Migrate from Wix without losing SEO: what you can export, the URLs to redirect and what each move costs

The short answer

You can't move a Wix site as a site. Wix's help center says a site "must run on Wix's servers" (Wix Help), so migrating from Wix means rebuilding the pages on the new platform and carrying the data across: products, contacts, form submissions and CMS collections export as CSV, media downloads folder by folder, and blog posts, which have no export button, come out through Wix's own API.

Rankings survive the move when every Wix URL that earns traffic or links, such as /post/..., /product-page/... and auto-named pages like /copy-of-home, answers with a 301 redirect to its closest new page. Those redirects have to live on the new host, because Wix's redirect manager stops applying once your domain points elsewhere. Point the domain first; transfer it later if you want to.

On price, leaving rarely pays for itself. A 20-page site with a blog costs USD 348 a year on Wix Core (US price, billed yearly). The same site costs USD 48 a year on WordPress.com and about USD 480 on Webflow or Framer once one editor is added. People leave Wix for control, limits and ownership, not for the bill.

Prices below are in US dollars, before tax, read from each vendor's pricing page on 17 October 2026. Wix prices vary by country.

Why people leave Wix, and when they shouldn't

Wix's plans, as its plans page lists them in US dollars for reference, billed yearly:

Sources: Wix plans, Wix Help: CMS collection limits.

Two things about that table. Wix says its prices "may differ depending on your geographic location" (Wix Help): the Spanish-language pricing page, read from Colombia on the same day, showed Light at USD 5 and Core at USD 11. And the last increase was recent. Wix announced in July 2025 that "the price of some plans will be increasing", for new subscriptions and renewals (Wix Help). Business is USD 39 a month today; an Internet Archive capture from 14 June 2025 shows it at USD 36.

The limits that push people out are written in Wix's own help center:

• The site can't leave. There's no code export: everything you build stays on Wix's hosting, as the export article above says.
• CMS caps. Once a collection reaches the plan's item limit, "you won't be able to add more data" (Wix Help). Light stops at 1,500 items and Core at 4,000.
• Fixed URL prefixes. Blog posts always sit under a prefix that "is not possible to remove", only rename (Wix Help).
• Redirect ceilings. A Wix site holds at most 5,000 redirects, and none can start from the home page (Wix Help).

Speed is usually not a reason to leave. In Google's field data for September 2026, 88.7% of Wix sites in the United States passed all three Core Web Vitals on mobile, ahead of Shopify (85.5%), Framer (81.7%), Webflow (80.2%) and WordPress (62.0%) (HTTP Archive technology report). Our website platform speed report shows the same data by country. Those are shares of all sites on each platform, not a promise for yours, but they mean a move "for speed" can make things worse.

Stay on Wix if the site does its job, the people who edit it are happy and none of the limits above bites. A rebuild costs more than several years of plan fees.

What Wix lets you take with you

Export everything while the plan is still active, and keep the files with the date you made them. Contacts and orders change daily, so repeat those two exports the day you switch.

Getting the blog posts out

Wix's help center is blunt: "Currently, it is not possible to export blog posts to other platforms" (Wix Help). There are four ways around it, from least to most complete:

1. The RSS feed at /blog-feed.xml. It holds at most 20 posts (Wix Help), and on the live Wix site we checked it carried excerpts, not full posts.
2. WordPress.com's Wix importer. It brings over static pages, images, menus and the site title, but for posts it falls back to the same RSS feed and "the 20 most recent posts" (WordPress.com Support). It works on WordPress.com, not on self-hosted WordPress.
3. Copying from the live site, post by post, using /blog-posts-sitemap.xml as the list. Fine for 30 posts, slow for 300.
4. Wix's Blog API. The List Posts endpoint returns up to 100 published posts per request, with the full body when you ask for the RICH_CONTENT or CONTENT_TEXT fieldset, plus SEO and URL. You create an API key in Wix's API Keys Manager and send it with the site's ID in a wix-site-id header (Wix Developers). A blog of 300 posts is three requests.

GET https://www.wixapis.com/v3/posts?paging.limit=100&fieldsets=RICH_CONTENT&fieldsets=SEO&fieldsets=URL
Authorization: <API key>
wix-site-id: <site ID>

The rich content comes back as structured JSON, so a developer converts it to HTML before importing it into WordPress, Webflow or Framer. Check images inside posts: they point to Wix's media hosting, so download and re-upload them rather than linking to Wix.

The Wix URLs that need redirects

Wix documents its default URL patterns in its SEO settings guide, and we found most of them on live Wix sites on 17 October 2026:

Four details catch people out:

• Prefixes may have been renamed. Wix lets you change the post and product-page prefixes in SEO settings (Wix Help), so read your real URLs from the sitemap instead of assuming the defaults.
• Your old Wix redirects need a new home. Wix's 301s "only work with custom domains" connected to Wix (Wix Help). Export them, and point each old source straight at its final new URL so nothing chains.
• Query-string pages exist. Restaurant menus, for example, appear as /menu?menu=lunch-menu. Check the sitemap for question marks.
• The sitemap is your inventory. /sitemap.xml is an index of sub-sitemaps for pages, blog posts, categories, products, bookings, events and dynamic pages (Wix Help). Add the landing pages from Search Console, because a page can earn clicks without being in the sitemap.

Google asks for the same thing: map every old URL to its new one, and "don't redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant single URL destination, such as the home page", which "might be treated as a soft 404 error" (Google Search Central). Our free redirect map generator reads the Wix sitemap and the new site's sitemap, matches the two and writes the rules for your host.

