How to Migrate From Blogger or Wix to WordPress

Outgrowing Blogger or Wix and moving to WordPress is a big jump: better control, more features, real SEO, and no platform lock-in waiting to bite you later. Done carelessly, the migration can crater your traffic overnight. Done carefully, you keep your SEO and gain everything WordPress offers on top of it. This post lays out the careful path.

Why people migrate

• Full control over the site, without platform-imposed limits.
• Meaningfully better SEO capabilities.
• Access to WordPress’s entire plugin ecosystem.
• Far more monetization flexibility.
• Room to grow without hitting platform constraints later.
• Owning your data outright, rather than renting it from a platform.

Before you start

1. Back up everything first. Export your current site in full. Save every image locally on your own machine. Don’t trust anything to simply “be available later” once you start making changes.
2. Pick a host. For a shared starter plan: SiteGround, Bluehost, or A2 Hosting. For managed hosting: WP Engine or Kinsta.
3. Pick a domain strategy. Keeping the same domain is recommended and far simpler. Moving to a new domain is considerably more work.
4. Plan for some downtime. A small amount is unavoidable during the switch. Schedule it for a genuinely low-traffic window.

Migrating from Blogger

Step 1: Export Blogger content

In the Blogger dashboard, go to Settings, then “Back up content.” This downloads an XML file containing all your posts, pages, and comments, and Google’s own Blogger backup and import documentation covers the exact steps if the menu location has moved since this was written.

Step 2: Install WordPress

Install it on your new host. Most hosts offer a genuine one-click install. Set up the basics: site title and permalink structure.

Step 3: Import to WordPress

In the WordPress admin, go to Tools, then Import, install the “Blogger Importer” plugin, and run the import. Upload your Blogger XML file there.

This imports your posts, pages, and comments. Featured images may need to be manually reattached afterward, so don’t skip a review pass.

Step 4: Set permalinks to match Blogger’s structure

This step is critical for SEO. Blogger URLs typically look like this:

blogname.blogspot.com/YYYY/MM/post-slug.html

WordPress’s default permalink structure doesn’t match that pattern at all.

In WordPress, go to Settings, then Permalinks, then set a Custom Structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

This makes your new URLs match Blogger’s old pattern closely, in most cases well enough to avoid needing individual redirects.

Step 5: Redirect blogspot.com to your new domain

If you already used a custom domain on Blogger, meaning yourdomain.com pointed at Blogger, updating your DNS to point at your new WordPress host handles most of this automatically.

If you were using raw blogspot.com URLs instead, install a Blogger-to-WordPress redirect template inside Blogger itself, under Settings, then Search preferences, then Custom Redirects, or by editing the theme HTML directly. Plenty of migration guides provide ready-made template code for this specific step.

Step 6: Check images and links

Some Blogger image URLs may not import cleanly. Run a broken-link checker, like the Broken Link Checker plugin, across your migrated site, then fix or replace whatever it finds.

Migrating from Wix

Wix migration is genuinely harder, because Wix doesn’t offer a clean, native export for blog content. According to Wix’s own support documentation, exporting blog posts directly to another platform isn’t currently supported; Wix only offers CSV export for structured Collections data, not full blog posts with formatting intact. That’s the honest starting point for anyone planning this move.

Option 1: RSS-based import

Wix sites typically expose an RSS feed at a URL like yourdomain.com/blog-feed.xml, or something similar.

Install WordPress’s RSS Importer, or a dedicated plugin like CMS2CMS, to pull recent posts in through that feed.

The downside: RSS feeds are usually limited to your most recent posts, often the last 25 or so. Older posts get left behind entirely and need a separate solution.

Option 2: Manual export

Copy each post over by hand. Painful for a large blog, but genuinely realistic for a smaller one, especially since Wix doesn’t offer a better native path anyway.

Option 3: A migration service

Services like CMS2CMS automate Wix-to-WordPress migration for a fee, typically $50 to $200 depending on the size of your site.

Worth seriously considering for any blog with 50 or more posts, given how limited Wix’s own export options are.

Option 4: Scraping-based tools

Some developers pair the WordPress Importer with scraping tools that extract content directly from Wix’s public-facing pages. Several technical guides walk through building a custom script for this.

It’s a technical route, but worth it if you have a large archive and want full control over exactly how the content maps over.

The SEO part, and the most important part

Without proper redirects in place, you lose essentially every backlink and Google ranking you’ve built up.

Map old URLs to new URLs

Export your full list of old URLs. Screaming Frog’s free tier crawls up to 500 URLs, which covers most blogs.

List every old URL alongside exactly which new URL it should redirect to.

For example:

• oldsite.com/2022/03/post-name.html should redirect to newsite.com/post-name/
• oldsite.com/about should redirect to newsite.com/about/

Implement 301 redirects

A 301 is a permanent redirect, and Google passes link equity through it to the new URL.

