Wix is a great and easy to use drag and drop website builder to make simple but exceptionally well websites. But the drawback here is that the features are limited, and in case you try adding more features it will cost you a good amount.

Most users find WordPress a great platform to get more features at a reasonably low cost. If you are reading this article, you 're probably one of those users. Don’t worry folks, we have got you covered.

For the sake of this article, we will be importing your blog posts via RSS, which according to us is the easiest way for the numerous methods available.

Just go through the following steps, and you will be able to transfer your Wix website to your WordPress hosted site in about less than an hour depending upon the number of pages on your site.

Step 1: Signing Up for a Hosting

You have got to have a hosting account and a domain name in order to start a WordPress blog.

You didn’t need any hosting account when you were using Wix because your website was hosted by Wix.

For the sake of this tutorial, we are using Bluehost. While signing up for Bluehost you are asked to get a new domain or use an old one if you already have one.

Step 2: Setting Up a WordPress

Once you have successfully completed the first step, you will have to install WordPress in your cPanel.

Most of the hosting providers provide one-click WordPress installation.

The process is extremely simple. You just have to follow the on-screen instructions. You shall be ready to set your WordPress permalinks as soon as the WordPress installation process is completed.

Permalinks are extremely important as they decide the URL or address of all of your blog posts. To change it go to your WordPress dashboard and then click on ‘Settings’ and select ‘Permalinks’ from the drop-down menu. Choose the structure of your choice and then click on the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Step 3: Customizing the Appearance of Your Website

In this step, you have got to customize your site’s design. This can be done quite easily by using WordPress themes which as just like the Wix templates. So you will feel at home doing this.

Well, you can buy any premium theme online  Or you can even stick to the default WordPress theme for the time being.

However, you are free to use any theme of your choice from the hundreds of them available for free as well as paid.

Step 4: Importing Blog Posts From Wix to WordPress

You need to locate your Wix RSS file. This can be done by adding ‘/feed.xml’ after your Wix website’s URL.

Once you have successfully located your Wix RSS file you will see a page full of code. You just have to right click on the page and click on ‘Save as….’ from the menu. This will save this file to your PC.

Navigate to ‘Import’ under the ‘Tools’ tab on your WordPress dashboard. In the ‘Import’ tab click ‘Install Now’ button under the ‘RSS’ section.

You shall get a message at the top just a few seconds later saying ‘Importer installed successfully. Run importer’. Click on the ‘Run importer’ option.

Under Import RSS, choose your feed.xml file by clicking on the ‘Choose File’ button and then click on the ‘Upload file and import’ button at the bottom.

You will be presented with a ‘All done. Have fun!’ Message once all your posts are imported.

You can check if all the posts have been imported correctly or not, you can navigate to ‘All Posts’ under ‘Posts’ on your WordPress dashboard. To view any post just click on the ‘View’ option under the post.

You might have noticed or not by now that the images in your blog posts are still hosted by Wix. This can be clearly seen in the ‘Text’ tab if you are viewing any post.

To fix this you will have to install and activate the Import External Images By Marty Thornley plugin which will move your images over to WordPress.

Once you have installed and activated the plugin, click on the ‘Media’ tab and choose the ‘Import Images’ option in your WordPress dashboard. There you will see a button to ‘Import Images Now’. Click on it.

This will get the job done.

Step 5: Importing Pages From Wix to WordPress

Truly there isn’t any automatic way to import your Wix pages to WordPress. So guess what, we have got to recreate all of the pages.

Go to the Wix page and then select all of the content on the page leaving the page title. Copy the selected content.

Now go to your WordPress dashboard. Click on the ‘Pages’ tab and select ‘Add New’. Add the title of the page and paste the copied content into the text box below. Be sure to not just paste the content but ‘Paste as plain text’ to avoid unnecessary clutter. Just right click in the text area and select ‘Paste as plain text’ from the menu.

After making sure that you have completely recreated your Wix page click on the ‘Publish’ button present on the top right corner.

Step 6: Creating the Navigation Menu

In your WordPress dashboard, go to ‘Appearance’ and then click on ‘Menus’. Type the desired name of your menu in the text box and then click on the ‘Create Menu’ buttons; one next to the text box and one at the bottom.

One you have. Created all the desired menus, click on the ‘Save Menu’ button.

Find the ‘Manage Locations’ tab and click on it. Click on the drop-down menu next to ‘Top Menu’ under the ‘Theme Location’ tab to select the name of the menu. Once selected, click on the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Your WordPress website is ready.

Step 7: Let Your Viewers Know Your Move

You might want the traffic on your new WordPress site that you had on your Wix site. For this, you would need to set up a proper redirection. And not only the viewers, but you would also want the search engines to know that your old website has been moved to a new location. Unfortunately, this can be done if the user had a custom domain on Wix.

Copy the code provided below and paste it in any plain text editor like Notepad.

If you go through the above code, you would notice some example URLs.

The first part in the line will be the URL of the page from which the Wix visitors will be redirected. While the second part in the line will be the WordPress slug for the same page.

After doing this for all the pages manually, save this file as ‘redirects.js’ and using an FTP client, upload it to the /js/ directory of your WordPress theme.

The following code needs to be added at the bottom of your theme’s ‘function.php’.

Save the changes and that’s it.