How to Migrate Your Website to WordPress Without Losing Traffic

Migrating a website to WordPress is one of the most common projects we handle at Xpose, and it’s also one of the most frequently botched jobs in the industry. Done correctly, a migration to WordPress can improve your site’s performance, flexibility, and SEO. Done carelessly, it can wipe out years of accumulated search rankings overnight.

This guide covers the key steps to plan and execute a WordPress migration that preserves your existing traffic, rankings, and user experience — while also taking advantage of the opportunities a migration presents.

Before You Migrate — The Preparation Phase

The work you do before migrating is what determines whether you lose traffic or not. Crawl your current site — use Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) or a similar crawler to extract every URL on your current site. This is your master list of pages that need to either be recreated or redirected. Document your current rankings — take a snapshot of which pages rank and for which keywords using Google Search Console. This gives you a baseline to compare against post-migration. Audit your current site — identify which pages are worth keeping, which should be improved, and which (thin or duplicate content) can be consolidated or retired. Plan your URL structure — ideally, your WordPress URLs should match your existing ones exactly. If they can’t (for example, your current platform uses an incompatible structure), plan your redirects in advance.

The Migration Process

The mechanics of getting content into WordPress depend on your source platform: From Wix — no direct export tool. Manual recreation or a third-party migration service is usually required. From Squarespace — WordPress has a Squarespace importer. Blog posts import well; custom page layouts need rebuilding. From a custom CMS or old HTML site — usually involves manual content migration or a developer writing a custom import script. From another WordPress install — the simplest scenario. Use the All-in-One WP Migration plugin or export/import XML files. A complete database and file transfer is the most reliable approach for larger sites.

Build and test the new WordPress site on a staging environment (a private URL, not your live domain) before going live. Test every page, form, image, and feature.

The Go-Live Checklist

When you’re ready to switch: Set up 301 redirects from every old URL to its new equivalent. If URLs are unchanged, this step is trivial. If they’ve changed, this is critical — 301s pass the majority of your existing link equity to the new URLs. Update your domain’s DNS to point to your new host (or configure your existing host to serve the new WordPress install). Submit an updated sitemap to Google Search Console. Monitor Search Console daily for the first month for crawl errors, coverage drops, and ranking changes. Check that all forms, checkout processes, and third-party integrations (booking tools, CRM, payment processors) work correctly on the live site.