How to Transfer a Site from Wix.com to Self-Hosted WordPress Website?

Wix is a popular website builder platform among new site owners, especially small business owners and bloggers. Many like it due to its simplicity and modern feel. You can have a website set-up using Wix within minutes (even if you’re not too good at it).

But since you arrived on this post, I think that you want to go away from Wix. Maybe you’ve recently heard about WordPress, and about all the wonders it can do. After all, to be fair, WordPress is a lot more dynamic than Wix. You can use it for pretty much anything, and it gives you total freedom in designing and setting up the website of your dreams.

Whatever the reason behind this move is, you can do it without the need to rebuild the whole website from ground up. In this article we’ll discuss how you can migrate your website from Wix to WordPress. We’ll go into detail, so don’t worry right now. You’ll get everything until the end of this article.

Right now, I’ll list all the steps that need to be taken to be able to migrate your website from Wix to a self-hosted WordPress website (we’ll go into detail right after):

1. Get yourself a WordPress hosting plan (we recommend InMotion Hosting).
2. Install WordPress on your account.
3. Transfer your website/domain from Wix to the new hosting provider.
4. Finalize the process using CMS2CMS WordPress plugin.

Get a WordPress Hosting Package

When we talk about web hosting, there are many companies out there offering all kinds of services: VPS hosting, shared hosting, dedicated hosting, reseller hosting and ecommerce hosting. But for us, it’s best to find a hosting company that offers Managed WordPress hosting, or just simple hosting that supports WordPress.

You could find the best company pretty hard, if you try to search for it yourself. That is because there are literally tens (if not hundreds) of hosting companies online. Luckily, we compiled a list of 3 hosting providers who support WordPress. Any one of them could be a good candidate. Let’s look at them separately:

InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting – Sign Up!

This company is a well-known hosting provider from the US. It’s been around for quite some time now, and gained in popularity ever since. They offer many hosting capabilities, among which you can also find dedicated WordPress hosting too.

Depending on your website that needs to be transferred, you can choose between 6 different hosting plans. Let’s assume you have a medium sized website with fairly many monthly visitors. Considering this, I’ll expand on the 2^nd hosting package called WP-2000S.

It comes for a monthly $11.38, and you get all the following features: free domain name (big plus in our case), support for 2 WP websites, suitable for 50,000 monthly visitors, 80GB of SSD storage with unlimited bandwidth and email accounts. They also provide specific customer support for every new buyer.

HostGator

HostGator – Sign Up!

HostGator is well-known for its low prices. But being cheap, doesn’t mean that it isn’t a reliable hosting provider. The exact opposite is true in the case of HostGator. They provide 3 different hosting plans all customized for WordPress use.

• Hatchling plan: it costs $2.75/month
• Baby plan: this one comes for $3.95/month
• Business plan: $5.95/month

For your needs, the best choice would be the Business plan. This one includes support for unlimited hosted websites/domains, lots of 1-click installs (including WordPress), unmetered bandwidth, free private SSL certificate and dedicated IP address and even email marketing tools.

Bluehost

BlueHost – Sign Up!

Bluehost is another American company closely tied to web hosting. This candidate however differs from the other 2 on our list: Bluehost is recommended by WordPress itself for Managed WP hosting. This gives the company a huge plus. (though the other 2 are just as good)

The best hosting plan from Bluehost’s offered in the WP hosting section, is called Choice Plus. It costs $5.23/month. You get included the next-mentioned features and resources: unlimited websites for hosting, free SSL certificate, free domain name for a whole year, unlimited parked and sub-domains, free backups and unlimited SSD storage space.

Just like any WP hosting plan should, this one also includes an automatic WordPress installation. When you sign up for the package, Bluehost will automatically take care of the installation, without the need for you to do anything. This is quite convenient for most people.

Install WordPress to Your Host

Now, if you’ve managed to pick a hosting plan out of the 3 above, it’s time to install WordPress on your hosting account. Depending on your choice, this can be done in 2 different ways:

1. If you’ve chosen Bluehost, then you don’t have to worry about the installation at all. Like I already mentioned above, once you sign up for your managed WP hosting plan, WordPress will be installed automatically. There’s literally nothing you should do additionally.
2. For InMotion and HostGator, things are a little different. Once you’re done with the sign-up, you can opt to install WordPress right away with a 1-click installation, or you can wait and do it later. This is because, in the case of these 2 companies, you can install other applications that you might want. So, it’s up to you to install WordPress right from the start or only some time later.

The process of the installation is very simple. All you need to do, is find WordPress in the list of available applications, click on it and approve the installation. From there on, all you need to do is wait (a little).

Transfer Domain from Wix

Transferring your domain name from Wix to your chosen hosting provider isn’t a complicated process either. The steps needed to make it happen, are listed right below:

1. The first thing you need to do, is go to the My Domains page in your Wix account. Know, that if you have multiple domains hosted at Wix, you must choose the one you want to be transferred.
2. On the My Domains page, go to the Advanced tab and click where it says “Transfer away from Wix”. At this step you’ll have to fill out where you want the domain to be transferred and other possible info.
3. Once you’ve done step 2, you have to click Send Code. The email address specified in your domain registrant information, will receive an email with an authorization code for transferring your domain name. You should receive it within 24 hours.

Transfer Domain Away from Wix (source)

When you’ve done all the requested steps accordingly, your domain will be transferred to the specified hosting provider. But be aware that this process can take up to 7 days.

When all is finished, you’ll receive a notification (email) from your new host that the transfer was completed successfully. If for some reason that won’t happen, after 7 days just check in your account or contact them for support. But this rarely happens.

Finalize transfer using the CMS2CMS WordPress plugin

This is the final step in the process of site migration from Wix to a self-hosted WP website. To be able to do this, you need to install a plugin for WordPress, called CMS2CMS. How can you do that?

On your WP dashboard, head to the ‘’plugins’’ sections. Once you’re there, click on ‘’add new’’. The easiest way, is to just type into the search bar the name of the plugin: CMS2CMS. When it’s found, just click install. WP will do the rest of the installation by itself.

When that’s done, you must activate the plugin. This is done simply by clicking the ‘’activate’’ button on the plugin’s description. While you’re on the activation tab, you’ll be prompted to sign into your CMS2CMS account. If you don’t already have one (which is likely), just create a new account. It only takes a few minutes. When you created it, just sign in.

After this is finished, you can move on with the migration of your website. On that page, you have to enter the existing details that relate to your current website, like the current URL, and where you want it to be moved (WordPress). You have to check all the boxes (tags, images, content etc.) for the site to be moved to WordPress. Since you migrate the whole website, just tick all the boxes.

Next, you can first see a demo of how your website will look, when migrate to WordPress. If you’re ok with the look and feel, you can proceed, and do the full migration. You have to tick all the boxes again, and see what the price for the service is below. If you’re comfortable with everything, move on and finish the transfer.

It should take about 15-20 minutes, depending on your website (if it has a lot of content or not so much).

Conclusion

When you’ve done all the steps like described above, you’ll be able to manage your new website using the WordPress platform. Everything: images, articles, videos, meta data, literally everything will be moved to WordPress.

However, if you want to further change the look of the site, you can do that too by changing the theme it works with.

All in all, using the CMS2CMS plugin, the migration is handled fast and efficiently. You’ll have a WordPress based website in no-time.