By Cody Wise, Founder, Wise Media. Last updated 10 September 2026. All prices are in Canadian dollars (CAD).
Summary
Moving a Wix or Squarespace site to WordPress in Canada typically runs between $2,500 and $12,000 CAD for a small business site, because almost none of the design comes with you. Wix does not offer a site export at all. Squarespace exports an XML file that carries blog posts and basic page text and leaves your design, navigation, galleries, store pages and most images behind. The money goes into rebuilding, not into moving. The part that decides whether you keep your Google rankings is not the rebuild, it is the redirect map.
Table of contents
- What does a Wix or Squarespace to WordPress migration cost in Canada?
- What actually exports, and what does not
- The seven things that break during a migration
- How to move a .ca domain without downtime
- The migration runbook, in order
- Common mistakes
- Should you migrate at all?
- FAQ
What does a Wix or Squarespace to WordPress migration cost in Canada?
Expect $2,500 to $12,000 CAD for a typical small business migration, and $12,000 to $40,000 CAD or more once ecommerce, memberships, multiple languages or hundreds of pages are involved. The wide spread exists because a platform migration is only nominally a data transfer. On Wix and Squarespace your layouts live inside the platform and cannot leave it, so what you are really buying is a rebuild with your content poured back in.
The ranges below reflect what Canadian agencies and independent developers publish for this work in 2026. They are published market rates, not quotes. Always get the scope priced against your actual page count and feature list before you budget against them.
| Tier | Typical CAD range | What it covers | Realistic timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content-only lift | $1,200 to $2,500 | Under 15 pages, a stock or lightly customised theme, blog posts imported, redirect map, DNS cutover. Design is theme-standard. | 1 to 2 weeks |
| Standard small business rebuild | $2,500 to $6,500 | 15 to 40 pages, custom layouts matched to your brand, forms rebuilt, image library re-uploaded and compressed, full redirect map, schema, analytics carried over. | 3 to 6 weeks |
| Design-led rebuild | $6,500 to $12,000 | New design system rather than a copy of the old site, custom post types, service and location page templates, performance budget, staged QA. | 6 to 10 weeks |
| Ecommerce or complex | $12,000 to $40,000+ | WooCommerce build, product and customer data migration, payment and shipping reconnection, memberships, bookings, bilingual builds, integrations. | 8 to 16 weeks |
What actually drives the number
- Page count, not site size. Every page is a rebuild and a redirect. Forty pages is not twice the work of twenty, it is closer to two and a half times, because the redirect map and QA scale faster than the layouts do.
- How custom the old design is. A Squarespace site running a stock template with light edits is cheap to reproduce. A Wix site with heavily hand-positioned sections, animations and overlapping elements has to be re-engineered rather than copied, because Wix positioning does not translate into any WordPress builder.
- Images. Neither platform hands you a clean media library. Someone downloads every asset, renames it, compresses it and re-uploads it. On a photo-heavy site this is a real line item, not a rounding error.
- Forms and third-party tools. Every form, booking widget, chat tool, email capture and payment link is a separate reconnection with its own testing.
- Ecommerce. Products, variants, inventory, customer accounts, order history and tax settings all move separately, and order history frequently does not move at all.
- Whether anyone maps the redirects. This is the single most commonly skipped line item and the most expensive one to skip.
The running costs after you move
WordPress is free. Running WordPress is not. Budget for these on an ongoing basis, and compare them honestly against what you pay Wix or Squarespace today before you decide the move saves you money.
| Item | Typical annual CAD | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Managed WordPress hosting | $300 to $900 | Canadian or Canadian-edge hosting matters if data residency is a client question. |
| Domain renewal | $20 to $30 | A .ca renewal through a CIRA certified registrar. |
| Commercial plugin and theme licences | $150 to $600 | Page builder Pro licences, forms, SEO, backup. A lapsed licence means the update button stops working, which is how sites end up unpatched. |
| Maintenance plan | $1,200 to $4,800 | Updates, backups, uptime, security response. Optional in the sense that a smoke alarm is optional. |
If you want the detail on that last row, we broke it down separately in what a WordPress maintenance plan should include in Canada.
What actually exports from Wix and Squarespace, and what does not
Neither platform gives you your website. Wix gives you nothing exportable in a site format at all, and Squarespace gives you an XML file containing blog posts and basic page text. Everything else is rebuilt by hand. This is the single fact that most migration quotes are built on and most business owners are never told.
