Key takeaways
- Wix has no real export. Blog posts come out through an RSS feed; pages, design, images, and forms all get rebuilt by hand. Squarespace gives you an XML export, but images, stores, and custom design don't come with it.
- A "migration" is a rebuild wearing a migration's name. Plan and price it that way, or the project will surprise you halfway through.
- Redirects must live on the new WordPress server. Anything configured inside Wix dies the day your Wix subscription does.
- Don't migrate a site that isn't broken. Under 20 pages, no store, no growth plans? Stay on Wix or Squarespace and spend the money on marketing instead.
- Rankings don't drop because you left Wix. They drop because URLs changed without redirects, metadata went missing, or the new site is slower.
Every migration guide you'll find for this move is written by a company that sells hosting or a migration plugin. Of course they all say the same thing: migrate, it's great, it's easy, here's a ten-step checklist.
We're a web agency. Migrations are literally how we get paid. And we're going to tell you the parts those guides skip — including the part where you probably shouldn't migrate at all.
First, the honest question: should you even migrate?
This is the question other guides answer with a sales pitch. Here's our honest answer — the same one we give on sales calls.
Stay on Wix or Squarespace if:
- Your site is under 20 pages and it does its job fine.
- You don't run a store, a membership area, or a booking system that fights you daily.
- You're the person updating the site, and you genuinely like the drag-and-drop editor.
- Your growth plan for the next two years is "more of the same."
There is no shame in that. A cheap Wix plan that brings in customers beats a $5,000 rebuild that changes nothing. We've talked clients out of migrations before — the money usually does more good in ads or content.
The test we use with our own clients: if you can name the specific thing your current platform won't let you do — not a vibe, a thing — migration is on the table. If you can't name it, you're shopping, not solving.
Migrate when you've hit a real ceiling:
| The signal | What it looks like | Why WordPress fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| App subscriptions are stacking up | You're paying monthly for bookings, reviews, email popups — basics that should be built in | Most of it exists as free or one-time-cost WordPress plugins |
| SEO has plateaued and you suspect the platform | You can't properly control schema, URL structure, or page speed | Full technical control: schema, redirects, sitemaps, Core Web Vitals tuning |
| The store is outgrowing the plan | Product limits, transaction fees, a checkout you can't customize | WooCommerce has no product ceiling and no platform commission on sales |
| You want to own the asset | One company controls your hosting, design, data, and pricing — and raises it yearly | Your files and database are yours; move hosts whenever you want |
| Developer help is rare or expensive | Wix and Squarespace specialists are hard to find | Tens of thousands of WordPress developers compete on price and availability |
One signal, honestly held, is enough. Five vague complaints is not.
What actually exports (and what doesn't)
Here's the part that surprises people. "Migration" sounds like moving house — boxes out, boxes in. It's not. It's closer to moving country and rebuilding the house from photographs.
| What | Wix | Squarespace |
|---|---|---|
| Blog posts | Yes — via RSS feed (/feed.xml or /blog-feed.xml) | Yes — XML export under Settings → Advanced → Import/Export |
| Static pages | No. Copy and paste by hand, page by page | Basic pages yes, via the same XML export |
| Images | No. Download and re-upload manually | Partially. Often left hosted on Squarespace's CDN — check every image |
| Site design / theme | No. Rebuilt from scratch | No. Rebuilt from scratch |
| Store products and orders | No. | No. Product, album, and event pages don't export |
| Forms, booking, integrations | No. Rebuilt with plugins | No. Rebuilt with plugins |
| Custom CSS and code | No. | No. |
| Redirects you set up | No. They live on Wix and die with the subscription | No. Same story |
Two traps in that table deserve their names in lights. First: Wix blog images don't ride along with the RSS feed. The text arrives; the pictures stay behind on Wix's servers. Second, sneakier: Squarespace's XML export quietly leaves images hosted on Squarespace's CDN with absolute URLs. Your new site can look perfect for months — then the Squarespace subscription lapses and every image on the site breaks on the same day. After every import, audit the WordPress media library itself, not just the pages. If the files aren't in your media library, you don't own them yet.
What breaks: the seven honest ones
Ordered roughly by how often each one blindsides people — not by how the other guides order them.
