Is it Time to Transfer Your Wix Site to WordPress? Here’s How

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wix to wordpress

Is your Wix website speed dragging? Finding the Wix platform to be too limiting for your growing business? Are you in need of a more flexible website platform?

You’re likely planning to upgrade to WordPress now. Who wouldn’t want to use WordPress? It not only powers a majority of sites today but it also has a plethora of plugins, themes, and versatile tools all at your disposal.

But what should you do with all the content on your Wix site? The best thing to do is to transfer everything to your new WordPress platform. If you don’t know how, we’ve got you covered.

Here’s our quick guide to help you transfer your site from Wix to WordPress:

1. Secure a Domain Name and a WordPress Host

Before your Wix to WordPress transfer, get a domain name. You either buy a domain name or switch over the one you bought from Wix.

You should also sign up for a web hosting account for WordPress.

A 2018 survey by Clutch.co found that 64% of small businesses have a website. That doesn’t mean these small businesses got to choose their hosting providers.  Wix hosts your website for you.

When you have a web hosting account, you are making a home for your website. All your data and files get stored in that host. This way, you aren’t sharing storage space with all other websites Wix is hosting.

2. Setup and Customize Your New WordPress Site

The next step is to install and setup WordPress. Some hosting sites have automatic installation for WordPress after you sign up. Set your permalinks for WordPress before you proceed to transfer Wix to WordPress.

You can change your permalink structure under the permalink settings. You find this under Settings in the WordPress dashboard. Remember to save changes before you continue.

The next part of this step is to customize your new website. WordPress has free themes that you can change in the future. Install your chosen WordPress theme, like Divi, and start working on improving the design.

You can use a different website as an inspiration. Model after another website or create your own. We recommend sticking to a simple theme if you’re a beginner.

3. RSS Migration from Wix to WordPress

In this step, you convert Wix to WordPress using the RSS feed. Do note that this transfer will work for older Wix blogs only. If you have a newer blog on Wix, you will need an automated Wix to WordPress migration tool.

Before you go further, you have to locate your Wix RSS feed. Add “/feed.xml” to the end of your URL. You know your Wix site has an RSS feed with this method.

Save the page with the open RSS feed. Your browser may save the file as a .txt file. If it does, rename it the file extension to .xml.

Go to WordPress and navigate to Tools>Import. Run the RSS importer and upload your downloaded RSS file.

Navigate to All Posts to check if all your posts got imported. You may have to redo some formatting if any formatting issues come up. Download into your computer then re-upload your images because they are still hosted with Wix.

If you noticed, your site’s pages are not yet transferred. You will need a manual transfer for your pages. There is no automatic transfer for Wix pages yet so be patient.

Go to a Wix page and copy all the content. Under the Add New menu, create a new page and paste everything in it. To make it go live, click the publish button.

Re-upload images from your computer as mentioned above. Or you can install a plugin to import the images for you.

Repeat the process with other pages.

4. Create a Primary Navigation Menu

Your Wix domain transfer isn’t done yet. You still have to do some clean-up. One way to clean up your site is to create a WordPress menu.

Go to Appearance>Menus. Create a menu by selecting and adding pages to the menu. Save the menu once it is complete.

Go to Manage Locations to place the menu on your site. You can display your menu at the top of your site as a ‘Main Menu’ or ‘Header Menu’, depending on your chosen theme.

WordPress powers more than 25% of the websites in the world. One of the reasons for this is accessibility. You have the power to make your WordPress site easy to navigate, so use it.

5. Redirect Old Wix Site to WordPress

Now, you want your old site to bring you to the new one. If you built your Wix site on a subdomain, you also can’t apply this redirect feature.  You can skip this if you used a redirect feature in the CMS2CMS plugin.

The CMS2CMS plugin is the automatic transfer plugin for migrating sites from Wix to WordPress. It also does the job of redirecting the old Wix URL to the new WordPress URL.

You can announce your new URL to readers via social media or new blog posts.

6. Secure Your SEO

Your new website is almost ready. It’s new, but is it going to rank better than the old one? One thing that makes WordPress great is the SEO plugins.

Get a recommended SEO plugin for your site. Develop a sitemap file then make sure you give it to search engines like Google and Bing. Recheck your robots.txt file.

Now, you’re ready to double-check your onsite SEO and spot areas that need immediate attention.

7. Give Your Site a Final Run-Through

The last step is to make sure that everything is in order. Double check your new site by previewing all your pages and posts. This way, you catch link errors and formatting issues before you publish your brand new site.

Your existing media and content should all still be there. You should be certain that all the functions work. If your site is available to mobile devices, access it through your own to check its mobile formatting.

Be patient and thorough. This is the most important step. And don’t worry; it’s the last.

Convert Your Wix Site to WordPress Now

If you want an alternative to Step 3, you’re going to need to install the CMS2CMS plugin. As stated above, it’s an automatic site transfer tool. It’s a premium plugin but it makes the migration simpler.

That is our quick guide on how you can transfer your site from Wix to WordPress. We hope you found it informative and useful. Now, you’re ready to move your Wix site to the WordPress platform.

Need something to manage your business’ web content? If you’re looking for a different content management system like WordPress, check out our list of the top 10 CMS platforms. They’re commercial platforms perfect for small businesses.