How to Migrate from Wix to Self-Hosted WordPress
In the early years of my digital marketing career, I worked exclusively on WordPress sites. So when I built my personal website in 2021, I chose Wix partly because I wanted to learn a new platform. It’s now 2026, and I feel I’ve outgrown Wix and all of its limitations, so I migrated to self-hosted WordPress.
Is Wix Bad for SEO?
Wix has a bad reputation among SEOs, but it has improved features recently. Ahrefs did an extensive study of 6.4 million domains, and concluded that there is no causal relationship between the platform used and a site’s ability to rank in the SERPs. WordPress sites got more search traffic overall, but Wix had more search traffic on domains with 100+ monthly organic traffic.
Wix’s Limitations
Wix has a gentle learning curve, which would definitely be attractive for creative professionals who are unfamiliar with web development. However, I actually found it frustrating that I can’t fully control the technical SEO.
Side note: since I couldn’t edit some of the code directly, I had to reach out to Wix’s customer support on several occasions, and I did have a good experience with them. I simply answered a couple of questions in the online customer support chatbot, got a phone call back within a few minutes, and they helped me resolve the issue on the spot.
Wix basically only offers templates, and does not allow you to directly edit the html, css, JavaScript, php file, etc. Wix sites tend to have a lot of code bloat, much of which is unused JavaScript that users are blocked from removing. This can increase your page load speed and negatively affect SEO, so you’ll need to compensate in other areas such as limiting the number of apps used, using the same/common font, and reducing image file sizes especially on mobile.
The Wix editor has a feature for adding custom html code, but it’s pretty clunky and doesn’t let you adjust the format and placement of your custom component. Another solution is Wix Velo, which adds an open-development platform where you can add scripts to the front and back end of your website through the Wix editor.
At the time of writing, Wix has a Multilingual App for creating translated versions of your site, but does not support the hreflang tag, and you cannot access the code to add it. For this reason, I would not recommend Wix for multilingual sites. On WordPress, the aforementioned WPML plugin is great for multilingual sites.
WordPress Hosting via Hostinger
Unfortunately, Wix and WordPress are competitors and not compatible with each other, so there’s no quick and easy migration solution. In my case, I kept the domain name datachai.com, and only moved the website platform from Wix to WordPress.
At first, I was going to buy WordPress hosting through HostGator because I’d used it before and was comfortable with it. My old HostGator account had already expired, so I would’ve needed to renew the plan to get started installing WordPress and adding sites. But when I saw the renewal price of $158 USD per year for a basic HostGator Hatchling plan, I decided to look elsewhere, and ended up getting Hostinger’s Business plan for much cheaper. The sites associated with the old HostGator account were no longer active, so there was nothing keeping me with HostGator anyway.
Moving Away from Wix
Since I already owned datachai.com through Wix, I didn’t need to register it again through Hostinger. I used a temporary domain while I rebuilt and tested the site on WordPress. While my site was on the temporary domain, I made sure to noindex it navigating to Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility in the WordPress dashboard, and checking “Discourage search engines from indexing this site."
Once an MVP version of my site was ready on WordPress, I switched the domain hosting by updating DNS at Wix. Because I had added all of my images through the Media Library, their URLs were automatically updated from the temporary domain to datachai.com. The code I had added through the Custom CSS & JavaScript plugin was also updated automatically. The only thing I needed to do was click Update in the plugin so the changes would be reflected on the site. html.
I kept my domain registered at Wix and just changed the DNS point to Hostinger, which can be done for free. The other option would’ve been to transfer the domain registration itself, which would cost $9.99 plus whatever Hostinger charges. However, I didn’t see any real benefit in doing so immediately, other than having everything in one place.
At the time of writing my published WordPress site is still an MVP version, but once all of the service and blog pages are live and stable, I’ll decide whether it’s worth transferring the domain registration (including my email address) to Hostinger. For now, I’ll leave the registrar with Wix, which hopefully reduces the number of things that could possibly break at once.