Moving from Wix or Squarespace to WordPress without losing your Google rankings

You can move a Wix or Squarespace site to WordPress without losing your Google rankings, but only if three things stay intact: your domain, your content and every URL that currently earns traffic. Keep the domain, rebuild the pages with the same (or better) wording, and set up a 301 redirect from each old address that changes to its new one. Do that, and most sites see a short wobble of a few weeks, then settle where they were or higher. Skip the redirects and you can lose years of search history in a fortnight.

This guide covers what actually exports from each platform (less than people hope), how to map and redirect URLs, the order we do the switchover in, and what a migration costs if you hand it to us.

Why businesses leave Wix and Squarespace

Neither platform is bad. For a five-page site that never changes, either is a sensible choice, and we say so in our Wix vs web agency cost comparison. The people who call us about moving have usually hit one of these walls:

• They need something the builder can only do through a paid app or not at all: a proper booking flow with deposits, a trade price list behind a login, integration with their stock or accounting system.
• The site is slow on mobile and they cannot fix it, because the code is not theirs to change.
• Monthly fees have crept up as they added apps for forms, reviews, members and bookings.
• They want to own the site outright, host it where they like and hand it to another developer one day if they need to.
• Their blog has grown to a few hundred posts and the editor has become painful to work in.

If none of those apply, stay where you are. A migration is a project with real cost and some risk, and it only pays off if WordPress solves a problem you actually have.

What exports, and what does not

This is where expectations need resetting. Neither builder gives you a tidy file you can drop into WordPress. Based on the platforms’ own help documentation at the time of writing, here is the honest picture.

The practical upshot: for any site, plan for the design and page layouts to be rebuilt from scratch. That is not a disaster. A migration is the one moment you get to fix the structure, rewrite the thin pages and drop the ones nobody visits. Export features change, so check the current Wix and Squarespace help pages before you plan around them.

Before you touch anything: take an inventory

Most lost rankings come from pages nobody knew were getting traffic. A forgotten blog post from 2019 that brings in 300 visits a month vanishes, and so does the enquiry it was producing. So the first job is a complete list of every URL that matters.

Where to get the list

• Google Search Console: Performance report, Pages tab, last 16 months. Export it. This shows which URLs Google actually sends people to.
• Your sitemap: Wix and Squarespace both publish one at /sitemap.xml. It lists the pages the platform thinks exist.
• A crawl: run Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) over the live site. It catches pages missing from the sitemap and records titles, meta descriptions and headings.
• Backlinks: the Links report in Search Console shows your most-linked pages. Those need redirects even if they get little traffic, because the links carry authority.
• Analytics: if you have Google Analytics 4, landing-page data fills the gaps.

Merge these into one spreadsheet with a row per URL and columns for clicks, impressions, backlinks, page title and meta description. Sort by clicks. The top 20 rows are the pages you protect at all costs.

Mapping old URLs to new ones

Both builders force URL patterns on you, and WordPress lets you choose your own. You can either copy the old patterns exactly, or move to cleaner ones and redirect. Copying is the lowest-risk option and often possible. Where the old structure is clumsy, we change it and redirect, because you will live with these URLs for the next ten years.

These patterns are the defaults we see most often. Your site may differ, which is why the crawl comes first. A redirect from /post/how-to-choose-a-boiler to /how-to-choose-a-boiler/ is one line in a redirect plugin or server config. For a site with 150 blog posts, that is 150 lines, usually written as one pattern rule plus exceptions for anything renamed.

Rules that save rankings

• Use 301 (permanent) redirects, not 302s, and never redirect everything to the home page. Google treats mass home-page redirects as soft 404s.
• Redirect each old page to the closest matching new page. If you merge three thin pages into one, all three point to the new one.
• Avoid chains. Old URL straight to final URL, one hop.
• Keep the page title, H1 and the opening paragraph close to the original on your top-traffic pages for the first few months. Improve them later, once rankings settle, so you can tell what caused any change.
• Leave redirects in place permanently. Removing them after a year throws away the links that still point at the old addresses.

The domain: keep it, and be careful with email

Never change domain at the same time as changing platform if you can avoid it. Two big changes at once make problems hard to diagnose. Keep the same domain and Google sees a site that has been redesigned, not a new site.

