Wix to WordPress: a migration checklist that keeps your rankings
Moving from Wix to WordPress gives you control of your site. Done carelessly, it also loses the search traffic you spent years earning. This is the checklist we work through.
Organisations usually leave Wix for the same reasons: the site has grown beyond what the editor handles comfortably, content is hard to structure, and they want to own their platform. WordPress solves those problems. What it does not do on its own is protect the search traffic the old site has earned. That depends on the migration.
Before you touch anything
- Crawl the current site and save every URL, title and meta description. This list is your safety net.
- Export your search data. Download the top pages and queries from Google Search Console, so you know what must not break.
- Inventory the content: pages, blog posts, images, documents, forms and anything embedded from other services.
- Decide the new structure. Migration is the right moment to fix navigation, but every changed address needs a redirect.
Moving the content
- Rebuild pages as structured content, not pasted text. Branches, people, events and documents become their own content types, so they can be listed and filtered.
- Bring every image and document across to the new site. Do not leave files linked from the old host, because they disappear when the plan ends.
- Carry over titles, meta descriptions and image alt text, page by page.
Redirects are the whole game
- Map every old URL to its new home with a permanent (301) redirect. Wix blog posts typically sit under /post/, while WordPress uses its own pattern, so these addresses almost always change.
- Test the map before launch by requesting each old URL and checking where it lands.
Launch day and after
- Keep the same domain, switch DNS, and check the site loads over HTTPS.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
- Watch for 404 errors and ranking changes for four to six weeks, and fix gaps as they appear.
A careful migration usually shows a small wobble in rankings for a few weeks and then settles. A careless one can lose much of a site's search traffic. The difference is almost entirely in steps 1, 8 and 9.
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