Wix is a popular website builder service where you can build your websites using simple drag and drop website building tools.

However, it’s pretty limited in what it can do, especially when it comes to blogging. Wix doesn’t give you much control over your data and adding extra features can quickly become costly.

This is why many website owners decide to move their websites from Wix to WordPress.

We’ve prepared this guide to help you successfully move your website from Wix to WordPress.

Here’s a list of steps required to move your website from Wix to WordPress:

1. Set up a WordPress installation
2. Customize your WordPress site and appearance
3. Import blog posts from Wix via RSS feed
4. Create pages from Wix on WordPress
5. Create menus on WordPress
6. Import images from Wix to WordPress
7. Redirect Wix to WordPress

Step 1: Set up WordPress installation

If you purchased a WordPress hosting service – you should already have WordPress installed out of the box. Many WordPress hosting services will pre-install WordPress for you, one of our favorites is Skystra.

Step 2: Customize WordPress site and appearance

Now that you have an active WordPress installation, it’s time to customize your site’s appearance and sections.

First, let’s set up WordPress permalinks by going to Settings > Permalinks.

We recommend using the Post name setting so your posts link structure is clean.

By using Post name, your post links will look like this:

www.yoursite.com/post-title

Instead of the default, which looks like this:

www.yoursite.com/2017/10/post-title

Once you update your Permalinks Settings, click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page to apply the update.

Then go to the Settings > General, and set your Site Title and Tagline:

Next, you need to customize your website appearance using WordPress themes.

WordPress themes are like Wix templates, and by using them – you can change how your website looks. There are thousands of free and premium WordPress themes to choose from, depending on if you want a minimalist type of website or a heavy-duty feature-packed site.

If you’re a beginner, we recommend starting with a simple theme that’s easy to use.

To search and install themes, head to the Appearance > Themes section of the WordPress dashboard, and click on the Add New button.

Here, you can find featured, latest, and popular themes which you can easily install using the Install button. Each theme can be previewed as well, which is quite handy.

You don’t have to choose your theme right away, a default WordPress theme will work fine during the migration process away from Wix, and the most important task is bringing your content over from Wix first.

Step 3: Import blog posts from Wix via RSS feed

Now we need to go ahead and migrate your blog posts from Wix to your brand new WordPress website.

Since Wix is a closed platform, they don’t make it easy to migrate content or data from their platform. We’ll need to use RSS feeds to bring them over, and it’s a semi-automated process.

First, you’ll need to download the Wix RSS file, by adding /feed.xml or /blog-feed.xml to your Wix website URL.

If you have a wixsite.com subdomain, you’d do exactly the same – you’d add it after the blog name, for example:

https://yourusername.wixsite.com/blogname/blog-feed.xml

Make sure to replace yourusername with your actual Wix username, and blogname with your site name at Wix. The same goes if you have your custom domain with Wix:

https://yourdomain.com/blog-feed.xml

or

https://yourdomain.com/feed.xml

Once you access your Wix RSS URL, you’ll see a page full of code. Right-click your mouse anywhere on the page, and select the Save As (or Save Page As in Firefox) option and save the file.

Once you download the file, head back to your WordPress dashboard > Tools > Import option and click the Install button under the RSS option.

Once the RSS importer is installed, click the Run Importer button under it:

Click the Browse button, select the file you downloaded to your computer, and click the Upload file and import button.

You will receive a confirmation message once the installation process is completed.

It’s best to check if everything was imported correctly manually, so head to Posts > All Posts option and make sure that all posts are there.

Step 4: Create pages from Wix on WordPress

Unfortunately, Wix doesn’t offer any automated way to move pages from their service, so this part will have to be done manually.

Navigate to the Wix page that you want to move, select all content (except the title), and right-click > Copy.

Then head to Pages > Add New, and paste that content into the body section. Input the title and click the Publish button to publish it. You’ll have to follow this process for each page you want to move over.

Step 5: Create menus on WordPress

To create a menu for your website, head to Appearance > Menus, type the name of the menu, and click the Create Menu button.

On the left side, select all the pages you want to add to the menu and click the Add to Menu button. Select the menu position and click the Save Menu button to save the changes.

That’s it! Now you’ll have a functional menu displayed on your website.

Step 6: Import images from Wix to WordPress

To avoid manually uploading your images via FTP, you can use the Auto Upload Images plugin.

What this plugin does is search through the post for image URLs, and automatically downloads, uploads, and imports those images to your WordPress gallery and then post itself.

Head to Plugins > Add New, search for the Auto Upload Images in the top-right search bar, then install and activate it.

Once the plugin is activated, you need to re-save each post for it to go through them and replace images. To avoid doing the process manually, go to Posts > All Posts, click the Screen Options option at the top-right corner, and set the Number of items per page option to 999.

Next, select all your posts, choose the Edit option from the drop-down menu, and click the Apply button.

Once you see the WordPress edit box, click the Update button, and that’s it!

Step 7: Redirect Wix to WordPress

This step is very important as you’ll want to redirect all your website visitors that browse your old Wix website to the exact page on the new WordPress site.

In addition to that, redirect helps with SEO as it lets search engines know that your website has moved to a new location.

Keep in mind that the redirect method only works if you have a custom domain name on Wix.

If you had built your website on a free Wix subdomain, then the visitors can’t be redirected to your new WordPress site.

Copy the following code and paste it to your notepad application:

var hashesarr = {

"#!about/xxxx”:’/aboutus/‘,

"#!contact-us/xxxx”:’/contact/',

“#!some-article/xxxx”:’/some-article/'

};

for (var hash in hashesarr) {

var patt = new RegExp(hash);

if (window.location.hash.match(patt) !== null) {

window.location.href = hashesarr[hash];

}

}

The first part of the string (#!about/xxxx) is your old Wix URL, while the second part (/aboutus/) is the URL on your new WordPress website. You will have to do this manually for every URL you have on the Wix site that is being migrated to WordPress.

Once you’ve completed that, save the file under redirects.js name, and upload it to the WordPress theme /js/ directory on your account.

If your theme doesn’t have this directory available – create it from your FTP client or the File Manager.

Lastly, edit your theme’s functions.php file, and add this code to the bottom of the file:

function wpb_wixjs () {

wp_enqueue_script( 'wixredirect', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/js/redirects.js', array(), '1.0.0', true);

}

add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'wpb_wixjs'); 

Save the file, and you’re done!

Final thoughts

Make sure to go through your new WordPress website carefully to make sure that all of your content was migrated over properly and works well.

You can preview posts and pages before publishing them to try and catch errors before they go live. 

We know that moving away from Wix to WordPress can be complicated, but we hope this guide makes things just that much easier.

Have you ever migrated from Wix to WordPress? Let us know how it went in the comments below.