Website migration to WordPress

Not if the redirects are done as part of the build rather than remembered on launch day, which is the single thing that separates a quiet migration from an expensive one. Every old address gets a mapped replacement, the rules are tested against the live host before the switch, and rankings and crawl errors are watched for the weeks afterwards. Some movement in the first few weeks is normal while search engines re-crawl. A permanent drop is a redirect problem, and it is preventable.

Wix has no export another platform can import, so nothing useful comes out of it by pressing a button. That does not mean the content has to be retyped. We pull the pages, the copy and the images down with our own tooling and prepare them as an import. We wrote exactly those scripts for the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, whose Wix site carried years of concerts, people and news, and almost all of it came across. What gets rebuilt is the design and the content model, not the content itself. Builder sites are also small, the audit put the median Wix site at 13 to 20 pages depending on the country, so this is a smaller job than it usually sounds.

From Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and most database-backed systems, largely yes, because the content is stored as structured data and can be read and mapped. From Wix, Tilda, Squarespace and the other builders there is no database to read, so we extract from the published site itself and prepare that as an import. Either way the extraction is rarely the expensive part. Deciding how the old content should be modelled on the new site is.

Products, variants, categories and images move. Order history and customer accounts are a decision rather than a default: passwords cannot be carried across between platforms because they are hashed differently, so customers reset them on first login, and order history either migrates or is archived somewhere readable depending on what you need it for. Payment and delivery integrations are usually rebuilt rather than reconnected. We settle all of that before quoting, because that list is the actual scope.

A small builder site is four to six weeks. A Joomla or Drupal site with a real content model, or a shop with a catalogue and integrations, is more usually eight to fourteen. The crawl, the URL map and the content audit happen at the start rather than at the end, and that front-loading is what makes launch day boring, which is the goal.

It is driven by how many genuinely different templates the site needs, how much of the old content has to be re-modelled rather than moved, and how many outside systems have to be reconnected. Page count on its own is a poor guide: a 200-page site built from six templates is a smaller job than a 30-page site where every page is different. We scope before quoting and the price is fixed after that. Our cost calculator gives an honest range including the running costs a build-only quote leaves out.

Sometimes not, and we will say so. If the platform still does what the business needs and the complaint is really about design, speed or content, then moving adds risk and cost without fixing the thing that is wrong. The case for migrating is when the platform is the constraint: it will not do what you need next, the people who can maintain it are getting harder to find, or you are paying a subscription for limits you have outgrown. We tell you which of those you are in before quoting.