How to Transfer Your Wix Website to WooCommerce: A Beginner’s Guide

Migrating from Wix to WooCommerce is a decision many business owners make as their online stores grow. While Wix offers a simple website-building experience, its eCommerce features lack the flexibility, scalability, and control that WooCommerce provides. WooCommerce, a WordPress plugin, is widely regarded as the most customizable eCommerce platform on the web, enabling you to create a feature-rich online store that is fully under your control.
If you’re ready to transition from Wix to WooCommerce, this guide will walk you through each step of the migration process. From backing up your data to setting up a new store on WooCommerce, you’ll learn how to make the switch without losing any of your website’s essential elements like products, customers, or design.
At Dellos, we specialize in helping businesses with their CMS migration services, including moving from platforms like Wix to WordPress, Shopify to WordPress, and more.
Why Migrate from Wix to WooCommerce?
Before diving into the migration process, it’s important to understand the benefits of moving from Wix to WooCommerce. Below are some of the key reasons why businesses choose to make this switch:
1. Full Control Over Your Store
Wix, while user-friendly, imposes restrictions on what you can do with your eCommerce site. You can only use the design tools and apps provided by Wix. With WooCommerce, you have full control over your website. You can customize your site, add third-party plugins, and modify the source code if needed.
2. Better Scalability
WooCommerce is a great solution for growing businesses. It can handle a large number of products, users, and traffic, making it ideal for expanding eCommerce stores. Wix, on the other hand, can struggle to accommodate larger stores due to its more rigid infrastructure.
3. SEO Optimization
WordPress, along with WooCommerce, offers advanced SEO tools that Wix lacks. By moving to WooCommerce, you can fully optimize your product pages, meta descriptions, and URLs to improve your rankings on search engines. Plugins like Yoast SEO make it easy to implement SEO best practices.
4. Customization and Flexibility
With WooCommerce, the possibilities are endless. Whether you want to implement a new design, add a unique feature, or integrate with third-party services, WooCommerce makes it all possible. This is a level of customization that Wix cannot match.
Step-by-Step Guide to Migrating from Wix to WooCommerce
Migrating from Wix to WooCommerce can be broken down into several steps, including setting up your WordPress environment, exporting data, and importing it into WooCommerce. Let’s take a look at the process in detail.
Step 1: Choose a Web Hosting Provider
Before you can set up WooCommerce, you need to choose a reliable web hosting provider that supports WordPress. Wix handles hosting for you, but with WordPress, you will need to select a separate hosting provider. Some popular hosting options include Bluehost, SiteGround, and WP Engine.
When choosing a hosting plan, make sure to consider the following factors:
- Speed: Choose a host with good server speed to ensure fast load times for your WooCommerce store.
- Storage: If you plan to add many products, images, and videos, ensure your hosting plan offers sufficient storage.
- Security: Look for features like SSL certificates, backups, and malware scanning to keep your website secure.
Step 2: Install WordPress and WooCommerce
Once you’ve set up your hosting, the next step is to install WordPress. Many hosting providers offer a one-click installation option for WordPress, making the process quick and easy. After installing WordPress, you’ll need to install the WooCommerce plugin to enable eCommerce functionality.
Here’s how to install WooCommerce:
- Go to your WordPress dashboard.
- Navigate to Plugins > Add New.
- Search for “WooCommerce.”
- Click Install Now, then Activate.
Once WooCommerce is activated, follow the setup wizard to configure your store’s basic settings, including currency, payment gateways, and shipping options.
Step 3: Export Content from Wix
Now that your WordPress and WooCommerce environment is ready, it’s time to export the necessary data from your Wix website. Unfortunately, Wix does not offer a direct way to export products and customer data, so the migration process is a bit manual.
Here’s what you’ll need to export from Wix:
- Products: You’ll need to manually export your products by copying the details (such as name, description, price, and images) and saving them in a CSV file. This will allow you to import them into WooCommerce later.
- Customer Data: Similar to product data, customer data will also need to be manually copied from Wix into a CSV file.
- Blog Posts and Pages: For blog content, Wix does allow you to export your blog posts using the RSS feed. To do this, go to your Wix blog and copy the RSS feed URL. You can then import this feed into WordPress using an RSS import plugin.
