90°S · Migration · Wix

Moving off Wix

The fastest route from nothing to online, and genuinely good at it. For a business that needs to exist on the internet by Friday, it is the right tool and we would tell you so.

Stay on it when: The site is a presence rather than a channel, it will not change much, and nobody in the building is technical.

If that describes you, close this tab — you have your answer and it cost you nothing. What follows is for everyone else.

Depth · 20M · What a Wix export contains

Press export and see what arrives.

There is no export that produces a working site, and this is the single most important thing to know before planning anything. Blog posts can be extracted; the pages, the design, the structure and the forms are rows in Wix's database rather than files on a disk. This is not a flaw somebody forgot to fix — it is what the product is, and it is why the migration is a rebuild with content carried over rather than a transfer.

What comes with you

  • Text and images, pulled from the live site
  • The URL list, crawled rather than exported
  • Blog posts, where the blog export applies
  • Whatever is in your own hands already — domain, brand assets, copy

What gets rebuilt

  • Every page, because there is nothing to import them from
  • The design, which exists only inside the editor
  • Forms and wherever the submissions were going
  • Anything added through the App Market

Deliberately no item counts, plan tiers or quoted limits anywhere on this page. Those change on somebody else’s release schedule, and a stale specific is worse than no specific on a page whose whole claim is that you can check it yourself.

Depth · 40M · Where it starts costing

What Wix charges you that isn’t on the invoice

You cannot take it with you. There is no export that produces a working site — the design, the templates and the structure are rows in their database, not files. That is not a flaw in the product; it is the product. There is also a performance ceiling you cannot engineer past.

Time to leave when

The site starts mattering commercially — or you try to leave and discover what leaving means.

And the four reasons people actually go

01

It is slow, and nobody can say why

Usually plugin sprawl, uncompressed images, or a builder rendering everything client-side. Measurable before and after, which makes it the easiest of the four to justify.

02

Nobody can change it without calling somebody

Either the platform makes editing dangerous, or the person who built it left. This is a structure problem, and it is fixed by deciding who should be able to change what before anything is rebuilt.

03

The annual bill keeps growing

Plugin licences, platform tiers, seats you are not using, a retainer for changes you could make yourself. Worth adding up over three years before comparing it to a one-off build.

04

You have realised you cannot leave

The most expensive one, and the one people discover latest. It is also the only one on this list that gets worse the longer you wait, because everything you publish in the meantime is published into somebody else's database.

Depth · 400M · How the move runs

What a Wix migration actually involves.

We crawl the live site for content and for the complete URL list, because that list is the only reliable record of what exists. Everything is then rebuilt — which sounds worse than it is, since a Wix site being migrated is usually one somebody had outgrown anyway, and rebuilding is the part that fixes it. Redirects come from the crawl, so no address is dropped.

  • Every URL, redirected

    Old addresses 301 to their new home, generated from the crawl rather than typed — so the rankings and inbound links you already paid for survive the move.

  • Measured on both sides

    Load time, Core Web Vitals and accessibility recorded on the existing site before anything is touched, and again after. It is the one project where the improvement is a number rather than an opinion.

  • Instrumented on arrival

    Named conversion events wired at build, so the new site can tell you which page did the work — which the old one almost certainly could not.

  • In your accounts

    Repository, hosting, domain and analytics in your name. If the reason you are leaving is that somebody else held them, the migration is not finished until that is not true.

Most sites should not migrate. If yours should, it is a known job at a known price.

A migration is $4,800 and takes 2–3 weeks, published like every other figure on this site. The free assessment can also tell you to keep what you have — that outcome is on the page too.