Steps to Migrate from Wix to WordPress
1) Sign up for WordPress Web Hosting.
2) Setup new WordPress website.
3) Customize website style and appearance.
4) Import blog posts via RSS.
5) Convert Wix pages to WordPress.
6) Create main navigation menu.
7) Redirect Wix to WordPress.
Step 1: Sign up for WordPress Web Hosting
Go to Exabytes home page. Click on WordPress>WordPress hosting to check the different packages available for WordPress.
To start to build a website, we need to have web hosting and a domain name. These are the plans available under Exabytes. Click 'Order Now; for the hosting plans you intend to purchase.
On the next page, you have 3 options to proceed with the registration for the hosting plan.
Upon clicking 'Continue', you may now proceed with configuring, confirming order, checkout and completing order.
Step 2: Setup new WordPress website.
Login to WordPress
Once you have successfully ordered and received confirmation on your order, you may proceed to install and setup WordPress. You may either log in to your WordPress via
- Client area My Services>My Products/Services>Active button beside your selected hosting plan. Scroll down the page and click Manage My WordPress OR
- Click on the link that was sent to your email and log in using your login credentials provided in the same email.
Permalinks
It is recommended to set WordPress permalinks as it will affect the address of blog post.
For example, instead of www.example.com/2018/10/blog-post-title, you can publish to www.example.com/blog-post-title.
To change the permalinks, navigate to Settings>Permalinks in WordPress Dashboard. Under the common settings, you can choose the preferred style for your permalinks.
Step 3: Customize Website Style and Apperance
Now it is time for designing your website. WordPress offers a variety of themes that you can choose from. You can start with a simple theme or use the default WordPress theme. Theme can be changed when your content has moved or migrated from Wix.
Step 4: Import blog posts via RSS
Import your blog posts from Wix to WordPress via RSS feed.
1) Locate your file by below link
domain.com/feed.xml or domain.com/blog-feed.xml to Wix website URL. (if you have a custom domain with Wix).
If you don't have a custom domain with Wix, you can locate your RSS feed via username.wixsite.com/blogname
/feed.xml or username.wixsite.com/blogname/blog-feed.xml (whereby username = Wix username ; blogname = name of your blog).
2) The URL will load a page full of code. Right click on the page and click 'Save As' to save the file to your computer.
3) Navigate to the WordPress dashboard and click Tools>Import>Under RSS (Install Now).
4) A link at top of the page to Run Importer will appear. Click on the Link. Click Choose File and select the feed.xml file that was saved in Step 2 and click Upload File and Import.
You will see the confirmation message for the post that was successfully imported.
Navigate to Posts>All Posts and click View underneath each post to check your blog posts which was imported.
The above moved the content from Wix to WordPress (without the IMAGES). To fix this, install and activate Auto Upload Images plugin.
Go to Posts>All Posts. Click on Screen Options at the top right Corner. Increase the number to 999 in the 'Number of items per page field' field and click Apply. Select all posts and click Edit under the bulk actions menu. Click Apply. Click Update. This will update all posts.
Step 5: Import Wix pages to WordPress.
For this step we can only recreate the pages as there is no way to transfer the pages.
1) Navigate to Wix page that you would like to transfer to WordPress. Highlight all content (except page title). Right click and click on Copy.
2) Login to WordPress Dashboard and navigate to Pages>Add New to recreate the page. Type in the page title. Right click and click Paste to recreate the content. Click Publish.
The above are used for text based pages. There are pages that were created using plugin. Thus may kindly install the plugin and recreate your pages.
Once all content has been moved and created, it is advisable to review posts and pages.
Step 6: Create Main Navigation Menu
1) Go to Appearance>Menus. Enter your preferred menu Name and click on Create Menu.
2) Select pages to add to main menu and click Add to Menu. Navigate to Menu Settings to set up your menu position and click Save Menu.
Step 7: Redirect Wix to WordPress.
*This is only applicable to users with custom domain with Wix.
1) Go to plain text editor i.e Notepad and paste the code below:
var hashesarr = {
"#! about-us/clit7" : '/about/',
"#! contact/ce54" : '/contact/',
"#! random-article/c1mz" : '/random-article/',
} ;
for (var hash in hashearr) {
var patt = new RegExp (hash);
if (window.location.hash.match(patt) !== null) {
window.location.href = hashesarr[hash];
}
}
There are two parts in the line.
First part is the URL where Wix users come from.
Second part is the WordPress slug for the same page.
You will need to manually add each URL in this format. Once all is done, you need to save file as redirect.js.
Upload redirect.js file to WordPress theme /js/ directory using an FTP client. (Create one if you do not have one).
Edit theme's functions.php file and add code to bottom of file. Save Changes.
function wpb_wixjs () {
wp_enque_script( 'wixredirect;,
get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/js/redirects.js',
array(), '1.0.0' , true);
}
add_action('wp_enque_scripts', 'wpb_wixjs');
These redirects do not redirect search engines (not SEO friendly).
Finally, you can continue to improvise your website via the plugins available in WordPress.