You want to add one thing to your website. A proper booking system. A landing page for next month’s campaign. And Wix says no, or says yes in a way that costs more than the campaign was going to make.

That’s usually the week people call us — not because they hate Wix, but because they hit a wall and found out the wall was holding up the building. Then comes the question everybody asks, and it’s the right one: if I move, do I lose my Google rankings?

So here’s the honest version of a Wix to WordPress migration. “Migration” just means moving your site from one platform to another. This is what doesn’t survive the move, what really drives the price, and what you keep if the work is done in the right order.

Wix won’t hand your website back

There is no button in Wix that gives you your site back.

You can copy your text and download your images. You can get your blog posts out too, with effort. There’s no export button for those either, so it’s the feed your blog publishes for subscribers, which only reaches back so far, or copying them across by hand.

What you can’t take is the build: the layout, the animations, the way each app is set up, the settings you nudged into place over years. That only runs on Wix, because it was only ever written for Wix. So moving isn’t a transfer — it’s a rebuild with your content carried across.

Anyone calling it a one-click import is describing a blog archive and hoping you hear “website”.

This isn’t Wix being sneaky. It’s the deal you signed, and it has a real upside: Wix runs everything, so nothing is yours to patch or break. That holds until you want something the platform never planned for, which is exactly the case we’ve made against website builders.

The bill doesn’t arrive monthly. It arrives all at once, on the day you leave.

What you actually get to keep

Your words and your brand come with you — every page of copy, every blog post, every product description.

Two things need care on the way out. Pull your images from the Wix media library rather than off the live page, because what’s on the page has already been shrunk to load fast. And your domain name stays yours, as long as nobody touches the mail delivery records that tell the internet where to send your email.

Your position in Google can come too, on one condition: the rest of this post.

What breaks when you move, and why

None of this is random — Wix and WordPress are built on different assumptions, so one tidy feature on Wix often arrives as several separate pieces on WordPress.

Your page addresses change, and that’s the risk

Every page address that changes is one Google found at an address about to stop existing. That’s how traffic quietly disappears after a move.

Wix has its own ideas about where pages live, and blog posts usually sit under a /post/ path. WordPress lets you choose instead, which is an improvement and the most dangerous moment in the project at the same time.

Your forms, and everything behind them

Rebuilding a form is easy. Losing every enquiry it ever collected is not. Your submission history lives in the Wix dashboard, along with the setup deciding who gets notified. Export what you care about before you switch — afterwards you’re looking at a closed account.

Wix apps with no direct replacement

This is where budgets get eaten. Bookings, stores, member areas, restaurant ordering and event tickets aren’t features you copy across. They’re separate products.

WordPress has a good answer for every one of these. They just work differently, so nothing here is a dead end — a rebuild plus a bit of retraining.

Some customer information can’t move at all: saved accounts, stored card details, past bookings. The platform holds part of it, the payment company the rest, and neither hands it over.

Your blog posts arrive looking rough

Budget real attention for tidying posts by hand, starting with the ones that bring traffic. The text transfers reliably, but everything around it gets messy: galleries, spacing, pull quotes, videos, captions.

The descriptions attached to your images usually don’t travel either. Those are what a blind visitor’s software reads aloud and what Google uses to understand a picture — losing them costs you twice.

The Google settings you spent years on don’t come along

Move your site without moving these and you hand every page a fresh, generic headline in Google’s results. That’s a ranking problem you caused yourself, nothing to do with changing platforms.

Your page titles and descriptions are the blue headline and grey text people read in search results. They live inside Wix’s own SEO panel, and SEO just means the work you do to show up in search. Being attached to Wix, they don’t travel when your content does.

Two more go the same way. One tells Google which of your pages is the real one when two look nearly identical. The other is the extra detail that lets Google show star ratings or opening hours in the results. Both need setting up again.

The redirect list is what protects your rankings

This one piece of work decides whether the rankings you have today come with you or vanish.

Google doesn’t know your website by how it looks. It knows a list of addresses and what it found at each one. When an address changes and nothing points to where it went, the credit it earned doesn’t move. It stops.

The instruction that sends a visitor from an old address to the new one is called a 301 redirect. Do it thoroughly and your rankings ride along. Do it halfway and you get a site that looks better and performs worse, with nothing on the screen to tell you why.

List every page on your Wix site while that site is still live. Once your domain points at the new build, the old site is gone, and so are the forwarding rules you set up inside Wix over the years. Write them down first; you’ll be rebuilding them on the new site.

