed up outside the website
2. Push WordPress live with the redirect rules already active, not added afterward
3. Remove staging protection, then immediately verify robots.txt and check the live source for stray noindex tags
4. Update DNS. If Wix is your registrar you can either transfer the domain out, which needs it unlocked and an authorization code and takes several days, or leave it registered there and repoint the records. Do this early in the day and allow for propagation
5. Crawl the live site immediately, looking for 404s, chains, and missing titles
6. Hand check thirty of your highest traffic old URLs
7. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console
8. Confirm analytics and conversion tracking are recording

Launch on a Tuesday morning. Keep the Wix subscription running for at least thirty days. It costs one month and it is your only way back.

What to Expect Afterward

A short dip is normal. A permanent loss is not.

Because nearly every URL changes on a Wix migration, there is more redirect processing to get through than on a platform where you could preserve the structure. Expect two to four weeks of fluctuation on a small site and six to eight on a larger one, then a return to baseline or better.

A drop of thirty percent or more that has not begun recovering by week three is a defect rather than the migration settling. The first four places to look are the redirect map, robots.txt, the live source for a stray noindex tag, and whether meta data and page content survived the rebuild intact.

The Five Failures That Cause Most of the Damage

Meta data never restored. Wix does not export it, nobody crawled first, and every title and description on the site silently changed at launch.

The /post/ redirects missed. The blog is often the majority of a Wix site's organic traffic and it sits under a prefix that has no WordPress equivalent.

Blog images never re-embedded. The RSS import brought the text, the posts read fine in the editor, and every article is illustrated with nothing.

Redirect map built from the sitemap alone. Misses orphaned pages that still earn traffic and pages with inbound links.

Content trimmed during the rebuild. Since every page is rebuilt by hand on a Wix migration, this risk is higher here than anywhere else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you export a Wix site to WordPress?

There is no full site export. Wix does not provide one, and no plugin can create one, because the pages only exist inside Wix. What you can get out is blog post text through the RSS feed, store products and contacts as CSV files, and your media by downloading it. Pages, layouts, design, forms, app content, and your meta titles and descriptions do not come out at all. A Wix to WordPress move is a rebuild with a content migration attached.

How do you move Wix blog posts to WordPress?

Through the RSS feed at yoursite.com/blog-feed.xml, imported with the built-in WordPress RSS importer. It is a partial solution. The feed carries post text but not images, formatting frequently breaks, and anything that lived inside a Wix app or widget does not appear at all. Expect to re-upload and re-embed every image by hand and to tidy the formatting on each post. On a blog with more than about thirty posts this is the longest single task in the project.

Do Wix SEO titles and meta descriptions transfer to WordPress?

No. The title tags and meta descriptions you set in Wix do not export through any route. This is why crawling the Wix site before you start is not optional. Your crawl export becomes the source of truth for rebuilding every title and description in WordPress. Skip that step and you will silently regenerate all of your meta data from theme defaults, which is a change to every page on the site made at the same moment you changed everything else.

What happens to Wix URLs after migrating to WordPress?

Most of them change, because Wix uses its own path conventions. Wix blog posts typically sit under a /post/ prefix, and store products sit under the store path, neither of which matches a standard WordPress structure. Every old URL that carries traffic or inbound links needs a 301 redirect to its closest equivalent. The redirects are implemented on the WordPress side, since once DNS points at the new host WordPress serves every request, including requests for URLs that no longer exist.

How long does a Wix to WordPress migration take?

For a small brochure site of ten to twenty pages with a light blog, three to five weeks is realistic including design, content, redirects, and testing. Larger sites, or sites with a store, run six to ten weeks. Because nothing exports cleanly, the schedule scales with page count and blog post count more directly than on other platforms. A hundred blog posts is a hundred manual image re-embeds, and that is the part people underestimate.

Do the Crawl First

If you take one thing from this: crawl the Wix site before anyone touches anything. It is thirty minutes of work, it is the only copy of your meta data you will ever have, and it is the difference between a rebuild you can verify and one you can only hope went well.

Get a free Revenue Opportunity Analysis and we will show you which of your current pages earn the traffic, which URLs carry links you cannot afford to break, and what your redirect map has to cover. See how we handle rebuilds in WordPress development and website design and development, or read our process. Book a strategy call or call us at 321-401-7016.