“Can we just move the site to Wix? It’ll be easier, right?”
If you work with websites long enough, you’ll hear some version of this from a client, a friend, or even from yourself. On the surface the idea sounds harmless: the site already exists, the content is written, the brand is defined. You “just” need to move it from WordPress to Wix and everyone’s life gets simpler.
The reality is more nuanced. Transferring a website from WordPress to Wix can absolutely make life easier in day-to-day operations. It can also quietly limit what you can do with the site in the future and, if done carelessly, destroy traffic and search visibility that took years to build. Whether it is a smart move or not depends on your skills, your budget, and what you want this website to become over the next few years, not just over the next few weeks.
This post is written for developers and SEOs who find themselves in the middle of that decision. Maybe a client is pushing for Wix. Maybe a small team is tired of hosting and plugin drama. Maybe you are trying to decide what to recommend. The goal is not to sell you on either platform, but to show you how the choice actually behaves in real projects.
WordPress vs Wix in real life, not in feature tables
If you read marketing pages, both platforms sound perfect. WordPress is presented as infinitely flexible and “owns the internet,” while Wix is described as the friendly all-in-one place where everything just works. In real projects, the picture looks different.
WordPress shines when you need a structure that is truly your own. If you are building something with complex content types, unusual taxonomies, custom workflows, or integrations that depend on APIs and hooks, WordPress feels like a big toolbox where you can always find another tool or build one yourself. You can shape almost anything, connect analytics the way you want, tune performance deeply, and choose where and how the site is hosted. For developers, that freedom is often the main reason to stay.
The trade-off is that someone has to care for this freedom. Themes age, plugins conflict, PHP versions change, and security becomes your constant background process. Non-technical teams quickly learn to be afraid of the “Update” button. A simple redesign or new feature can turn into a debugging session across theme code, plugin settings and server logs. WordPress is powerful, but it expects responsibility in return.
Wix flips that equation. Instead of asking you to assemble and maintain the stack, it hands you a controlled environment. Hosting, SSL, updates, backups, security and the visual editor all live in one place. For many small businesses, this alone is enough to breathe easier. A marketer or founder can log in, change copy, swap images, publish a new page and move on with their day without pinging a developer. The platform deliberately narrows the number of ways you can break things.
The cost of this simplicity appears when you try to push beyond what Wix was designed for. You still have ways to extend the site, especially with Velo, but the ceiling is lower than a self-hosted WordPress stack. Some complex information architectures feel awkward. Very custom behaviors can be harder or sometimes impossible to implement without workarounds. You trade some long-term flexibility for stability and ease.
When a move to Wix starts to sound attractive
The request to move from WordPress to Wix rarely comes from a technical spec. It usually grows out of fatigue. A small business is tired of calling a developer for every tiny change. A solo founder is done with plugin conflicts and surprise downtime. A non-technical team wants to own the website without learning hosting, updates and backups.
In those situations, Wix solves something real. It reduces cognitive load. It turns “the website” from a fragile thing no one wants to touch into a tool that the team actually uses. For a simple marketing site, a brochure-style presence or a straightforward lead-generation funnel, that can be exactly what is needed.
The problem is that this conversation often ignores the invisible asset sitting underneath the WordPress install: years of SEO signals, backlinks, content relationships and URL history. From the outside, the site looks like a set of pages. From Google’s perspective, it is a graph of URLs, internal links, anchors, crawl paths and user behavior. If you move only the visible shell and leave the structure behind, you are not “just” changing platforms. You are breaking that graph.
Why migrations are where things go wrong
Most painful stories about platform moves sound similar. A client launches a new Wix site. The design is nicer, the copy feels refreshed, everyone celebrates for a day. Then organic traffic falls off a cliff, calls and inquiries slow down, and analytics starts telling a different story.
The cause is almost always structural. Old URLs quietly disappear or change without proper redirects. Blog posts that were pulling in steady traffic are left behind because “they felt outdated.” Internal links are rebuilt casually, sometimes dropped altogether. Meta data is not migrated or is rewritten without a strategy. The new site may look better to humans, but it is a stranger to search engines.
From a developer and SEO perspective, the platform change itself is not the enemy. The real danger is treating the migration as a cosmetic task instead of an architectural one. If you take the time to audit existing traffic, identify key URLs, map old paths to new ones, plan redirects carefully and rebuild internal linking with intention, a WordPress to Wix move can be relatively safe. If you treat it as copy-paste with a new theme, you are gambling with the main acquisition channel.
How to think about the decision as a dev or SEO
If you are advising a client, your job is not simply to say “WordPress good, Wix bad” or the reverse. Your job is to frame the trade-offs in plain language.
You can explain that WordPress remains the better choice if they expect heavy customization, complex structures, deep integrations or a future where the website becomes a core product rather than a brochure. In that world, the overhead of maintaining a WordPress stack can be justified, and your skills as a developer or technical SEO will stay heavily involved.
You can also explain that Wix is a reasonable option if the main goal is to have a stable, easy-to-edit marketing site that a non-technical team can own, and if the functional requirements are modest. In that case, the core risk is not the platform itself, but the way the migration is handled. The message becomes simple: moving is possible, but it must be planned and executed with SEO and structure in mind, not only design.
The final question is always about the future. Ask what they want the website to be in two or three years. If they dream of intricate apps, heavily customized flows and a lot of experimentation, locking into a more constrained environment might create friction later. If they mostly want a reliable, low-maintenance presence that supports other channels, the simplicity of Wix can be worth the limits.
Closing thoughts
Transferring a site from WordPress to Wix is not a yes-or-no religious choice. It is a strategic one. The move can absolutely make life easier and free a team from the constant stress of maintaining a complex stack. It can also quietly erase the compound effect of years of SEO work if it is handled casually.
As developers and SEOs, we sit at the point where that decision becomes real. We see the logs, the graphs and the redirects that most people never think about. The best thing we can do is to translate that invisible complexity into clear trade-offs: what is gained, what is lost, and what must be protected during the move.
If a client, coworker or friend tells you they want to move from WordPress to Wix “because it’ll be easier,” you do not have to say no. You just have to make sure they understand what “easier” really means, and what it will take to bring their traffic and structure along for the ride.
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