Your options:

• The Redirection plugin, free and manageable entirely from the WordPress admin.
• Rank Math’s built-in Redirections module.
• .htaccess (on Apache) or an nginx config directly, for higher performance at scale.

Test every redirect afterward: enter the old URL and confirm it 301s cleanly to the correct new one.

Internal link updates

After migration, most of your own internal links will still point at the old URLs unless you fix them.

Run a search and replace using either:

• The Better Search Replace plugin.
• WP-CLI directly: wp search-replace 'old-url' 'new-url'

Update everywhere links live: post content, menus, widgets, and any theme settings that reference URLs directly.

Sitemap submission

Install Yoast or Rank Math and confirm your sitemap is generating correctly. Our guide to setting up Yoast SEO or Rank Math correctly covers the settings worth double-checking right after a migration specifically.

Submit your new sitemap URL, typically yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml, in Google Search Console.

If you already had Search Console verified for the old site under the same domain, the property may carry over automatically. If your domain changed, you’ll need to register the new property from scratch.

Domain handling

Same domain, recommended

Update your DNS to point at the new host. Both Blogger and Wix can be replaced entirely while keeping the exact same domain.

This produces a much easier SEO recovery, since backlinks pointing at the same domain simply keep working without any change on the linking site’s end.

New domain

Set up 301 redirects from the old domain to the new one, either at the DNS or host level, or through the old platform’s own redirect feature if it has one.

SEO recovery is noticeably slower here, since backlinks now point at an old domain that merely redirects, rather than pointing directly at your content.

Image migration

Images are frequently the trickiest part of either migration path.

Blogger images are hosted by Google, and may or may not import cleanly depending on the post. The Auto Upload Images plugin can pull external images directly into your WordPress media library after the fact.

Wix images are hosted by Wix, and the same general approach applies there too.

After migration, double-check that featured images are set correctly on every individual post, since this is where imports most often silently fail.

Theme and design

Your new WordPress site won’t look identical to the old one, and that’s genuinely fine. You’re choosing a new theme as part of this move, not cloning the old design brick by brick.

Don’t try to match your old design exactly. Use the migration as a real opportunity to refresh things properly. Once you’re on WordPress, it’s worth picking a real blog theme like Aurora rather than defaulting to whatever ships with your hosting plan or the first free theme you find.

Configure your chosen theme fully before promoting the new site to your existing audience. If you’re unsure where to even start comparing options, our guide to choosing a WordPress blog theme breaks down what actually matters versus what’s just marketing.

Testing before going live

The migration sequence, in order:

1. Build the new WordPress site, with all imported content, on a staging URL, either new.yourdomain.com or your host’s built-in staging environment.
2. Test every page thoroughly.
3. Test the redirects you’re planning to set up, before they go live.
4. When everything checks out, switch DNS over to the new server.
5. Set up redirects immediately after the DNS switch completes, not days later.
6. Submit your new sitemap right away.

Post-migration checklist

• All posts and pages imported successfully.
• All featured images correctly attached.
• Internal links updated across the site.
• 301 redirects in place from every important old URL.
• Sitemap submitted to Google.
• Google Analytics configured for the new site.
• SSL certificate active and enforcing HTTPS.
• Permalinks set correctly and tested.
• SEO plugin fully configured.
• A backup system configured going forward.

What to expect after migration

• A traffic dip is normal, usually lasting 2 to 8 weeks while Google re-indexes everything. Recovery follows reliably if your redirects are correct.
• Search Console errors will need monitoring for unredirected 404s and other crawl errors during this window.
• Comments may or may not migrate. Blogger comments generally come across via the importer; Wix comments frequently don’t.

Common pitfalls

• Skipping redirects entirely, which directly causes traffic loss.
• Forgetting to update internal links, which breaks navigation across your own site.
• Forgetting to verify the new property in Search Console.
• Letting the old site go dark before redirects are actually in place.
• Changing your permalink structure without setting up matching redirects.

Hiring help

For blogs with significant existing traffic or a large number of posts, hiring a migration specialist is genuinely worth the cost. Expect $200 to $2,000 depending on complexity.

You can find specialists on Upwork, in freelance communities, or by hiring a WordPress agency directly.

What actually makes or breaks this

Migrating from Blogger or Wix to WordPress is doable, but it requires careful planning from the start. The SEO piece, specifically the 301 redirects from every old URL, is what makes or breaks the whole migration. Use the platform-specific importer where one exists, or a paid migration service where it doesn’t, particularly for Wix. Test everything on staging before going live. Submit a new sitemap and keep watching Search Console for several weeks afterward. Expect 4 to 12 weeks for a full recovery. Done right, migration unlocks growth potential that your original platform simply couldn’t have delivered.