Where the rules go on each destination:

• WordPress: a redirect plugin or the server's configuration.
• Webflow: Site settings, Publishing, 301 redirects. Pattern rules use capture groups, such as /blog/categories/(.*) to /category/%1. Characters such as -, _ and ? must be escaped with % in the old path, a CSV import can be up to 16 MB but "new imports overwrite all existing redirects", and Webflow recommends 1,000 rules at most (Webflow Help, CSV import).
• Framer: redirects are a Pro-plan feature (Framer pricing).
• Shopify: URL redirects, with CSV import (Shopify Help).

Where to go, and what each option costs

Running costs for one example: a 20-page site with a 60-post blog and a contact form, edited by the owner plus one other person, billed yearly. Domain fees are left out because they're the same everywhere.

Sources: Wix, WordPress.com, Hostinger, Webflow, Framer, Squarespace (Internet Archive capture of 13 October 2026), Shopify (Internet Archive capture of 17 October 2026), Cloudflare Workers, Sanity. Squarespace and Shopify show prices by country, so their US prices come from the archive; ours showed lower prices when read from Colombia.

How to read it:

• WordPress is the only hosted route that costs clearly less than Wix. WordPress.com allows plugins on every paid plan (WordPress.com pricing), which removes the old reason to pay for Business. Self-hosting is cheaper still on long prepaid terms, but you own the updates, backups and security.
• Webflow and Framer cost more than Wix Core once a second editor joins. Pick them for design control and a better CMS, not to save money. Our Webflow vs Framer comparison covers seats, limits and languages, and Wix Studio vs Webflow covers staying inside Wix's own pro editor.
• Shopify is the move for a store that has outgrown Wix Stores. Its Store Migration app imports Wix products and customers from the Wix CSV, but "you can't export or migrate reviews from Wix to Shopify" (Shopify Help).
• A coded site has the lowest running cost and no platform limits, and the highest build cost. It fits teams with developers or sites that share code with a product.
• Hostinger won't migrate a Wix site for you: "If you build websites using any website builder, you won't be able to migrate them to Hostinger" (Hostinger). Its free migrations are for sites coming from other hosts.

Add the one-time cost of the move. Published starting prices, read 17 October 2026: Seahawk Media moves sites from Wix and other platforms to WordPress from USD 499 (Seahawk Media), and DesignSense Agency rebuilds WordPress, Wix or Squarespace sites in Webflow or Framer from USD 800 in about two weeks (Contra). Those are entry prices for small sites; our website migration cost guide lists more by size, and the website cost estimator gives a range for rebuilding the site itself. Leaving Wix Core for WordPress.com saves about USD 300 a year, so even an entry-price move takes a year or two to repay on fees alone.

The migration, step by step

1. Inventory every URL. Download /sitemap.xml and each sub-sitemap. In Google Search Console, export the Performance report's pages for the last 12 months and the top linked pages. Add the Wix redirect CSV. Mark each URL keep, redirect, merge or retire.
2. Export the data. Products, orders, contacts, form submissions, CMS collections and bookings as CSV; blog posts through the API; media folder by folder. Record each page's SEO title, meta description and social image with a crawler of the live site; it's quicker than opening each page's settings.
3. Rebuild on a staging address that search engines can't index. Keep URLs where the platform allows: /post/{slug} stays the same on WordPress and Webflow with the settings above. Give auto-named pages proper slugs. Rebuild forms and point them at real inboxes, and license any fonts you used through Wix.
4. Write the redirect map. One row per old URL, one hop to the final URL, a 404 or 410 only for pages you're retiring on purpose. Load it on the new host and test every row on staging.
5. Prepare the domain. Lower the DNS TTL in advance: Webflow suggests the lowest value available, typically 30 seconds, set at least one full TTL period before the change (Webflow Help). Write down your email (MX) records.
6. Switch. Point the domain at the new host, publish, and request a sample of old URLs to confirm each returns one 301 to a page that answers 200.
7. Tell Google. On the same domain you don't use the Change of Address tool; Google says it's only for moves "from one domain or subdomain to another" (Google Search Central). Submit the new sitemap, inspect your top pages, and watch the Pages report for 404s.
8. Watch, then cancel. Google warns that visibility "may fluctuate temporarily", and for medium-sized sites "it can take a few weeks or more" for new URLs to show. Compare clicks by page at 30, 60 and 90 days, keep the redirects "at least 1 year" (same source), and only then cancel the Wix plan.

Our website migration SEO checklist covers launch day and the 90 days after it in more detail.

The domain and email: point first, transfer later

If you bought the domain from Wix, you have two options:

• Keep it at Wix and point it. Wix says you "can connect a domain purchased from Wix to any site, even if it's hosted on another platform": edit the A record for the root and the CNAME for www, and delete old A records (Wix Help). This is the fastest switch and the easiest to undo.
• Transfer it away. Unlock the domain, then Domain Actions, "Transfer away from Wix". Wix emails an authorization (EPP) code to the domain's registrant contact address, recommends turning off private registration first, and says a transfer "usually takes up to 7 days". Your Wix site is disconnected when it goes, and business email stops until you add the MX records again at the new provider (Wix Help).

Two traps. The ICANN 60-day lock blocks a transfer for 60 days after registering the domain, changing the registrant's contact details or a previous transfer (Wix Help), so don't edit the contact details right before you move. And the EPP code goes to the registrant email, so check you can read that inbox before you start.

That's why we point first: the site switches the day you're ready, and the transfer can happen any time later, outside the launch window. If the domain was bought elsewhere and only connected to Wix, there's nothing to transfer: change the records at your registrar and remove the domain from your Wix account.

Checklist

What to do next

Start with the inventory: paste your Wix sitemap into the redirect map generator to see how many URLs you're moving and which ones need a decision. If you'd rather hand the whole move to someone, it's the work Dardo does in a website migration, with a redirect map for every Wix URL.