Your design. Nothing about how your site looks transfers. The layout, the fonts, the spacing, the mobile behavior — all of it gets recreated in a WordPress theme or builder. The upside nobody mentions: this is a free redesign. If your Wix site is four years old, rebuilding it is a chance to fix every layout decision you regretted. Don't aim for a pixel-perfect clone of a design you were lukewarm about.
Your URLs. Wix and Squarespace URL structures rarely match a clean WordPress setup. Every URL that changes needs a 301 redirect pointing at its new home. Miss pages here and Google starts handing out 404s — and your rankings follow them down. This is the single highest-leverage step in the entire project.
Images, again — the CDN time bomb. Covered above, worth repeating because it's the failure mode we see most: everything looks fine at launch, and six months later the old subscription lapses and the blog goes imageless overnight. Fix it during the migration, when it's cheap.
Forms, booking, and integrations. Contact forms, newsletter signups, booking calendars, review widgets, chat popups — each one gets rebuilt with a WordPress equivalent and reconnected to whatever it talked to (your CRM, your email tool, your calendar). Inventory every integration before you start, because the one you forget is the one that breaks silently.
The store. Products, variants, customer accounts, order history, discount rules, shipping zones, tax settings — the hardest part of any migration. A brochure site is a weekend project; a store with three years of order history is a project project. If you sell online, budget and timeline both roughly double.
SEO metadata. Page titles, meta descriptions, alt text, schema markup — none of it transfers automatically. It has to be carried over deliberately, page by page, for every page that matters. Skip this and you'll keep your URLs but lose the reason Google ranked them.
Email and DNS — the unglamorous killer. When you point your domain at the new host, it's tempting to just switch nameservers and move on. If your email runs on the same domain (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, anything), changing nameservers without copying the existing MX records kills your email instantly. Record your full DNS zone before you touch anything. This one has ruined more launch days than every other item on this list combined.
Nobody's migration ever failed because of the blog posts. They fail on the store, the forms, and the DNS. Budget your worry accordingly.
What it actually costs
A migration is priced like a rebuild because it is a rebuild. A 2026 migration guide from a Canadian agency published market tiers that match what we see across the industry (figures in CAD):
| Tier | What it covers | Typical range |
|---|---|---|
| Content-only lift | Under ~15 pages, stock or lightly customized theme, blog import, redirect map, DNS cutover | $1,200–$2,500 CAD |
| Standard small-business rebuild | 15–40 pages, brand-matched layouts, forms rebuilt, image library re-processed, full redirect map, analytics carried over | $2,500–$6,500 CAD |
| Design-led rebuild | New design system instead of a copy, custom templates, performance budget, staged QA | $6,500–$12,000 CAD |
| Ecommerce / complex | WooCommerce build, product and customer migration, memberships, bookings, integrations | $12,000–$40,000+ CAD |
For a US-anchored reference point: our own site rebuilds at Lynxwell start at $4,000, and a migration lands in the standard-rebuild tier at minimum — then gets scoped against your actual page count and feature list. Anyone quoting you a flat $500 "Wix to WordPress migration" is quoting the blog-post import, not the migration. Ask what's included, in writing. (Our pricing page shows how we scope builds.)
Doing it yourself? The cash cost is small — hosting starts around $5–15/month, a decent theme or builder is a one-time $50–100. The real cost is time: a simple brochure site is a focused weekend; a 40-page site with a blog is two to four weekends; a store is "hire someone" territory. Decide which one you are before you start, not three weekends in.
The process, step by step
Condensed to what actually matters. Keep the old site live through all of it — you only flip the switch at the end.
Inventory everything. Crawl your current site (Screaming Frog's free tier handles up to 500 URLs) and export the full URL list. Pull your top traffic pages from Google Search Console. List every form, integration, and third-party script. This inventory becomes your redirect map and your QA checklist.
Set up WordPress on a staging URL. Install it somewhere visitors can't see. Set your permalink structure now — "Post name" is the usual right answer — because changing it after launch breaks URLs you've already redirected to.
Export the content. Wix: save the RSS feed (/feed.xml or /blog-feed.xml) and import via Tools → Import → RSS. Squarespace: Settings → Advanced → Import/Export → Export to WordPress, then Tools → Import → WordPress. Count what arrived versus what existed — the RSS importer often needs repeat runs for large blogs.