If you bought the domain through Wix or Squarespace, you have two options. You can leave the registration where it is and simply point the DNS at your new host, or transfer the domain to an independent registrar. We usually recommend transferring once the new site is stable, so the domain is in your name at a registrar you control. For .co.uk and .uk domains, transfers between registrars run through Nominet’s tag system rather than the authorisation codes used for .com, so the steps look a little different; your new registrar will tell you the tag to use.

The trap is email. If your mailboxes run through Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, the MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records live in the same DNS zone as the website. Copy every one of them before you move DNS anywhere. Get this wrong and the website moves perfectly while your email quietly stops arriving, which nobody notices until a customer rings to ask why you never replied.

The switchover, step by step

This is the order we work in. It keeps the old site live and earning until the moment the new one replaces it.

1. Inventory and URL map signed off (see above).
2. Build the WordPress site on a staging address, blocked from search engines.
3. Move content: pages rebuilt, posts imported and checked one by one, images re-hosted, products imported from CSV.
4. Recreate on-page SEO: titles, meta descriptions, headings, image alt text, and schema markup through the SEO plugin.
5. Load the redirect map and test every row on staging with a crawler, expecting a single 301 to a 200 page.
6. Lower the DNS TTL a day before so the change propagates quickly.
7. Switch DNS to the new host in a quiet period (for most B2B sites, early morning midweek; for shops, avoid Friday to Sunday).
8. Remove the staging “noindex” setting. Forgetting this is the single most common migration mistake we see.
9. Install SSL, check https redirects, and crawl the live site again.
10. In Search Console, check the domain property is still verified (DNS verification survives a host change; the HTML tag method does not), submit the new sitemap and request indexing of the top pages.
11. Keep the old Wix or Squarespace plan running for two weeks as a fallback, then cancel it once you have saved anything you still need.

Note that Search Console’s Change of Address tool is only for moving to a new domain. If you kept the domain, you do not need it.

What to expect in the weeks after launch

Some movement is normal. Google has to recrawl the site, process the redirects and reassess the pages. On a well-run migration of a typical small-business site, we usually see impressions dip for one to four weeks and then recover. Larger sites take longer to recrawl. A drop that is still getting worse after six weeks means something is wrong, usually missing redirects, a noindex tag left on, or pages that lost most of their content in the rebuild.

What to monitor

• Search Console Pages report: watch “Not found (404)” and “Page with redirect”. 404s for URLs that used to get traffic need a redirect adding.
• Performance report: compare clicks for the top 20 URLs week by week against the same weeks before the move.
• Core Web Vitals: a hand-built WordPress theme should pass comfortably. We target Lighthouse 95+ on every template.
• Enquiries and sales: the number that matters. Check forms deliver, and that payment and confirmation emails arrive.

What a migration costs with WE-DEV

We price migrations as a new build plus the migration work, so you can see what each part costs. All prices exclude VAT at 20 %. The build uses our fixed-price packages; the migration work (inventory, URL map, content transfer, redirects and post-launch checks) is charged at our WordPress rate of £50 an hour, booked through hire us, with volume discounts from 10 hours.

The hours above are typical, not a quote. The biggest variable is blog content: posts that import cleanly from Squarespace take minutes each, while Wix posts pulled from an RSS feed often need formatting, images and internal links fixing by hand. We tell you the estimate after the inventory, before you commit to anything.

Compare that against what you pay now. Many of the Wix and Squarespace sites we look at are paying for a business plan plus two or three paid apps, and the total is easy to underestimate until you add it up over three years. WordPress hosting for a small site costs less than most builder plans, though you should budget for maintenance; our guide to what a WordPress maintenance plan should include covers that.

DIY or hand it over?

You can do this yourself. Plenty of owners do, especially on small sites. Our honest advice:

• If your site has under ten pages, no blog and little search traffic, a careful DIY move with a simple redirect plugin is reasonable. Follow the checklist above and do not skip the inventory.
• If search brings in a meaningful share of your enquiries or sales, pay someone who has done it before. The cost of a botched migration is weeks of lost leads, which for most businesses is far more than the fee.
• If you run a shop, get help. Products, variants, customer accounts and order emails all need testing, and the redirect list is long.
• If you are also changing domain or merging two sites, definitely get help, and ideally split it into two separate moves a few months apart.

We are a small development team based in St Albans and we run migrations for businesses across the UK, mostly remotely. If you want a second opinion before you decide, send us your current URL through our contact page and we will tell you how big the job is. You can read more about how we build WordPress sites without page builders in why we hand-build WordPress themes, or see the full service on our CMS development page.

Photo: Deng Xiang via Unsplash