Wix
Wix does not publish a site export function. Its own help documentation on exporting blog posts to other platforms lists the capability as a feature request rather than a feature. What you can actually retrieve:
- Blog posts, via the blog RSS feed at your blog URL followed by /feed.xml. The feed carries published posts and often truncates or omits older ones depending on feed length.
- Contacts, as a CSV from the dashboard.
- Store products, as a CSV on plans that include it.
- Nothing else. Homepage, service pages, about page, galleries, forms, layouts, animations, custom code blocks and the media library all stay where they are.
The practical consequence: a Wix migration is a rebuild with a content transcription step. Anyone quoting you a Wix migration as a two-day data transfer has not looked at your site.
Squarespace
Squarespace does publish an export, and its own Exporting your site documentation is unusually candid about the limits. The export produces a WordPress-format XML file. What it does not include, per Squarespace:
- Album pages, cover pages, index pages, info pages, calendar pages, portfolio pages and store pages.
- Content held in page-specific headers, footers and sidebars.
- Your design, CSS, navigation structure and site styles.
- Reliable image transfer. On a self-hosted WordPress import, images often come across as reference links pointing back at Squarespace, which means they break the day you cancel the subscription.
- Linked PDF files, which export into the XML but will not import into WordPress.
That last point about images is the one that quietly ruins migrations. The site looks fine on launch day because the images are still being served from Squarespace. Six weeks later the subscription lapses and every image on the site turns into a broken placeholder. Re-uploading the media library properly is not optional.
| Asset | Wix | Squarespace |
|---|---|---|
| Blog posts | RSS feed only | Yes, via XML |
| Standard page text | Manual | Partial, via XML |
| Page design and layout | No | No |
| Navigation structure | No | No |
| Images and media library | Manual download | Unreliable, often reference links only |
| Galleries and portfolios | No | No |
| Forms and submissions | No | No |
| Store products | CSV on some plans | No, store pages excluded |
| Contacts | CSV | Separate export |
| Custom CSS | No | No |
The seven things that break during a migration
In order of how much damage they do when nobody plans for them.
1. URL structure, which is why you need redirects
Wix and Squarespace impose their own URL patterns. Wix blog posts commonly sit under a /post/ path. Squarespace blog posts sit under the blog collection path. WordPress will not reproduce those patterns unless you deliberately force it to, so most of your URLs change. Every URL that changes without a redirect becomes a 404, and Google treats a 404 as a page that no longer exists rather than a page that moved.
Google documents the correct approach in its site move with URL changes guidance: map old to new one for one, use permanent 301 redirects, and keep them in place indefinitely rather than for a token thirty days.
2. Images, twice
First they may not transfer at all. Second, if they do, they arrive at whatever dimensions the old platform stored, which is usually far larger than the new layout needs. Sites routinely get slower after a migration for this reason alone. Re-upload, resize to the layout, convert to a modern format, and set explicit width and height attributes.
3. Forms and every submission behind them
Form submissions live in the old platform database and do not travel. Export any submission history you need to keep before you cancel. Then rebuild each form, reconnect the notification email, and send a test through every one before launch. The number of migrated sites running with a form that silently sends to nobody is far higher than anyone admits.
4. Email, if it was bundled
If your business email is bundled with the website platform or the platform-managed domain, changing DNS can take your inbox down with your site. Confirm where your MX records point before you touch anything. If you are moving mail as well, set up authentication properly at the same time, which we covered in SPF, DKIM and DMARC for Canadian businesses.
5. Analytics and Search Console continuity
Your Google Analytics property survives the move if you install the tag on the new site. Search Console does not need a new property if the domain is unchanged, but you should submit the new sitemap on launch day and expect a normal crawl and reindex period. Do not panic-diagnose a ranking problem during the first three weeks after a platform move. The data is genuinely noisy.
6. Structured data
Squarespace and Wix inject some schema automatically. WordPress does not, unless you configure it. If your service or local business pages were earning rich results, they stop the moment the markup disappears. Rebuild it deliberately rather than assuming a plugin default covers it.
