Move From Wix or Squarespace to WordPress Without Losing SEO

Here's the thing nobody tells you: moving off Wix or Squarespace to your own WordPress hosting is mostly dull, mechanical work — and the one part that actually loses you traffic is a missing redirect map. That's it. Map every old URL to a new one, set proper 301 redirects before you switch the domain over, and your rankings ride through the move almost untouched. Skip that single step and you'll spend months clawing back what you gave away in an afternoon.

Everything else is grunt work: pulling your content out of a closed builder, rebuilding it in WordPress, and pointing your domain at the new home. None of it is hard. It just needs a checklist and a bit of patience, because neither platform hands you a tidy export button and waves you off.

Here's the order I'd do it in, the traps that catch people, and exactly what to check once you flip the switch.

Why bother leaving a builder at all?

The honest reason to leave Wix or Squarespace is ownership and cost over time — you're renting a walled garden, and rent goes up.

Builders are genuinely good for getting online fast. The problem shows up later. You can't take your Wix theme with you, you can't move your Squarespace design, and your content lives in a format only they can read. When your business grows and you want a plugin they don't offer, a cheaper hosting bill, or a developer who isn't boxed in by the builder's rules, you're stuck.

WordPress on your own hosting flips that. You own the files, the database and the domain. You can move host any time, install whatever you like, and pay a predictable amount instead of an annual plan that creeps upward. That portability is the whole point — and it's why this migration is worth doing once, properly.

Step one: export your content (and accept it won't be clean)

Neither Wix nor Squarespace gives you a full one-click export, so plan to do part of it by hand.

Squarespace is the friendlier of the two. Go to Settings > Advanced > Import / Export and export to a WordPress-format XML file. It carries over blog posts, pages, images and text. It does not carry over product pages, album pages, some style blocks, or anything in index/gallery layouts — you'll rebuild those manually.

Wix has no meaningful export. Your blog posts can be pulled via the Wix blog's RSS feed or a third-party importer, but pages, layouts and images you'll copy across by hand or scrape. Budget real time for this if you have more than a dozen pages.

Before you touch anything, make a full inventory. Crawl your live site with the free tier of Screaming Frog SEO Spider (up to 500 URLs) and export the list. That crawl is your source of truth for the redirect map later, so save it somewhere safe.

• Every live URL — pages, posts, category and tag pages
• Page titles and meta descriptions — so you can replicate them, not guess
• Images — download originals, not the compressed versions in the page
• Your top 20 pages by traffic — from Google Analytics or Search Console, so you know what must survive

Step two: build WordPress on real hosting first

Set up your new WordPress site on a temporary address before you move the domain, so you can rebuild in peace without touching the live site.

Most hosts, including TPC Hosting, let you install WordPress in a few clicks and work on it at a temporary URL while your Wix or Squarespace site stays live and earning. Nobody sees the half-finished version. When it's ready, you point the domain across and the switch is near-instant.

Import your Squarespace XML under Tools > Import > WordPress. Then rebuild the pages the export missed, upload your images to the Media Library, and recreate each page's title and meta description with a plugin like Yoast or Rank Math. This is your one chance to tidy thin content and merge duplicate pages — but note every URL you change, because each one needs a redirect.

If the hand-work feels like a lot, this is exactly what free migration is for. TPC Hosting will move an existing site across for you, and our support engineers are real people on hand 24/7 if the import throws something odd — which, with builder exports, it sometimes does.

Step three: match your URLs, or plan the redirects

The single most important SEO task is making your new URLs match the old ones — and where they can't, redirecting the old to the new.

Squarespace URLs look like /blog/my-post-title and pages like /about. WordPress can copy that exactly. Set Settings > Permalinks to Post name so posts become /my-post-title, and if you want the /blog/ prefix, set it in your SEO plugin's permalink settings. The closer you match, the fewer redirects you need.

Wix is messier. Old Wix blog URLs used a /post/ or dated structure, and Wix often adds a hash fragment (/#!) that search engines handled awkwardly. You almost certainly won't match these one-to-one, so a redirect map is non-negotiable here.

Build a simple two-column sheet: old URL, new URL. Every URL from your Screaming Frog crawl goes in the left column. Fill the right. Nothing gets left blank — if a page is gone for good, redirect it to the closest relevant page, not the homepage, because a wall of homepage redirects reads as a soft-404 to Google.

Step four: set up the 301 redirects

Use permanent 301 redirects — never 302 — because only a 301 tells Google to pass the old page's ranking authority to the new one.

On WordPress the easiest route is the Redirection plugin. Add each pair from your sheet, or use its bulk import to paste them all at once. For larger sites, adding the rules directly to your .htaccess is faster and doesn't load a plugin on every request:

• Redirect 301 /post/spring-sale /blog/spring-sale-2024
• Redirect 301 /services-old /services

One catch specific to leaving a builder: you can only add these redirects on the new WordPress site, and they only fire once the domain points there. That's fine — the domain move and the redirects go live together. Test a handful with a redirect checker afterwards to confirm each returns a clean 301, not a 302 or a chain of hops.

Don't forget non-page redirects: if your old blog RSS feed, sitemap or image URLs had traffic or backlinks, redirect those too.

Step five: move the domain and check everything

Moving the domain means pointing its DNS at your new host, then verifying the site, redirects and search setup all work before you relax.

If your domain is registered with Wix or Squarespace, you can either transfer the registration out or simply update the nameservers/A record to point at your host — updating DNS is faster and lower-risk. Your host gives you the target values; TPC Hosting's support can confirm exactly what to enter, and DNS usually settles within a few hours.

Once it resolves, run this list:

• Spot-check redirects — visit 10 old URLs, confirm each lands on the right new page
• Submit a new XML sitemap in Google Search Console (Yoast/Rank Math generate one automatically)
• Verify the property in Search Console for the new setup and keep the old one open to watch for crawl errors
• Check internal links — replace any that still point at the old builder URLs
• Confirm HTTPS loads with no mixed-content warnings
• Re-crawl with Screaming Frog and hunt for any 404s you missed

Expect a small ranking wobble for a week or two while Google recrawls and honours the redirects — that's normal and recovers if your mapping is complete. Keep the old builder plan active for about a month as a safety net, not longer. TPC Hosting gives you 30 days to back out, so there's room to confirm everything held before you cancel anything.

The short version

Rankings survive a migration when the old URLs keep working, either by matching exactly or by 301-redirecting to the right replacement.

Do the crawl first, build on a temporary address, map every URL, set 301s, then move the domain last. The mapping is the whole ballgame — get it right and most visitors won't even notice you moved.

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