A list worth the name covers every page and blog post at its current address. Add every address other sites link to, your product and category pages if you sell anything, and those old Wix forwarding rules. Give each retired page a deliberate home: the closest relevant page, not the homepage.

Check it against Google Search Console, Google’s free report on how your site does in search; it’ll remind you of pages you forgot existed.

One honest caveat: rankings bounce around for a while after any move, while search engines re-read your site. We won’t tell you how far or for how long — that depends on your site, your industry, and how complete your redirects are.

Treat anyone quoting you a precise recovery timeline with suspicion. They’re guessing and calling it experience. What you control is whether the list is complete, and that’s most of the result.

What really moves the price up or down

We’re not going to print a price range here. A number you read in a blog post was worked out for an imaginary website. A range wide enough to be honest is too wide to be useful, and a narrow one is a guess wearing a suit.

Here’s what genuinely moves the number, so you can read a quote properly.

  • How many pages, and how many are genuinely different. Forty pages built from four layouts is a smaller job than twelve one-offs.
  • Rebuild or redesign. Copying a Wix layout piece by piece is often more expensive than designing fresh, because you’re working inside someone else’s constraints.
  • Selling online, bookings or memberships. Anything where customers log in or pay is the most expensive item here, and each part is its own move.
  • Forms and connections. A contact form is quick. A quote form that files the lead, takes a deposit and kicks off a run of emails is a small build.
  • How many blog posts, and how messy each one is. The count matters less than you’d think — a heavily formatted archive costs far more to clean up than a plain one.
  • Whether your addresses change, and who writes the words. Keeping them is cheap. Changing them means building and testing the full redirect list, and rewriting pages is a separate job again.

That’s why our web design and development work starts with your actual site, not a package tier.

Questions that get you a real number

Ask any company you’re talking to, us included. The answers tell you more than the price does.

  • Are you rebuilding my design or redesigning it? Show me which.
  • Is the redirect list included, and built from a scan of my live site?
  • Which features are you rebuilding with a different tool, and what changes for my customers?
  • Who moves my page titles and descriptions across, and is that in the price?
  • How many blog posts are included, and what happens to the rest?
  • What is not included? Ask for that list in writing.
  • Who owns the finished site and the files if I decide to leave you?

That last one matters more than it sounds: the only reason you’re reading this is that a platform made leaving expensive. Don’t sign up for a new version of the same problem.

What actually makes a move drag on

We won’t invent a timeline either, because the calendar is mostly set by things that have nothing to do with the building work.

The technical side is predictable. The waiting isn’t. Moves stall on decisions: which pages get retired, who writes fresh copy for the weak ones, whether the new booking tool is approved by the person who runs the schedule. Sign-off is the bottleneck, not the build.

Expect roughly this order: scan the live site for every address, then move the content and images across and rebuild. Replace the Wix apps one feature at a time and build the redirect list. Check the whole thing on a private copy, then point your domain at its new home.

Then watch your Google search report for weeks. That step isn’t optional — it’s where you catch the addresses the list missed.

Hosting is the rented space your site sits on, and on Wix it came bundled in, invisible. On WordPress it’s a real decision affecting your speed, your security, and how fast a human answers when something breaks. Choose it deliberately instead of defaulting to the cheapest plan you find. That’s why we run WordPress hosting ourselves rather than handing clients a coupon code.

When you should stay on Wix

Sometimes the right answer is don’t move, and we’d rather say that now than halfway through a project you’ve already paid for.

Stay if your site is a handful of pages, doing its job, and nobody is complaining. Stay if there’s nobody to keep WordPress updated and no budget to pay someone. A neglected WordPress site is worse than a looked-after Wix one, and it isn’t close.

Stay if your only reason for moving is that somebody told you WordPress is better for search, without naming one thing your site can’t do today.

Moving costs money. It earns that back when the platform is actively holding the business back: leads lost to a form you can’t fix, three apps faking one feature, work turned down because the site can’t handle it. If none of that is happening, spend the money on something costing you customers right now.

Do it in this order and it stays boring

Everything above is really about sequence. Scan before you switch, and export before you cancel. Decide your page addresses before you build, not after.

Build the redirect list before you point the domain, not in a panic the week after traffic drops. A move done in that order is unremarkable, and unremarkable is the goal. The ones that go badly almost always went out of order.

Send us your Wix web address and we’ll do a free migration assessment: your real page count, the apps you’re running, and what the job would take. If the answer is stay where you are, we’ll tell you that too.