A Step-by-Step Guide to Migrating Your Website to WordPress

Migrating your website to WordPress is mostly a content transfer problem wrapped in an SEO problem, and the second half is where most people lose traffic. This step-by-step guide walks through the full move, from auditing your existing site and picking a host to importing content, mapping old URLs to new ones and monitoring rankings for 90 days after launch. Whether you are leaving Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Joomla or a hand-coded site, the sequence below is the same.

Plan on 3 to 10 hours of hands-on work for a small brochure site, and 2 to 6 weeks for anything with hundreds of pages, custom forms or an online store. The migration itself is fast; the testing is what takes time.

What a WordPress Migration Actually Involves

A migration has four moving parts that people often confuse with each other: content, design, URLs and DNS. You can move content without touching design, and you can rebuild design without changing a single URL, but you cannot skip the URL work and expect Google to follow along.

• Content: pages, posts, products, images, PDFs, categories and author data.
• Design: theme, templates, fonts, navigation and forms, all rebuilt rather than copied.
• URLs: the permalink structure of the new site and redirects from every old address.
• DNS: the final switch that points your domain at the new host.

Treat those as four separate checklists and the whole project gets calmer.

Before You Start: Audit and Inventory the Old Site

Crawl your current website with Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) or Sitebulb and export the full URL list. That crawl becomes the master document you will check against after launch, so save it somewhere you will not lose it.

1. Export every live URL along with its title tag, meta description and H1.
2. Pull your top 50 pages by organic traffic from Google Analytics 4 and your top queries from Search Console.
3. Note every form, integration and script: booking widgets, CRM embeds, chat, pixels, payment links.
4. Download all media if your current platform allows a bulk export, or scrape it with a crawler if it does not.
5. Record a full backup of the existing site and keep it for at least 90 days after the move.

If you have never run a technical review of the site, a structured SEO audit before migration will surface thin pages you can consolidate instead of rebuilding.

Step 1: Choose Your WordPress Flavour and Host

You need self-hosted WordPress (the software from WordPress.org) for full plugin and theme control, which is what almost every business site needs. The hosted service at WordPress.com only allows plugins on higher-priced plans, so read our breakdown of WordPress.com versus WordPress.org before you commit money.

For WordPress hosting, budget roughly $5 to $15 per month for shared plans and $25 to $60 per month for managed hosting with staging, daily backups and object caching built in. Managed hosts frequently include one free migration per account, which is worth using. Our guide to choosing a WordPress hosting provider covers what actually matters in the fine print.

Step 2: Install WordPress on a Staging Site

Never build the new site on your live domain. Use your host’s staging environment or a temporary subdomain like staging.yourdomain.com, and block it from search engines under Settings, Reading, “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”.

A clean install takes about ten minutes with most one-click installers, and our walkthrough on installing and configuring WordPress quickly covers the first settings to change. Set your permalinks to “Post name” straight away, before you import anything, because changing them later invalidates every link you have built.

Step 3: Export Content From Your Current Platform

How you export depends entirely on where you are coming from, and the export file format determines which import tool you use next.

• Another WordPress site: Tools, Export, All content, which produces a WXR (XML) file.
• Squarespace: Settings, Import/Export, Export as WordPress XML (blog posts and basic pages only).
• Wix: no native export, so use the blog RSS feed plus manual page rebuilds or a paid importer.
• Shopify: CSV export of products, then import into WooCommerce.
• Joomla, Drupal or Blogger: the matching importer under Tools, Import handles most of it.
• Static HTML: the HTML Import 2 plugin, or rebuild pages manually if there are fewer than 30.

Export images separately whenever you can. Importers that pull images by URL will silently miss files hosted on a CDN or behind login.

For a closer look at this topic, see our guide: Top 10 Fastest WordPress Themes in 2026.

Related reading: 15 Essential WordPress Plugins Every Site Needs.

We cover this topic in more depth in How to Implement Schema Markup on Your WordPress Site.

We cover this topic in more depth in Free vs. Premium WordPress Themes: Is the Upgrade Worth It?.

Step 4: Import Everything Into WordPress

Inside WordPress, go to Tools, Import and install the importer that matches your file. Run the import in batches if you have more than about 500 items, since shared hosting often times out on large XML files.

For site-to-site moves between WordPress installs, All-in-One WP Migration is the most forgiving tool: it packages files, database, themes and plugins into one archive and restores them on the new host. The free version caps the upload size, so for larger sites either use the host’s own migration plugin, Duplicator, or a manual move.

Manual migrations follow a fixed order: export the database with phpMyAdmin, download the wp-content folder over SFTP, create a new empty database on the new server, edit wp-config.php with the new credentials, then import the SQL file. It sounds intimidating and takes about an hour once you have done it twice.