Fix the images. Get every image into the WordPress media library with descriptive filenames, and confirm zero hotlinks back to Wix or Squarespace remain. Rename files as you go — team-photo-austin.jpg beats IMG_4829.jpg for image search.
Rebuild pages and design. Pick a lightweight theme (Astra, GeneratePress, Kadence, and Blocksy are the usual solid choices) or a builder for drag-and-drop familiarity. Recreate navigation, footer, and page layouts — and fix what bugged you instead of cloning blindly.
Rebuild forms, integrations, and the store. Every item from your inventory in step 1. Test each one with a real submission, not just a look at the page.
Write the redirect map. Old URL → new URL, one to one, for every URL that changed. No redirecting everything to the homepage — that discards the ranking value of every page you do it to. Implement as proper server-side 301s (the Redirection plugin works; server config is cleaner).
Move the domain. Copy your full DNS zone first — especially MX records. Then point the domain (or transfer it) and go live. Keep the old Wix/Squarespace subscription active for at least a month as your rollback.
Launch checklist. Crawl the new site for 404s and broken links. Confirm the redirect map fires correctly. Verify titles, meta descriptions, and schema on key pages. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console — and leave the old sitemap in place for a few weeks so Google recrawls the old URLs and discovers the redirects.
If any of that made your eyes glaze over, that's useful information — it's exactly the kind of project our web development services exist for. Knowing when to hire is a skill, not a failure.
The SEO plan that protects your traffic
This deserves its own section because it's where migrations are won or lost — and where most guides get dangerously vague.
The redirect trap. Wix has a redirect manager. It's fine. But it lives on Wix — the moment your domain points to WordPress and you cancel, every redirect you configured dies with the subscription. The redirects that protect your rankings must live on the new WordPress server, configured before launch and tested before DNS flips.
The rules that actually matter:
- One-to-one 301s. Old page → its new equivalent. Never bulk-redirect to the homepage.
- Keep content substantially the same at launch. Improve and rewrite after rankings stabilize — changing everything at once makes it impossible to diagnose what broke.
- Carry over titles and meta descriptions verbatim on pages that rank. You can optimize them next quarter.
- Keep URL changes minimal. If you can match the old URL structure, do it — every unchanged URL is a redirect you don't need.
- Don't launch with "Discourage search engines from indexing" still ticked. It sounds absurd. It happens constantly.
Expect two to six weeks of ranking fluctuation while Google recrawls and follows the redirects. That's normal. What's not normal is traffic dropping and staying down past week six — that means redirects are missing or wrong, and the fix is to go back to the inventory from step one.
The first 60 days after launch
The migration isn't over at launch. It's over when the data says it's over.
- Week 1: check Search Console's Pages report daily for 404s. Every "Not found" is a URL missing from your redirect map — add it.
- Weeks 2–4: compare clicks against the same period last year, not last week. Watch Core Web Vitals — on Wix, performance was Wix's problem; on WordPress, it's yours.
- Weeks 4–8: rankings should stabilize, often slightly better than before — you moved from a closed platform to one where the technical fundamentals are yours to control.
- Day 60: if traffic is at or above baseline, cancel the old platform subscription. Not before. That subscription was your rollback plan.
And then actually use the freedom you paid for. Publish the content you couldn't publish. Add the schema you couldn't add. Speed up the pages you couldn't speed up. A migration that ends with a WordPress site managed like a Wix site was an expensive way to change nothing.
Is it worth it? The short version
If you've hit a real ceiling — app costs stacking, SEO plateaued, store outgrowing the plan, or you just want to own your asset — yes. The migration pays for itself, usually within the first year of escaped subscription fees and unlocked growth.
If your site works, you're under 20 pages, and nobody's complained about the platform in six months — no. Spend the money on what actually grows the business.
And if you're somewhere in between — the site mostly works but something specific keeps biting you — that's exactly what a second pair of eyes is for. Run your URL through our free site roast and we'll tell you straight whether the platform is your problem or something cheaper to fix. If it is time to move, book a call and we'll scope the migration properly — page count, store, redirects, all of it — before you spend a dollar.
