You started on Wix or Squarespace because it was fast. Now you’re stuck. The blog editor can’t handle what your content team needs, the SEO controls are limited to a checkbox, and the templating system stops you from doing anything custom without a developer who knows the platform’s idiosyncrasies. Migration to WordPress is on the table.

This is a guide to doing it without losing your traffic, your existing pages, or your sanity.

Minimal workspace with laptop and coffee

Should you actually migrate?

Before anything else: is this the right call? Migration is a real project. It costs $4,000–$15,000 done properly, takes 3–6 weeks, and it temporarily disrupts your team’s content workflow. Don’t do it for a feature you used twice.

Migrate if you’re hitting any of these:

  • You can’t get the SEO controls you need (custom schema, granular meta, redirect management).
  • Your content team has outgrown the editor — they want custom blocks, reusable components, or proper content modelling.
  • Performance has plateaued and the platform won’t let you fix it.
  • You need integrations the platform doesn’t support and never will.
  • The monthly platform fee is creeping toward $300 and your CMS is still the bottleneck.

Stay where you are if you’re a 5-page brochure site that loads fast and the only complaint is “it’d be nice to have more flexibility someday.” That’s not a reason. That’s a feeling.

Choose the WordPress flavour first

“WordPress” is three different decisions in one word.

Hosting. Managed WordPress (Kinsta, WP Engine, Pressable) for low-effort, $30–$100/month. VPS (Hostinger, DigitalOcean, Hetzner) for control and cheaper at $10–$30/month if you’re comfortable with server admin.

Build approach. Page builder (Elementor, Bricks, Breakdance) for the lowest cost and a familiar drag-drop experience. Custom theme for performance, maintainability, and content-team UX. Headless WordPress with a Next.js front-end for the most flexibility, but at significantly higher cost.

Editor. Block editor (Gutenberg) for modern WordPress flow. Classic editor if your content team is migrating from a similar simple TinyMCE-style flow elsewhere.

For a Wix or Squarespace migration, the most natural target is a custom theme with the block editor — the editor experience is similar to what your team already knows, and a custom theme avoids the page-builder bloat that creeps in over time. Our comparison of WordPress build approaches walks through this in detail.

The pre-migration content audit

The single biggest mistake in a Wix-to-WordPress migration is moving everything. You don’t move everything. You move what’s worth moving.

Hands typing on a backlit keyboard

Before you touch anything technical, audit what you have:

  1. Pull a sitemap. Use Screaming Frog or your platform’s sitemap export. You’ll have somewhere between 30 and 500 URLs.
  2. Pull traffic data. Export the last 12 months from Google Analytics. Sort by sessions, descending.
  3. Categorise. Pages with traffic and links: migrate. Pages with traffic but no links: migrate. Pages with no traffic and old content: rewrite or kill. Empty category pages, duplicate URLs, and abandoned drafts: kill.

You’ll typically end up cutting 30–60% of pages. This is a feature, not a bug. The site that gets migrated should be the site that performs, not the site that exists.

The redirect map

Most traffic loss in CMS migrations comes from one thing: URLs change and nobody set up redirects. If your old blog URLs were /blog-post-12345-abc and your new ones are /articles/why-we-do-this/, every link Google has accumulated to those pages goes to a 404 unless you redirect.

Build the redirect map before you launch. A spreadsheet with two columns:

  • Old URL (full path, no domain)
  • New URL (where it should redirect to)

Every URL on the old sitemap should appear in this spreadsheet, even if the answer is “redirect to /404” because the page is being killed. Implement the redirects as 301s in WordPress (the Redirection plugin handles this well, or write them straight into .htaccess on Apache or LiteSpeed). Test 20 random old URLs after launch and confirm each redirects to the right place.

Content migration: the part everyone underestimates

There’s no clean automated path from Wix or Squarespace to WordPress. The official tools either don’t exist or produce a mess. Plan to migrate content semi-manually:

  1. Export what you can. Squarespace exports a WordPress-compatible XML for blog posts (mostly). Wix has no native export — you’ll be scraping or copy-pasting.
  2. Import into a staging WordPress. Don’t migrate to the live site. Set up a staging environment, import, and audit before pointing the domain.
  3. Reconnect the media. Imported posts will have image URLs pointing back to your old platform. Use a tool like Auto Upload Images or do a database find-and-replace to download images into the WordPress media library and update the URLs.
  4. Fix the formatting. Imported posts will have inline styles, divs in unexpected places, and broken layouts. Pass through every post, convert to clean Gutenberg blocks, and verify it looks right.

Budget 1–2 hours per blog post for this clean-up at the high end, 15 minutes at the low end. The variance depends entirely on how complex the originals are.

Launch day, in order

The launch sequence matters. Get this wrong and you have hours of broken state to clean up.

  1. Final content sync from staging to production.
  2. Confirm all redirects are in place and tested.
  3. Update DNS to point at the new server. (Lower TTL the day before — propagation is faster.)
  4. Verify the new site loads at the canonical domain.
  5. Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console.
  6. Run a quick crawl with Screaming Frog — confirm no broken links, no unexpected redirects, no missing pages.
  7. Watch Search Console for the next 30 days for crawl errors and 404s. Fix promptly.
Marketing data dashboard on a laptop screen

What to expect for traffic in the first 90 days

Even a perfect migration causes a small, temporary traffic dip. Google needs to recrawl, the redirects need to settle, and any content changes need to be re-indexed. Expect a 5–15% dip in the first 30 days, recovering and often exceeding pre-migration levels by day 90.

If you’re seeing more than a 25% sustained drop after 60 days, something is wrong — usually missing or wrong redirects, or content that didn’t migrate cleanly. Run an audit using our WordPress maintenance checklist as a starting point.

If you’d rather hand the entire migration off, our WordPress development service handles full Wix and Squarespace migrations as a fixed-price engagement — content audit, redirect mapping, custom theme, and launch.

The migration is the work. The new platform is just where you do it. Get the audit and the redirect map right and the rest is implementation.