Step 5: Rebuild the Design and Templates

Design does not transfer. Pick a lightweight theme, rebuild your key templates and recreate the header, footer and navigation to match or improve on the old site.

Get comfortable with the block editor before you start laying out pages, because rebuilding 40 pages with the wrong workflow is miserable. Our tips on using the Gutenberg block editor will save hours, and it is worth checking your essential page list so nothing like a privacy policy or contact page gets left behind.

If several people will be working on the build, set up accounts properly now. Assigning editor and author roles correctly at this stage prevents the mess described in our guide to managing WordPress users, roles and permissions.

Step 6: Map Old URLs to New Ones (The Step Most Guides Rush)

This is where migrations succeed or quietly fail. Open your pre-migration crawl in a spreadsheet, add a column for the new WordPress URL and fill in a destination for every single old address.

• Keep the URL identical wherever you can. Unchanged paths need no redirect at all.
• Map one-to-one when a path changes, for example /services/roof-repair.html to /services/roof-repair/.
• Redirect retired pages to the closest relevant page, not blanket to the homepage, which Google frequently treats as a soft 404.
• Watch platform quirks: Squarespace uses /blog/post-title, Wix used the old #! hash format on legacy sites, and Shopify adds /collections/ and /products/.

Implement the mappings as permanent 301 redirects using Redirection, Rank Math or server-level rules in .htaccess. Google’s documentation on site moves with URL changes is the reference to follow, and our post on fixing 404s and setting up 301 redirects covers the implementation detail.

Step 7: Test Before You Touch DNS

Work through a hard checklist on staging rather than clicking around hoping for the best. Budget at least two hours for a 20 page site.

1. Every page loads, with no missing images or broken internal links.
2. Title tags and meta descriptions carried over or were rewritten deliberately.
3. Contact and quote forms deliver to the right inbox, tested twice.
4. Mobile layout holds up at 375px width, since indexing is mobile-first.
5. Analytics, Search Console verification and any ad pixels are installed.
6. Page speed is at least as good as the old site (test in PageSpeed Insights).

The full WordPress launch checklist is worth running end to end here.

Step 8: Go Live and Switch DNS

Lower your domain’s TTL to 300 seconds about 24 hours before the switch so propagation happens in minutes rather than hours. Then push staging to production, update the A record or nameservers at your registrar, and install an SSL certificate immediately.

Uncheck the search engine discouragement box, confirm the site returns 200 status codes over HTTPS, and submit a fresh XML sitemap in Search Console. Schedule the change for a low-traffic window, typically Tuesday to Thursday morning, so you have a full working day to fix surprises.

Step 9: Monitor for 90 Days

Expect a temporary dip. On well-executed migrations rankings usually settle within 2 to 8 weeks, and Google Search Central notes that recrawling a whole site takes time proportional to its size.

Check Search Console’s Pages report weekly for crawl errors, watch the 404 log in your redirect plugin, and compare organic sessions against the same period last year rather than last month. If a specific page loses 40 percent or more of its traffic and holds there past week six, re-examine its redirect, content parity and internal links.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I migrate my website to WordPress?

In nine steps: audit the old site, pick hosting, install WordPress on staging, export your content, import it, rebuild the design, map every old URL to a 301 redirect, test thoroughly, then switch DNS and monitor for 90 days. Small brochure sites take a day or two; larger sites with e-commerce or custom functionality typically run 2 to 6 weeks.

What is the best way to migrate my WordPress website?

For WordPress-to-WordPress moves, a plugin-based migration is the safest route for 90 percent of sites, and many managed hosts will do it free. Manual migration (database export, SFTP file transfer, wp-config edit, database import) is better for very large sites where plugin archives exceed upload limits.

Can ChatGPT build a WordPress website?

No, ChatGPT cannot build or host a WordPress site on its own, though it can write page copy, generate CSS or PHP snippets, draft redirect maps and explain error messages. You still need hosting, a WordPress install, a theme and a human to check that the generated code does not break anything.

What is the best WordPress site migration tool?

All-in-One WP Migration is the easiest for most users, with Duplicator and WP Migrate as strong alternatives for larger or more complex sites. If you are importing from Squarespace, Blogger or Joomla, use the matching free importer under Tools, Import in the WordPress dashboard instead.

Want Your Migration Handled Without the Traffic Drop?

SEO Quirk plans and executes WordPress migrations with the redirect mapping and post-launch monitoring that protects your rankings, not just the content transfer. Tell us about your current site and we will scope the move, or read why working with a local agency makes the process easier to manage.