7. Anything with a licence attached
Commercial themes, page builder Pro licences and premium plugins are tied to a purchase key. If the agency doing the migration buys the licence on their own account and you part ways later, your update button stops working. Insist that every commercial licence is registered to your account and your billing. This is the same ownership question we walk through in how to switch web design agencies in Canada.
How to move a .ca domain without downtime
If your .ca domain is registered through Wix or Squarespace, you can transfer it to any CIRA certified registrar, but the process has fixed waiting periods you have to plan around. CIRA publishes the mechanics in its guide to transferring domains. The parts that affect your launch date:
- The 60 day rule. A domain registered or transferred in the last 60 days cannot be transferred. If you registered your .ca last month, the transfer is not available yet.
- Five calendar days for the authorization code. Your current registrar must provide the auth code within five days of your request, and the request has to come from the administrative contact email on the domain profile. If it does not arrive, CIRA has an escalation path.
- Five to seven days for the transfer itself, on average.
- Roughly $10 to $20 CAD for the transfer, usually including a year of registration.
- Another 60 day lock afterwards. Once transferred, you cannot transfer again for 60 days.
One useful detail most guides get wrong: a registrar transfer does not by itself change your nameservers, so it does not take your site down. Downtime comes from the DNS change, not the transfer. If you do change nameservers, allow 24 to 48 hours for propagation.
The safe sequence is to transfer the domain first, get comfortable, build and stage the new site on a temporary URL, and only change DNS when the new site is finished and tested. Doing it in the other order is how sites end up half-launched.
The migration runbook, in order
Twelve steps. The order matters more than any individual step.
- Crawl and inventory every URL. Export the full list of live pages, blog posts, PDFs and images from the old site. This becomes your redirect map, your QA checklist and your scope document all at once.
- Pull a 12 month Search Console export. Sort by clicks. The top 20 pages are the ones a botched migration will cost you real money on, so they get tested first and last.
- Export everything the platform will give you. Squarespace XML, Wix blog RSS, contacts CSV, product CSV, form submission history. Store it somewhere you control.
- Download the media library manually. All of it. Rename files descriptively while you are in there.
- Confirm domain and email ownership before anything else. Who holds the registrar login, where the MX records point, whether the transfer is even eligible yet.
- Build on a staging URL, not on the live domain. Keep staging out of the index with a noindex header, and remember to remove it at launch.
- Rebuild content, then design, then forms. Content first forces the layout to serve the copy instead of the other way around.
- Write the redirect map. Every old URL to exactly one new URL. No chains, no redirects to the homepage. A redirect to the homepage is a soft 404 and Google treats it as one.
- Rebuild structured data and metadata. Title tags, meta descriptions, canonical tags, Open Graph, schema. These do not come across in any export.
- Test on staging against the checklist. Every form submits and arrives. Every image loads at a sane size. Every internal link resolves. Mobile layout holds. Page speed measured, not assumed.
- Cut over DNS and immediately verify redirects on the live domain. Spot check the top 20 pages from step 2 by hand. Do not rely on the plugin telling you it worked.
- Submit the new sitemap to Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, then monitor crawl errors daily for two weeks and weekly for two months. Keep the old platform subscription active for at least 30 days as a rollback.
The last item is the one people skip to save one month of subscription cost. Keeping the old site alive for 30 days is the cheapest insurance policy in the entire project.
Common mistakes
- Cancelling the old platform on launch day. You lose the rollback, the reference for anything you missed, and on Squarespace you may lose the images the new site is still pointing at.
- Redirecting everything to the homepage. It is fast, it is tempting, and it discards the ranking value of every page you redirect.
- Changing URLs and content and design all at once, then having no way to tell which change caused a traffic movement. If rankings matter, keep URLs stable where you can.
- Trusting an automated migration plugin. They handle blog posts adequately and everything else poorly. They are a starting point, not a deliverable.
- Forgetting the 60 day domain rule and discovering it the week you planned to launch.
- Letting the agency own the licences and the registrar account. You are moving platforms specifically so you own the asset. Own it completely.
- Launching without measuring page speed first. Migrated image libraries are almost always oversized, and the new site can genuinely be slower than the Wix site it replaced.
- No staging environment. Building live means your customers watch you work and Google indexes the half-finished version.
Should you migrate at all?
