How to Migrate From Wix or Squarespace to WordPress

If you're still deciding whether WordPress is the right move, see our unbiased platform comparison first. This guide is for businesses that have already decided to move off Wix or Squarespace and want to know what the actual process looks like — and how to do it without losing the search rankings you've built up.

What Actually Transfers (and What Doesn't)

Squarespace and Wix's export tools are more limited than people expect. Blog posts and basic text pages generally transfer reasonably well through an XML export. Products, image galleries, event listings, custom CSS, audio or video blocks, and membership content typically do not transfer cleanly and need to be manually rebuilt on the WordPress side. Going in with realistic expectations about what needs rebuilding — rather than assuming a clean one-click export — is what keeps a migration from turning into a frustrating surprise halfway through.

The Migration Process, Step by Step

Start by setting up WordPress on a separate staging environment rather than touching your live domain directly. Export your content — on Squarespace this is under Settings → Advanced → Import/Export — and bring it into WordPress using the built-in WordPress Importer plugin under Tools → Import. Expect to manually re-upload images, since image URLs from your old platform's CDN typically don't carry over automatically. From there, select a WordPress theme and rebuild your design — page builders like Elementor make this more manageable if you're not working with a developer. Configure your WordPress permalinks to match your old URL structure as closely as possible, then set up 301 redirects mapping any URLs that do change to their new WordPress location. Test everything thoroughly on staging — forms, navigation, mobile display, and email routing — before reconnecting Google Analytics and Search Console with an updated sitemap and going live.

The Part Most People Get Wrong: 301 Redirects

This is the single most common way migrations damage a site's search rankings. A 301 redirect tells Google that a page has permanently moved and passes along its accumulated ranking authority to the new URL. If a URL changes during migration and there's no redirect in place, Google effectively loses the connection between the old page and its search history — you're starting that page's SEO over from zero. Matching your URL structure as closely as possible, and redirecting anything that does change, is not optional if protecting your existing traffic matters to you. After launch, keep an eye on Google Search Console closely for the first 30 days for any coverage errors or unexpected crawl issues.

Common Pitfalls

A few things trip up most DIY migrations: internal links pointing to old URLs that need to be manually updated across the site; images that silently fail to import and need to be re-uploaded one by one; contact form submissions that stop reaching your inbox because WordPress needs proper SMTP configuration to send email reliably (this is a very common and easy-to-miss failure); and design elements built with your old platform's proprietary editor that simply don't translate and need to be rebuilt from scratch rather than imported.

How Long Does It Take

For a small brochure-style site, a migration can reasonably be done in a few days. For a larger site or one with e-commerce — where products, categories, and galleries all need manual recreation — plan for several weeks. The content recreation work, not the technical setup, is usually what drives the timeline.

Common Questions