Migrating from another CMS to WordPress means exporting your existing content, rebuilding the design and functionality on WordPress, mapping every old URL to its new one, then testing the lot before the domain switches. Handled properly it takes a few weeks, leaves your search rankings intact, and ends with a website you own outright.
Outgrowing a website builder is a common place to be and an uncomfortable one. The website still works. It has stopped keeping up with the business behind it. What follows is a developer’s-eye view of what a migration actually involves, written for the owner who wants to know what they are signing up for before they commit.
Why businesses outgrow Wix and Squarespace
Businesses outgrow Wix and Squarespace when the platform starts deciding what the website is allowed to do. The usual tipping points are a design ceiling, a feature the platform will not support, subscription costs that climb as add-ons pile up, limited control over technical SEO, and the discovery that the site cannot be moved anywhere without being rebuilt.
Builders are a reasonable place to start, and we would not talk a new business out of one. For a five page site with no development budget, a Squarespace template that goes live in a weekend is a sound decision. The trouble arrives later, when the business has grown and the website has not.
You want a product catalogue that filters properly, or a booking system that talks to your accounting software, or a page structure search engines can actually read. The platform offers an app that half does it, or nothing at all. Roughly one to two businesses a month come to us in exactly this position: the site is not broken, it has aged out of its platform.
Ownership is the part owners notice last and mind most. Your content sits in someone else’s database, on hosting you cannot change, under pricing that can be revised without your agreement. There is no clean way out. We have written before about when a website reaches the point of being beyond repair, and platform lock-in is one of the ways a site quietly gets there.
What you gain by moving to WordPress
Moving to WordPress gives you the site files and database outright, your choice of hosting, full access to technical SEO settings, and a platform that grows from a brochure site into a WooCommerce store without a second migration. The WordPress.org plugin directory holds more than 71,000 free plugins, with commercial ones alongside them.
| Website builder | WordPress | |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns the files and database | The platform | You |
| Changing hosting provider | Not possible | Any host you choose |
| Technical SEO control | Whatever the platform exposes | Titles, schema, redirects and robots rules, all of it |
| Adding e-commerce | The platform’s own store, or nothing | WooCommerce on the same website |
| Extending functionality | The platform’s app market | 71,000+ plugins plus custom code |
| Ongoing cost | A subscription the platform sets | Hosting you choose, from $50 + GST a month |
None of that is worth much on its own. What it means day to day is that the next thing your business needs becomes a change to your website rather than a move to a different platform. We have made the case for WordPress as the best CMS for New Zealand businesses at length, and compared it directly with SilverStripe for organisations weighing that particular choice.
What actually happens during a migration
A migration runs in five stages: audit and export the existing content, rebuild the design and page structure in WordPress, move the pages, posts and images across, recreate the forms, integrations and tracking codes, then test everything before the domain switches over. The domain switch itself is the shortest part of the job.
The export is the stage that surprises people. WordPress has a clean, complete export and import format. Wix and Squarespace do not. Squarespace produces a partial WordPress export file that leaves out product pages, most layout content and anything held in blocks it cannot map. Wix will hand over your blog posts, products, contacts and orders as XML or CSV files, but not your pages: the design, the layout and the page copy stay behind. Past a certain point the honest route is to move content by hand, page by page, checking each one as it lands. That is the main reason a migration off a builder is developer work rather than an afternoon.
Rebuilding the design is a decision, not an obligation. Love the Centre came to us from Webflow liking how their site looked, but the platform underneath could not do what they needed and the team could not maintain it themselves. We kept the look, built the features that were missing and moved them onto WordPress so they can run it. Other clients treat the migration as the right moment to replace the design as well, which costs more and takes longer but produces a WordPress website design built around where the business is now rather than where it was.
Forms, integrations and tracking are rebuilt rather than moved. A Wix form has no WordPress equivalent to import into. Contact forms, analytics, advertising pixels, booking widgets and payment connections all need recreating on the new site and testing before launch, because a form that silently stops delivering is rarely noticed until someone asks why the enquiries dried up.
How to protect your SEO when you migrate
Search rankings survive a migration when every old URL points at its new equivalent through a 301 redirect, page titles and meta descriptions carry across unchanged, heading structure and body content stay intact, and an updated sitemap goes to Google Search Console on launch day. Rankings fall when redirects are skipped, not because the platform changed.
- Export a complete list of your existing URLs before anything changes, including the old blog posts and orphaned pages you had forgotten about.
- Map every one of them to a destination on the new site. A page with no direct equivalent redirects to the closest relevant page, never to the homepage.
- Put the redirects in place before launch rather than after someone spots the 404s. Our guide to redirecting an old page URL in WordPress covers how these are set up.
- Carry titles, meta descriptions and image alt text across as they are. Improve them afterwards, once you can measure the effect separately from the move.
- Submit the new sitemap on the day you switch. Our guide to connecting your website to Google Search Console walks through it.
- Watch Search Console and your analytics for the first fortnight. A brief dip in the first week or two is normal. A sustained drop is a redirect problem, and it is fixable.
Handled this way, a migration more often improves search performance than harms it. You gain the technical controls the builder kept out of reach, and the new site is usually considerably faster. Every website we build or migrate is held to the same internal standard: a GTmetrix grade of A and all Core Web Vitals passing, including the sites that arrive on a D or an E.
How long a migration takes, and what it costs
A straightforward migration takes three to five weeks. A migration that includes a full redesign takes eight to twelve weeks. Most small business migrations cost between $3,000 and $8,000 + GST, with larger figures where a redesign or a WooCommerce store is part of the work.
The variables are page count, how much content can be moved automatically rather than by hand, how many forms and integrations need rebuilding, and whether the design is being kept or replaced. A twelve page brochure site with one contact form sits at the bottom of both ranges. A two hundred page site with a product catalogue and a CRM connection sits well above them.
Hosting afterwards is a cost you control rather than a subscription that can be revised without your agreement. Ours starts at $50 + GST a month for hosting on its own, or $100 + GST with managed WordPress hosting and maintenance included, and you can take the website elsewhere whenever you want to. We quote migrations separately from hosting and never fold one into the other.
Migration mistakes that cost you traffic
Four mistakes cause almost all of the damage: skipping the redirects, launching without a backup of the original site, leaving forms and tracking behind, and testing on a single device. Each one is avoidable with a checklist rather than skill.
- No redirect map. The number one cause of lost traffic after a migration. Every changed URL without a redirect is a page that was earning search visits and now returns a 404 to both visitors and Google.
- No backup of the old site. Take a full copy before anything is touched, including a crawl of every page and a saved copy of the content. Once the builder subscription lapses, whatever you did not keep is gone.
- Forms, integrations and tracking left behind. Send a real test through every form after launch and confirm it lands in the right inbox. Do the same for analytics, advertising pixels and any payment connection.
- Testing on one browser on one machine. Check the new site on a phone, a tablet and a desktop before the domain switches, not once a customer reports the problem.
Thinking about making the move?
Migration is a great deal less painful than most business owners expect, and the part they worry about most, losing their search rankings, is the part with the most settled process behind it. The work that decides the outcome happens before launch: the content audit, the URL map, the redirect list and the test plan. Get those right and launch day is uneventful.
We are WordPress specialists and we run migrations end to end, from the first content audit through the redirects to the monitoring in the weeks after launch. Across 800+ websites over 15 years, most of the migrations we handle are for businesses in exactly this position, on a platform that served them well for a while and then stopped.
If you are weighing up a move, get in touch and tell us what platform you are on and roughly how many pages you have. We will tell you what the migration involves and what it would cost.