Step 4: Import Products into WooCommerce
Now that you have exported your products and data from Wix, you’ll need to import them into WooCommerce. WooCommerce has a built-in product importer that allows you to upload products from a CSV file.
To import products into WooCommerce:
- Go to your WordPress dashboard.
- Navigate to WooCommerce > Products > Import.
- Upload your CSV file containing your product information.
- Map the columns in your CSV file to the corresponding WooCommerce fields.
- Click Run the Importer to start the process.
Once the import is complete, review your product listings to ensure everything has been imported correctly.
Step 5: Rebuild Your Store Design
Wix and WordPress use different systems for designing websites, so you will need to recreate your store’s design on WooCommerce. Fortunately, WooCommerce is compatible with a wide range of themes, both free and premium, allowing you to create a professional-looking online store.
- Choose a Theme: Start by choosing a WooCommerce-compatible theme. Popular choices include Astra, OceanWP, and Storefront. These themes offer plenty of customization options and are designed to work seamlessly with WooCommerce.
- Customize with Page Builders: If you want even more control over your design, you can use page builders like Elementor or Beaver Builder to create custom page layouts. These drag-and-drop tools make it easy to design your site without needing any coding skills.
- Add Key Pages: Make sure to recreate important pages from your Wix website, such as the homepage, about page, and contact page. WooCommerce will also automatically generate essential eCommerce pages like the product listing page, cart, and checkout.
Step 6: Set Up Payment Gateways
One of the key aspects of any eCommerce store is accepting payments. WooCommerce offers a wide range of payment gateway options, including PayPal, Stripe, Square, and more. You can configure these payment gateways in WooCommerce by navigating to WooCommerce > Settings > Payments.
Choose the payment gateways that suit your business needs and follow the setup instructions to connect them to your WooCommerce store.
Step 7: Migrate Customer Data
If you have a customer database on Wix, you’ll need to transfer this data to WooCommerce. Since Wix doesn’t offer a direct export feature for customer data, you will need to manually transfer this data into a CSV file and import it into WooCommerce using a plugin like Customer / Order / Coupon CSV Import Suite.
Step 8: Optimize Your Store for SEO
One of the major advantages of WordPress is its powerful SEO capabilities. Unlike Wix, which has limited SEO options, WooCommerce (with the help of WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO) offers advanced control over your store’s search engine optimization.
Here are some tips for optimizing your WooCommerce store for SEO:
- Optimize Product Pages: Make sure your product titles, descriptions, and images are optimized for relevant keywords.
- Create SEO-Friendly URLs: Ensure your URLs are short, descriptive, and contain the necessary keywords.
- Use SEO Plugins: Install the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize your meta titles, meta descriptions, and other on-page SEO elements.
- Improve Site Speed: Website speed is crucial for SEO. Use caching plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket to improve load times.
Step 9: Test Your WooCommerce Store
Before launching your new WooCommerce store, it’s essential to thoroughly test everything. This includes testing the product pages, checkout process, payment gateways, and overall website performance.
- Place Test Orders: Try placing a few test orders to ensure that your products display correctly and the checkout process works smoothly.
- Check for Broken Links: Make sure there are no broken links on your site, particularly after migrating blog posts and pages from Wix.
Step 10: Redirect Your Wix URLs to WooCommerce
Once your WooCommerce store is live, you’ll want to ensure that any visitors going to your old Wix URLs are redirected to the corresponding pages on your new WordPress site. To do this, you’ll need to set up 301 redirects. This ensures you maintain your SEO rankings and provide a seamless experience for your users.
Use a WordPress plugin like Redirection to set up the 301 redirects for your old Wix URLs.
Conclusion
Migrating your website from Wix to WooCommerce is a significant step that can provide your online store with much-needed flexibility, scalability, and control. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you can ensure a smooth migration that preserves your product data, customers, and SEO rankings.
At Dellos, we specialize in CMS migration services and can help you with seamless transitions from platforms like Wix to WordPress, Shopify to WordPress, and Squarespace to WordPress. Let us help you take your eCommerce business to the next level with WooCommerce.