Migrate when the platform is now a constraint on how you make money. Do not migrate because WordPress is fashionable. Wix and Squarespace are competent products and plenty of profitable Canadian businesses run on them without issue.
| Situation | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Under 10 pages, brochure site, no blog, no growth plan | Stay. The migration cost buys you nothing. |
| You publish content regularly and want real control over URL structure, schema and internal linking | Migrate. |
| You need a feature the platform does not offer and no app provides | Migrate. |
| You are hitting performance limits you cannot fix because you cannot touch the code | Migrate. |
| You need bilingual EN and FR for Quebec compliance | Migrate. Platform translation widgets are not the same as a bilingual build. |
| You want ecommerce with real control over checkout, tax and shipping logic | Migrate, and budget properly. |
| Someone told you WordPress is better for SEO | Stay for now. Platform is not the constraint on your rankings. Content and links are. |
| You are unhappy with how the site looks | That is a design problem, not a platform problem. Redesign where you are first. |
Pros and cons, honestly
| WordPress gives you | WordPress costs you |
|---|---|
| Full ownership of files, database and design | Responsibility for updates, backups and security |
| Complete control of URLs, redirects and schema | A learning curve, or a maintenance retainer |
| Portability between hosts, no lock-in | More moving parts that can break |
| No feature ceiling | Plugin sprawl if nobody is disciplined |
| Cheaper at scale | More expensive to start |
If you are still weighing the platform decision rather than the migration itself, we compared the tradeoffs in AI website builder versus hiring a web design agency and in Elementor versus Gutenberg.
Frequently asked questions
Will I lose my Google rankings if I move from Wix to WordPress?
Not if the redirects are mapped one to one and the content stays substantially the same. Expect two to six weeks of fluctuation while Google recrawls and reindexes. Ranking loss after a migration is nearly always caused by missing redirects, missing metadata or a slower site, not by the platform change itself.
How long does a Wix to WordPress migration take?
One to two weeks for a small content-only lift, three to six weeks for a typical small business rebuild, and eight to sixteen weeks for ecommerce. The domain transfer adds five to seven days and cannot start if the domain was registered in the last 60 days.
Can I migrate my Wix site myself?
You can move the blog posts yourself using the RSS feed and the WordPress importer. Rebuilding forty pages, mapping redirects correctly and re-processing an image library is where most do-it-yourself migrations stall. If your site is under ten pages, doing it yourself is reasonable. Beyond that the redirect map alone justifies bringing someone in.
Do I have to buy a new domain?
No. Keep the domain you have. Keeping it is what preserves your rankings, your backlinks and anything printed on a business card. Transfer the registration to a registrar you control, then point DNS at the new host when the build is ready.
What happens to my email during the migration?
Nothing, if your MX records are left alone. Email breaks when someone changes nameservers without copying the existing MX records to the new DNS provider. Record your current DNS zone before you change anything.
Is WordPress cheaper than Squarespace?
Cheaper per year at scale, more expensive up front. A Squarespace subscription bundles hosting, security, updates and support into one predictable payment. On WordPress you buy those separately, either with money or with your own time. If you are moving purely to save on subscription fees, run the arithmetic first, including a maintenance plan.
Does Squarespace really not export my design?
Correct. Squarespace states plainly in its own documentation that the XML export does not include design, CSS, navigation, or a long list of page types including portfolio, index, album, calendar and store pages. The export is a content export, not a site export.
How many redirects do I actually need?
One for every indexed URL that changes. Include blog posts, category and tag archives, PDFs and image URLs if they earn traffic. Chains and loops are worse than nothing, so map old to new directly and test each one after cutover.
The bottom line
A Wix or Squarespace to WordPress migration is a rebuild wearing a transfer costume. Budget $2,500 to $12,000 CAD for a normal small business site, assume none of the design comes with you, and treat the redirect map as the deliverable that actually protects the value you have built. Do the domain work early, keep the old platform alive for 30 days, and test every form before you cut over.
Everything else is recoverable. A missing redirect map is the one mistake that quietly costs you traffic for a year.
Work with Wise Media
We rebuild Wix and Squarespace sites on WordPress for Canadian businesses, with the redirect map, structured data and ownership handover treated as part of the build rather than an upsell. Have a look at our website packages and website growth packages, or if you want the design rethought rather than reproduced, our design packages.
Start your project brief and get a scoped migration quote. Tell us your page count and your platform and we will tell you honestly whether the move is worth making.